Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

• A draft article will be distributed the week prior to workshop participants
• Limit to 12 (grad students + faculty)

Israeli drones were first tested by South African forces supported by Israeli contractors in the 1981 Operation Protea against the South West Africa People’s Organisation in Angola. This early reconnaissance drone built by Kentron, the armament corporation owned by the government of South Africa, is considered a predecessor of the unmanned aircraft developed by the American military for the War on Terror. In the mid-1980s, a classified CIA report described South African-built drones as among the most advanced in the world. By 1994, Kentron rebranded its drone as protecting democracy, citing its use in monitoring South Africa’s first democratic elections. By the 2000s, these drones received funding and publicity from international wildlife organizations for use in countering poachers. Meanwhile, local human rights groups campaigned to limit drone use by police, and in 2015 South Africa established detailed regulations for drone systems.

While drone aircraft have been widely critiqued for enacting vertical sovereignty in neocolonial contexts (Mbembe, 2003; Gregory, 2011), especially in the Middle East, less attention has been paid to the military, political, and legal infrastructures that underwrite their use, as well as the histories that give rise to current drone systems. I analyze the drone as a symptom of war infrastructure. How does the logic of conflict become enmeshed with the human, machine, and media parts of the drone? How does the rubric of threat, protection, and exception to the law condition other uses of drones for policing, medical, humanitarian, and wildlife management? How do military industries profit? Parks (2017) examines how drone aircraft rely on “vertical mediation” to create a targeted class. I show how these divisions become embedded in drone infrastructure through the South African context since 1981. Moving from drones used by the apartheid state to monitoring elections in 1994 and the protection of wildlife today, I explore how targeting, asymmetry, and air superiority are tied to each iteration.

Katherine Chandler is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. She studies the intersection of technology, media and politics to research how militarism is embedded in the everyday. Her book Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers University Press, 2020) analyzes failed projects to build drone aircraft from 1936-1992. It excavates how race, gender and nation are the basis of the drone, showing how these politics are disavowed as the technology advances. Her current research, Drone Publics, researches contemporary drones – and the overlay of militarism, humanitarianism, and commercialism they propose – to theorize global publics. For more information, visit www.katherinechandler.net.

Please email Dr. Sophia Acord (skacord@ufl.edu) to attend the event.