In the past decade, the United States has rapidly deployed militarized drones in theaters of war for surveillance as well as targeted killing. The swiftness with which drones were created and put into service has outstripped the development of an associated framework for discussing them, with the result that basic conversations about these lethal weapons have been stymied for a lack of a shared rhetoric. Marouf Hasian’s Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age fills that critical gap.
 
With a growing fleet of more than 7,500 drones, these emblems of what one commentary has dubbed “push-button, bloodless wars” comprise as much as a third of the US aircraft force. Their use is hotly debated, some championing air power that doesn’t risk the lives of pilots, others arguing that drone strikes encourage cycles of violence against the United States, its allies, and interests.
 
In this landmark study, Hasian illuminates both the discursive and visual argumentative strategies that drone supporters and critics both rely on. He comprehensively reviews how advocates and detractors parse and re-contextualize drone images, casualty figures, governmental “white papers,” NGO reports, documentaries, and blogs to support their points of view. He unpacks the ideological reflexes and assumptions behind these legal, ethical, and military arguments.
 
Visiting both formal legal language used by legislators, political leaders, and policy makers as well as public, vernacular commentaries about drones, Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age dispassionately illuminates the emotive, cognitive, and behavioral strategies partisans use to influence public and official opinion.

This volume's contributors offer a new critical language through which to explore and assess the historical, juridical, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of drone technology and warfare. They show how drones generate particular ways of visualizing the spaces and targets of war while acting as tools to exercise state power. Essays include discussions of the legal justifications of extrajudicial killings and how US drone strikes in the Horn of Africa impact life on the ground, as well as a personal narrative of a former drone operator. The contributors also explore drone warfare in relation to sovereignty, governance, and social difference; provide accounts of the relationships between drone technologies and modes of perception and mediation; and theorize drones’ relation to biopolitics, robotics, automation, and art. Interdisciplinary and timely, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare extends the critical study of drones while expanding the public discussion of one of our era's most ubiquitous instruments of war.

Contributors. Peter Asaro, Brandon Wayne Bryant, Katherine Chandler, Jordan Crandall, Ricardo Dominguez, Derek Gregory, Inderpal Grewal, Lisa Hajjar, Caren Kaplan, Andrea Miller, Anjali Nath, Jeremy Packer, Lisa Parks, Joshua Reeves, Thomas Stubblefield, Madiha Tahir

“Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” ― New York Times

“Noam Chomsky is a global phenomenon.”—New York Review of Books
 
In On Western Terrorism, world-renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses Western power and propaganda with filmmaker and investigative journalist Andre Vltchek. Together they touch on colonialism, propaganda, and the media, and cover topics from the Soviet Union to Latin America to the Arab Spring.
 
Here is the perfect introduction to Chomsky's political thought and provides an accessible approach for anyone who wishes to better understand the West's fraught role in the world.  Admired by some, condemned by others, and feared by all—the military might of the West is undeniably colossal.
 
Beginning with stories of the New York newsstand where Chomsky started his political education as a teenager, the discussion broadens out to encompass colonialism, imperial control, propaganda, and drone warfare.
 
Chomsky and Vltchek offer a powerful critique of the legacy of colonialism, touching upon many countries including Syria, Nicaragua, Cuba, China, Chile, and Turkey. The Table of Contents:
 
1. The Murderous Legacy of Colonialism
2. Concealing the Crimes of the West
3. Propaganda and the Media
4. The Soviet Bloc
5. India and China
6. Latin America
7. The Middle East and the Arab Spring
8. Hope in the Most Devastated Places on Earth
9. The Decline of U.S. Power Timeline
 
With a fresh design and a new foreword by Chomsky, this edition of On Western Terrorism stands as an influential and powerful critique of the West's role in the world, inspiring all who read it to think independently and critically. 

What does it mean for human beings to exist in an era of dronified state violence? How can we understand the rise of robotic systems of power and domination? Focusing on U.S. drone warfare and its broader implications as no other book has to date, Predator Empire argues that we are witnessing a transition from a labor-intensive “American empire” to a machine-intensive “Predator Empire.” 

Moving from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror and beyond, Ian G. R. Shaw reveals how changes in military strategy, domestic policing, and state surveillance have come together to enclose our planet in a robotic system of control. The rise of drones presents a series of “existential crises,” he suggests, that are reengineering not only spaces of violence but also the character of the modern state. Positioning drone warfare as part of a much longer project to watch and enclose the human species, he shows that for decades—centuries even—human existence has slowly but surely been brought within the artificial worlds of “technological civilization.” Instead of incarcerating us in prisons or colonizing territory directly, the Predator Empire locks us inside a worldwide system of electromagnetic enclosure—in which democratic ideals give way to a system of totalitarian control, a machinic “rule by Nobody.” 

As accessibly written as it is theoretically ambitious, Predator Empire provides up-to-date information about U.S. drone warfare, as well as an in-depth history of the rise of drones.