555597

research-article2015

IPT0010.1177/1755088214555597Journal of International Political TheoryBaggiarini

Article

Drone warfare and the limits

of sacrifice

Journal of International Political Theory

2015, Vol. 11(1) 128144
The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088214555597
ipt.sagepub.com

Bianca Baggiarini
York University, Canada

Abstract
Ren Girard argues that violence and the sacred are inseparable, yet how do the
political boundaries of sacrifice shift when state violence is privatized and increasingly
disembodied? This article provides a Foucauldian challenge to Girard by invoking
the mutually reinforcing problem of military privatization and drone warfare. Using
Foucauldian work on race and biopolitics, I will explore how military privatization
permits states to (precariously) call for the end of sacrifice. I trace the genealogical
trajectories of the citizen-soldier to argue that military privatization, as exemplified
by the burgeoning industry of private military and security companies and the current
American administrations use of drone warfare, allows for the removal of sacrifice
as a feature of the post-World War II social contract between states and citizens.
Historically, the sacrifices of citizen-soldiers have been consecrated within the
boundaries of the nation and memorialized in a way that allows for both the production
of shared collective memory and a projected future-oriented discourse of unification
through shared national or ethnic destiny. Drones, as the technological extension of
the philosophy of military privatization and the high-tech expression of pre-modern
violence, reveal tensions between embodied combat, citizenship and sacrifice.
Keywords
Drones, military privatization, sacrifice, US military, violence

Introduction
A cursory glance at international politics shows that unmanned aerial systems (UAS),
colloquially termed drones, constitute a prolific presence globally. By 2022, the global
drone sector is expected to reach a market value of US$82billion (Medina, 2014) despite
no consensus on how to govern the expansion of the industry and curtail the innumerable
Corresponding author:
Bianca Baggiarini, Department of Sociology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3,
Canada.
Email: b.baggiarini@gmail.com

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problems associated with the military applications of drones. UAS are a pillar of US
counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. The synchronistic efforts of the US
government, the Pentagon, arms manufacturers, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC) and the private contractors1 suggest a future of militarized violence as alwaysalready transcending the numerous vulnerabilities of the citizen-soldier. Regarded by
some as too fat to fight,2 ordinary bodies appear ill-prepared to combat the (savage yet
shrewd) enemy. In the asymmetrical yet perpetual Global War on Terror, whose architects are also explicitly casualty averse (Mandel, 2004; Shimko, 2010), the privatization
of militaries serves as a necessary but insufficient social pre-requisite in the quest for
clean bloodless war. UAS extend this social philosophy of privatization, delivering
enhanced battlefield capabilities to the war fighter by promoting situational awareness,
understanding, ownership of data and dominance through combat unmanning. But the
meaning of awareness is not entirely clear.
Consider the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems Internationals annual convention, of which I was in attendance. A military official quipped, Nothing ruins a good
war story like an eye witness. Here, enhanced sight and interpretation of data wrought by
UAS are distinct from the politicized act of witnessing. Agamben (2002) defines the witness, on the one hand, by the subjective potential for testimony and thus the production of
truth as recognized by law and, on the other hand, as a survivor: a person who has lived
through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it (p. 17, emphasis added). UAS, as techniques of government, enable
situational awareness by bringing populations into the terrain of state legibility and security so that they might become governable subjects (Adey et al., 2013: 3; emphasis
added). In contrast to sovereign power, governing presuppose[s] the freedom of the governed (Rose, 1999: 4). UAS enact permanent mechanisms of surveillance, which generate the constant fear of death. Governing at a distance undermines the transformative
potential of witnesses, whose experiences of drone wars have no clear temporal boundaries, and therefore cannot be. We can imagine that good post-9/11 war stories should
include themes of American exceptionalism and heroic, masculine sacrifice, triumph over
evil and national destiny not murder, clandestine assassinations or unjust occupations.
The inability to bear witness is informed by ongoing racism and neo-colonialism, which
is integral to drone violence in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) in North
Waziristan, Pakistan, and in other undeclared war zones. Killing at a distance forecloses
the encounter between executioner and victim. Insofar as the technology offers more ease
in effectively closing in on a battle space (shortening the kill chain), it is nonetheless a
space where the enemy is intimately known, generating an intimacy-in-distance.
In this article, I argue that the military application of drones signifies a troubling of
embodied combat, citizenship and sacrifice. The synthesis of citizenship and sacrifice
was a centuries-long process that hailed the citizen-soldier as the ultimate embodiment
of sacrifice. Modern citizenship promotes a nationalistic willingness to die for the nation
(Balakrishnan, 2009; Brubaker, 1992: 145). This symbiosis is eroded through privatization and combat unmanning, which pivot on how states govern sacrifice. The outsourcing of violence through private military corporations (PMCs) and the techno-fetishism of
drones are co-constitutive responses to the perceived need to unman combat. They

