Kill Box: Military Drone Systems and Cultural Production

Alex Adams

Dec 2024 · Rowman & Littlefield

Ebook

166

Pages

Eligible

Ratings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More

About this ebook

Drone warfare represents one of the most pressing moral and political problems of contemporary military ethics. Since the beginning of the American drone program in the late twentieth century, drone technologies have been used to conduct remote extrajudicial assassinations, to violate national sovereignty, and to conduct intrusive surveillance in contravention of international human rights norms, among other controversial uses. Today, military drones are used by dozens of military forces. As such, these technologies pose urgent questions which problematize well-established ways of thinking about central aspects of the ethics of warfare, such as justice, sovereignty, battlefield trauma, the political and physical limits of conflict, and, perhaps most prominently of all, the legitimacy of military violence. Though some of these concerns are well-worn, their central role in – and reconfiguration by – drone warfare means that they deserve serious reconsideration.

Kill Box investigates this urgent conceptual territory through readings of the popular cultural productions that have emerged as a part of these debates, and reveals the ways in which narrative texts have been an integral part of the framing of these political and philosophical conversations. Examining well-known single-issue drone texts, such as Eye in the Sky, Good Kill, and The Drone Eats with Me, alongside lesser known texts, such as pulp novels, genre sci-fi, and Netflix thrillers, this new book shows us the surprisingly versatile and elastic ways in which drone discourse continues to be co-constituted by narrative entertainment.

About the author

Alex Adams is an independent scholar based in the UK with a PhD from Newcastle University School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. They are author of Death TV: Drone Warfare in Contemporary Popular Culture;How to Justify Torture: Inside the Ticking Bomb Scenario; and Political Torture in Popular Culture: The Role of Representations in the Post-9/11 Torture Debate.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets

Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.

Laptops and computers

You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

eReaders and other devices

To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.

Report illegal content