'In this breathtaking and sophisticated book, Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi demonstrates how law helped institutionalize and normalize the coming of armed drones, with fateful consequences for the extension in time and expansion in space of war. Her damning revelation of the ways that law made possible the ubiquity of a new and more individualized form of violence places US program within a transnational survey, highlighting how practice and technology have in turn transformed law in the process.' Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History, Yale University, author of Humane (2021)

'Twenty-one years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, one might reasonably ask, 'do we need another book on armed drones?'. The originality and insight yielded by the analysis and research found in this book answers the question: Yes, we need this one.' Nehal Bhuta, Professor of Public International Law, University of Edinburgh

Through an analysis of the use of drones, Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi explores the ways in which, in the context of counterterrorism, war, technology and the law interact and reshape one another. She demonstrates that drone programs are techno-legal machineries that facilitate and accelerate the emergence of a new kind of warfare. This new model of warfare is individualized and de-materialized in the sense that it focuses on threat anticipation and thus consists in identifying dangerous figures (individualized warfare) rather than responding to acts of hostilities (material warfare). Revolving around threat anticipation, drone wars endure over an extensive timeframe and geographical area, to the extent that the use of drones may even be seen, as appears to be the case for the United States, as part of the normal functioning of the state, with profound consequences for the international legal order.
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1. Drone Programs Reconfiguring War, Law and Societies Around Threat Anticipation; 2. Contexts; 3. The Institutionalization of Drone Programs; 4. Targeting Hostile Individuals; 5. Endless Wars; 6. Anywhere Wars; 7. Rituals of Sovereignty; 8. Epilogue; Index.
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The technological characteristics of drones, together with the law, have been instrumental in expanding warfare in time and space in the counter-terrorism context.

Product details

ISBN
9781009346559
Published
2023-07-13
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Weight
560 gr
Height
235 mm
Width
158 mm
Thickness
21 mm
Age
P, 06
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
256

Biographical note

Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is Lecturer in International Law at the University of Manchester. She is a leading expert on issues of global security governance. Her work reflects on states' evolving legal and policy capacity to deal with security threats, where new forms of non-state transnational risk, counter-risk strategy and technology are in play. She is also a Guest Lecturer at SciencesPo since 2018, the Managing Editor of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, an Associate Fellow at the T. M. C. Asser Institute, a Research Fellow at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism and a Member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War.