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emerge in tandem with a Euro-American fascination with clean wars. Together, PMCs
and UAS free states from the accountability typically associated with state-centric and
defence-oriented wars. Both phenomena reflect the logical endpoint in the (impossible)
quest for bloodless war. Yet, bloodshed reminds us that war is a human practice. In
attempts to minimize bloodshed (through technological prowess) or conceal it (bypassing Congress, privatizing the effects of violence), an ineradicable paradox of liberal
modernity is revealed: liberal regimes [which idealize peace] have now committed to
war without end, temporally, spatially, and politically (Reid, 2006: 23). Drones, which
I claim are high-tech expressions of pre-modern sovereign violence, reconfigure sacrifice as being, first, a trope integral to war and, second, as an embodied, social practice.
As Girard (Girard and Gregory, 1979) succinctly states, sacrifice deals with humankind
(p. 90). What is the meaning of bodies for sacrificial violence in relation to disembodied
combat? How do privatization and drones, when taken together and accepting a symbiosis, reshape the imagination and applicability of sacrificial violence?
Following Girard, society cannot function without an understanding of the sacred.
Although his contributions to literary and religious theory are profound, it is less clear
what Girards work offers critical political sociology. Yet, in supplementing Girard with
Foucauldian sensibilities, his impulse can be extended to illustrate the importance of
sacrifice in a particular empirical context: the global War on Terror. First, I argue that the
biopolitics of sacrifice are essentially contested. Sacrifice does not exist a priori as it is
often retroactively and discursively constructed. Girard essentializes sacrifice, rendering
it a universal truth that unfolds rather formulaically, making the analytic point of departure and point of arrival foreordained (Taussig-Rubbo, 2011: 141). A straightforward
application of Girards analysis risks romanticizing the extent to which global wars are
necessarily contingent on sacrifice, thereby de-historicizing the role that gendered and
racialized bodies play in the meaning of the sacrificial violence.
Nevertheless, the idea that people desire to avoid the contagion of the other through
bloodshed is particularly apt when theorizing drones: the only way to avoid contagion
is to flee the scene of violence (Girard and Gregory, 1979: 28). UAS mean that soldiers
never arrive onto the scene of violence since they engage in violence from a safe distance. Drones prevent contagion since there is no need to face the humanity of the other,
the enemy. Second, I show how drone warfare emerges as the logical extension of the
socioeconomic and political philosophy of military privatization. Third, I suggest what
post-sacrificial violence would mean for future wars. Briefly, in postmodern, technofetishist wars, the deaths of citizen-soldiers are (inconsistently) profane. Technology has
shifted the terrain of sacrifice in that killing and being killed are no longer the legacy of
the citizen-soldier. In the removal of the social from war, markets, managerial expertise, the need to offer flexible responses to new wars (Duffield, 2001) and the distanced,
permanent and panoptic gaze(s) of drones, as well as data collection, storage, and interpretation, are the new sacred grounds of state violence.

