A Blast from the Past: Armed Drones, International Humanitarian Law, and Imperial Violence

Scholars of conflict and its regulation have regarded armed drones as a new ‘puzzle’ for international humanitarian law’s (IHL) theory and application to adapt. While drones indeed offer exceptional technological capabilities, their significance to the future of war resides not in their strategic or tactical possibilities but in their ability to reveal the contradictions in the idea of war embodied in its regulating law. This dissertation argues that the seemingly novel challenges weaponized drones present to IHL are, in fact, not new at all. Rather, it is through the introduction of drones that the kinds of violences occurring for centuries in the global periphery are made both visible and recognizable. The real trouble drones pose for IHL is that critical analyses of their regulation under IHL yields conclusions that directly challenge the persuasiveness of IHL’s ostensibly humanitarian motives. These conclusions reveal that IHL was developed and applied to facilitate the use of force by hegemonic and imperial state actors against foreign populations by means of increasingly sophisticated weapons technologies. In arguing this, the dissertation revisits not only IHL’s history, but also the narratives that have been (and continue to be) told about the regime’s origin, development, and application. It considers the particular actors, weapons, and violences IHL incorporated across the trajectory of its historical development, as well as the representation of war it depicts versus its realities. The argument is illustrated by way of a case study examining drone use by the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.