Drone violence as wild justice: administrative executions on the terror frontier

Abstract

This chapter considers the state use of armed drones as an object of governance manifesting outside the paradigm and morality of war. In some circumstances, the drone violence wielded remotely by the US government resembles more closely a non-war form of state violence—lethal, punitive law-enforcement (capital punishment)—even though the lawfulness of that violence might be questionable. In parts of the world that are relatively under-governed and outside zones of ongoing conflict, the remote user of armed drones appears sometimes to act in the manner of a lawman delivering ‘wild justice’ to outlaws. Arguably, the US government’s practice of conducting ‘personality strikes’ against alleged terrorists amounts to a practice of administrative execution and thus falls short of ethical expectations for the state use of lethal force in non-war (law-enforcement) circumstances. This punitive form of drone violence is instead ‘wild’ because it merely mimics the legalism of proper criminal-justice practice. When ‘drone-based killings in the guise of law-enforcement are sanctioned and conducted secretly by non-judicial agents of government, the ethical problem is that there is too much potential for unjust (arbitrary) violation of a person’s right to life. Drone violence as wild justice thus presents a governance challenge: either to prohibit personality strikes outside war zones or to tame such violence by requiring judicial authorisation.

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ORCID for Christian Enemark: orcid.org/0000-0002-1833-0927

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