The biopolitics of sacrifice

Diverging from policy and investigative journalism, critical academics point to the geopolitics of drones and their capacity as governmental technologies (Adey et al., 2013;

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Shaw, 2013), the nexus of democracy and democratic potentialities in the use of
unmanned systems (Sauer and Schrnig, 2012), the morality of distanced combat
(Coeckelbergh, 2013) and relatedly, an ethical turn captured in the political philosophizing regarding the risks and benefits of autonomous robots in war (Arkin, 2010; Lin,
2010; Sharkey, 2010). Whitehead and Finnstrm (2013) suggest that global wars reflect
cyclical outbursts of violence without a guaranteed endpoint, generating never ending
social routines (pp. 125). Killing becomes increasingly invested in magical realities,
where the space of virtuality connects directly to the lethality of materiality (p. 9).
Furthermore, they argue,
war is not an aggregation of violent acts that finally reaches a given threshold of carnage to
become war rather than armed conflict, counterinsurgency or peacekeeping, but is the invocation
and creation of a particular political reality that engages allies and enemies, civilians and
soldiers, in a particular style of violent interactions. (p. 7)

This style of violence is predicated on the bracketing of the allegedly modern from the
allegedly premodern or even primitive (p. 3). Similarly, as Larry George (2002) explains,
the protracted Global War on Terror reveals war as paradoxically both the disease of and
remedy for the social body. These pharmacotic mimetic wars use sacrificial rituals in a
politically cathartic and unifying function to cleanse and purge these societies of
internal disorder and remove troubling dissenters (p. 164). George claims that war sanctifies politics by transubstantiating the blood shed by compatriots and enemies, as well
as by innocent scapegoats and demonized dissenters, into various kinds of fungible political power (p. 165). Sacrificial acts bring together the opposing realms of the sacred and
profane (Hubert and Mauss, 1964) and offer a positive surplus for whoever or whatever
is to receive the benefit of the sacrifice, which emerged out of negative destruction
(Bataille, 1991). In this way, fallen soldiers remain the property of the state (Edkins,
2003: 95) and this in turn reifies state power. Sacrificial violence is repetitive and regenerative as it codifies power through a reorganization of social ties and marks the differences that sustain them (Schott, 2010). In unequal societies, the privileged are
overcompensated for any sacrifices they make and those with little or no resources are
under-compensated for their (often large) sacrifices. While all social life requires some
sacrifice, not all sacrifices are necessary and just (Pearce, 2010: 48). Therefore, the
demand for sacrifices in current wars is increasingly untenable, particularly as the United
States democratic deficiencies become more apparent.
I theorize UAS as an effect of liberal governments and militaries thinking on sacrifice
as burdened with tension regarding the deaths of soldiers. Taussig-Rubbo (2009, 2011)
claims that the sensibilities and schematics of sacrifice include whether killing is made
visible or invisible. He argues that sacrifice is a key feature of politics and liberal government is concerned with establishing a monopoly over its discursive trajectories and communicative potentiality, despite there being clear inconsistencies and contradictions in
sacrificial systems (Pearce, 2010). Since the boundaries of the self only become clear
through the imagination of sacrifice (Kahn, 2008), sacralization entails a negotiation
between sovereign and biopolitical power in determining the meaning and parameters of
subjectivity. UAS were largely sold on the basis that they protect American (racialized as

