The Programme

Politics

Countering threats from a distance has radically altered our ideas of warfare. Without clearly demarcated battlefields, explicit declarations of war, or boots on the ground, the rules and expectations surrounding when and how war is fought has become increasingly complex. How, then, is remote warfare politically and legally enabled, legitimized, accounted for, and contested, both domestically and internationally?

Political Economy

War, according to the popular maxim, is the only industry where the profits are measured in dollars and losses in lives. The sprawling industry of traditional arms manufacturers, Big Tech companies, start-up enterprises, and private military contractors (PMCs) testify to the fact that there is enormous money to be made out of warfare. In an increasingly globalized world, where economic fates grow ever more intricately tied to the (in)stability of faraway locales, trade and commerce have never been more central to violent conflict. These material relations significantly affect how war is waged, by whom, and for what.

Security Cooperation

Waging warfare remotely is seldom straightforward. Long-distance battles in far-flung locations often require close partnerships across Western allies and with military and political actors on the ground. Such alliances manifest across a range of social and material domains in the form of coalition warfare and security force assistance. They may be widely-recognized and institutionalised, or shadowy and transient. Common to them all is the fact that war ultimately plays out locally.

Technologies

The history of warfare has been defined by technological innovation. Everything from gunpowder to the atomic bomb has radically altered the way wars are fought and how peace is achieved. Remote warfare is no exception. Conducting warfare from a distance is made possible by a complex network of technologies including surveillance, algorithms, machine learning, unmanned and autonomous vehicles, and precision-guided munitions. By transforming what is possible on and off the battlefield, the ascendency of these technologies raises fresh questions about the role of humans in warfare as well as how the technologies themselves are developed and proliferated.

Civilian Harm

Remote warfare is only remote for some. While politicians portray it as riskless, algorithmic targeting and ‘precision’ airstrikes often lead to widescale civilian casualties. These casualties are often denied, kept secret or undercounted to maintain the myth of a clean war. In response, a growing community of scholars and NGOs have utilised remote-sensing techniques to monitor civilian harm. The resulting contestation of the exact numbers of civilian casualties has provoked intense debate. This raises pressing questions about the impact of the violence executed and democratic control.