Dissertation

Pilotless aircraft, or drones, pose a twofold challenge to the study of International Relations. First, the machines themselves are emerging as a contentious problem in world politics, both domestically and internationally. Second, attempts to analyze ongoing societal and political struggles over drones are hampered by a tradition among IR scholars of viewing technology as an exogenous variable and a reductionist belief that the meaning of a technology is determined by its material impact on the international system over time. Must we wait for drones to become history before we can truly understand them? This research zooms in on the discursive struggles over technological meanings and explores their political ramifications. The concept of technopolitics, insights from the field of utopia studies, and an analysis of earlier technological controversies are used to develop a new framework for analyzing the adversarial processes of social shaping that are responsible for creating, sustaining, or destabilizing today’s drone assemblages. An analysis of the domestic and international levels of the debates reveals that technopolitical actors are employing cultural databanks, fictionalization, technological analogies, and contextualization to create stark imaginary futures of drone potential and attack those of their rivals. These utopian and dystopian fantasies are clustered into three broad paradigms that transcend the boundaries of the Westphalian state: lethality, profitability, and civilizing agents. Despite the vast gulf between them, these paradigms are nevertheless interlocking in some of the details of what they say, suggesting a possible roadmap for better understanding the shape and the direction of tomorrow’s drone technopolitical systems. More broadly, this research suggests that speculative fantasies are not simply erroneous predictions but play a key role in manipulating the meaning and material configuration of all technological systems. Myth-making persists in modern politics but we no longer tell these stories about gods, we tell them about our technologies.