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white) life. As a collection of technological artefacts, strategic and tactical systems and
practices that supplement war fighters, the US Department of Defence (2013) claims3 that
ideally these systems will gain greater autonomy such that the algorithms must act as a
human brain does. For now, the application of unmanned systems involves significant
human interaction, but the goals of net-centric warfare assume a gradual shift from
humans in the loop to humans on the loop, and regards bodies as obstacles (Masters,
2008).
In the modern era, sacrifice rests on the value of life. Foucault (1978) and Agamben
(1998) argue that modernity is predicated upon processes of demarcation, regulation and
discipline, which render some expressions of life politically meaningful: life that is transcendent and proficient marked by its political capacity. This political life is in contrast to
mere animal existence (bare life) that is marked by a lack. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, when the domain of the biological came under the control of the state, biopolitical technologies of power were manifested within and against the population. Biopolitics
enhances social equilibrium through a disciplining of individual forces, in conjunction
with regulatory technologies aimed at the biological characteristics of the population
(Foucault, 1978). Whereas the sovereign power of the King was strictly concerned with
authorizing death, in late biopolitical societies, sovereignty, and indeed the potential for
self-sacrifice, comes to be diffused among the People. As popular sovereignty came to
inform citizenship, the internal and external regulation of populations became a chief
concern of the state. From the eighteenth century onwards, these developments produced
a normative relationship between the soldier and the state understood as a form of an
exchange marked by notions of mutual responsibility: the soldier-citizen sacrificed his
individual self through military service a sacrifice that was potentially permanently
through injury or death so that public goods might flourish. In exchange, the state would
provide institutional support and services for the soldier and his dependants: his legacy
might also be memorialized, thus reifying soldiers privileged acts of sacrifice.
Governmentality does not indicate the loss of sovereignty but instead the crystallization
of petty sovereigns, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by
aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or fully control (Butler, 2006: 56).
As Woodward (2008) explains in her analysis of the contradictions within British narratives of the meaning of military sacrifice, State-military discourses around the meaning
of the figure of the soldier, and the meaning of the participation of that soldier in military
activities, are adamant and persuasive that military participation constitutes national service (p. 378). When a member of the US military dies in battle, this is considered the most
grand of sacrificial acts for the nation (Pearce, 2010). Such acts crystallize in the social
contract, which reached its peak after the Second World War. The welfare-state contract
reflects the spatial order of the nation and thus arranges social relations within the boundaries of the state. The hegemonic ascendance of neoliberal socioeconomic ideals erodes the
social in citizenship, putting this already precarious relation of mutual exchange with the
goal of solidarity or community into an awkward confrontation with the decentralizing
race to the bottom iterations of global neoliberal economic capitalism.
The nation-state system is deeply intertwined with the soldier-citizen archetype and
its associated expressions of symbolic nationalized performance, which hinge on a complex imaginary and discourse of sacrifice. Furthermore, the model of the soldier-citizen

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as a model is deeply rooted in a political imaginary that renders nation-states as discrete,

territorially contained entities opposed to other discrete states. National armies, as a
product of securitized technocratic reason, facilitated the development of the nationstate. This rationality required that soldier-citizens undergo systematic physical and
moral discipline so that, ideally, their vitality would solidify the overall strength of the
military and the population at large. Soldiers, with their privileged location in the official
state narrative of sacrifice, were key to the wider project of nation building, as well as the
developing institution of formal citizenship. According to Balibar (2004), states cannot
become nation-states if they do not appropriate the sacred, not only at the level of representations of a more or less secularized sovereignty, but also at the day-to-day level
of legitimation, implying the control of births and deaths, marriages (p. 20). The
demarcation and then re-appropriation of the sacred produce noteworthy intersections
between disciplinary and biopolitical modes of power, which morally regulate, rank,
subordinate and hierarchize bodies.
Nationalized narratives of war have been equally dependent on a related understanding of foreign enemies. These narratives of otherness extended the legitimacy of the
nation and naturalized violence against perceived others, while affirming its territorial
borders and the need to protect the nation from dangerous people. Foreign wars were
inspired and legitimized by both imperialism and racism. As war became a state privilege, it also became the prerogative of an institutionalized army or military apparatus.
War became both a model and a principle of intelligibility of politics and thus a grid for
analysing politics (Foucault, 2003). In this way, as Girard and Gregory (1979) explain,
sacrifice creates the necessary conditions for the socially acceptable use of violence.
Sacrifice allows for the displacement of vengeance onto a scapegoat. Unchecked violence is only tamed through sacrifice or through the implementation of a judicial system.
Sacrifice is therefore an act of violence without risk of vengeance and is the mechanism
by which violence can be enacted in a purifying or pharmacotic (George, 2002) way:
violence is directed out of the community, thereby protecting the community from its
own capacity to commit violence against itself. Moreover, race permits the sovereign
power of letting die (Foucault, 2007).
The exteriorization, rationalization and spatialization of war included identifying colonies and racialized subjects as zones of exception. As such, the impetus to kill was realized
outside or as exception inside the rules contained within Western legal and moral achievements. The culmination of these historical moments, the synthesis between massacre and
bureaucracy, the incarnation of Western rationality (Mbembe, 2003: 23), demarcated the
colonies as the space of exception. In these spaces, the rules of sovereignty and confined
warfare among equal states did not apply. The state aimed to civilize colonial populations
and to rationalize the sovereign act of killing, based on the centrality of the state in the
calculus of war [, which] derives from the fact that the state is the model of political unity,
a principle of rational organization, the embodiment of the idea of the universal (Mbembe,
2003: 24). As such, the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the
native was used to justify colonial war and occupation, which was a matter of
seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area the writing of
new spatial relations (territorialisation) was, ultimately, tantamount to the production of

