From Threat to Walking Corpse: Spatial Disruption and the Phenomenology of "Living under Drones"

The use of armed drones in post-9/11 US military conflicts has increasingly been the subject of academic writings; few, however, examine its collateral effects from a biopolitically-framed, phenomenological lens. This article examines how the indeterminate field of threat produced and sustained by the preventive military paradigm of drone warfare transforms potential threats into determinate targets of military violence. The spatial disruption experienced by inhabitants of the "space of death" generated by the "drone zone" thus transforms their existential comportment of living under drones into that of 'walking corpses' whose relationships to space expose the devastating phenomenological consequences of drone warfare.