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boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property
arrangements, the classification of people. (Mbembe, 2003: 26)

Conflict between the two opposing biologically/racially defined groups allows for the state
to emerge as the necessary mediator of the logic of war, acting as a precursor to the logic
of permanent warfare. Foucault (2003: 256) answers the question of how death functions
in a system characterized by the biopolitical imperative to maximize life through an exploration of how race and racism, the production of enemies through the deployment of race
and racial categories, become the necessary and sufficient precondition for the right to kill.
Biopolitical projects, rationalities and techniques of power thus allow the state to be both
the cause and the solution of state-sanctioned violence; race is integral to this dynamic.
While sovereign states are able to memorialize some deaths and negate others, their claims
to legitimacy are undermined when they offload aspects of their authority onto PMCs. This
undermines the normative potential of mutual exchange between the citizen and the state.
In theory, the idea of the social contract, at least in its contemporary liberal form, requires
a democratic essence, and an impetus towards accountability, that corporations simply cannot (or will not) guarantee. The politics of sacrifice engages state-soldiers and private contractors at disparate yet not mutually exclusive levels: the Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA), I will argue, has generated flexible soldier-citizens who offer sacrifices but
whose labour cannot be considered sacrifices. This is because their deaths do not coalesce
with one national audience and as such cannot be adequately represented or validated by
the public. In contrast, state-soldiers bear the characteristics of sovereignty and are bound
to its legal, nationalized and cultural symbols. Historically, their deaths have been considered irreversibly sacrosanct.
Given that sacrifice is partly about the power to name and legitimize certain deaths as
having public significance, the power to recognize certain deaths as loss, the privatization
of warfare invites the question of what is at stake in the negation of sacrifice. Recall that
sacrifice is not about a material act but is an effect of a social mechanism that recognizes
the act as sacrificial or not. The outsourcing of violence implies that governments can disavow the burden of humanness in war. Alas, this is the cornerstone of both privatization and
the desacralization of citizenship (Brubaker, 1992). The ritualization of the sacrifices of
state-soldiers produces foundational narratives and thus has a communitarian effect.
Moreover, unlike private contractors, their actions are consecrated within the boundaries of
the nation and memorialized in a way that allows for both the production of shared collective memory and a projected future-oriented discourse of unification through shared
national or ethnic destiny. As an archetype of citizenship, the soldier-citizen normalizes a
belief that soldiers actions in wartime reflected the highest echelon of sacrifice. In the
period of nation building, social relations are engaged within the boundaries of the nationstate. However, globalized wars, combined with denationalization (Sassen, 2002: 280) and
military privatization, threaten the soldier-citizens status as a stable subject of sacrifice.

The social and political context for drones

The era of total warfare marked a critical turning point in the history of soldier-citizenship, sacrifice and technological change. The First World War reflected the combination

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of modern nationalism, industrialism and technological limitations whose defining

characteristic was mass (Shimko, 2010: 10). As Lieber (2005) states, the firepower
acquired in the First World War was greatly limited by problems with accuracy. These
were eventually resolved during the nuclear revolution in the Second World War, which
revealed the speed with which total annihilation [could be] carried out, and the ability to
do so without first achieving success on the battlefield (Lieber, 2005: 126). From
machine guns to air assaults and bombing, the Second World War altered the spatial logic
of the battlefield, creating further distance between soldiers and their targets and allowing the American military to achieve what would become its dominant military status
through air assaults. Accordingly, American war making into the Cold War period was
defined by a military doctrine of annihilation and resource-based approach to warfare,
evidenced by conflicts in Korea and Vietnam (Adamsky, 2010: 79). While over 19million people died in combat during the Second World War, the deaths of North American
soldiers were regarded as honourable and continue to be remembered as noble sacrifices.
Total wars, which involve mass numbers of troops, facilitate deaths that are regarded as
legitimate sacrifices. Limited wars, such as liberal humanitarian wars, turn casualties
into a political problem (Mandel, 2004). PMCs emerged as the solution to what Duffield
(2005: 61) identifies as conflicting needs: to maintain traditional military capacity
(demand sacrifice) while also remaining flexible in new wars (disavowing sacrifice).
Efficiency and military success eventually came to be linked with reducing and avoiding (citizen-soldier) casualties. Strategies were thus developed to distance American soldiers from combat. Casualty aversion was full-fledged by the 1990s when significant
force reduction was required to finance technology, although, to be sure, casualty aversion
escalates in moments when the public questions the legitimacy of wars (Shimko, 2010).
The military was not exempt from the broader institutional transformations that marked
industrial societies at this time: like other institutions, it too shifted from a labour to capital-intensive organization (Manigart, 2006). The decline of the mass army model complemented a restructuring that emphasized privatization and professionalization (Joachim
and Schneiker, 2012; Stachowitsch, 2012). Managers and technicians increasingly conducted war, as opposed to combat leaders (Moskos, 2000: 15). The professionalization of
the military was essential for the realization of the goals of the RMA: a policy agenda
emphasizing the exploitation of technological advances to preserve and even improve the
United States long-term strategic position (Shimko, 2010: 2). Without this professionalization, the incorporation of precision-guided weapons would have remained in the realm
of the abstract (Adamsky, 2010: 5961). In part, casualty aversion was a product of the
identity crisis and emasculation suffered by the American body politic after Vietnam
(Masters, 2008). While recuperating from the political and symbolic consequences of
defeat, American military strategists addressed the disciplinary problems associated with
the transition to an all-volunteer force. The Gulf War was and still is widely hailed as a
milestone success insofar as the American casualty rate was relatively low; this was attributed to an unprecedented application of military technology (Shimko, 2010).
The RMA made technological advancement a key component of casualty avoidance.
Borrowing ideological language, the RMA makes constant reference to trade liberalization, economic reform and free markets the classic buzzwords of neoliberal capitalist accumulation (Parenti, 2007). The RMA contains a complex set of practices that

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emerged, in part, within the dictates of global capitalism. Flexible citizenship was an
integral model that freed both military and global economic objectives to facilitate the
compression of time and space in mobile and transnational sites of capitalist production,
to reduce human casualties during war and to allow for efficient strategies of global military, political and economic dominance. It includes technological mastery, omnipotent
surveillance, real-time situational awareness, and speed-of-light digital interactions
(Graham, 2008: 37). These developments reflect a profound desire to overcome the limits of the body of the soldier-citizen. This strategy, a completely automated weapons
system devoid of human involvement (Graham, 2008: 51), is packaged in the language
of economic efficiency and the protection of life since it seeks to substitute bodies with
technology. The increasing reliance on technical reason is not a coincidence. It is inextricable from the privatization and outsourcing of sacrifice and with widespread practices
that unfold in relation to the securitization of citizenship.
Securitization has become a chief concern for the modern state. By securitizing citizenship, technologies of governing are employed that displace the governing of populations from authorities and sites traditionally located in the state to other sites and actors
such as private companies, international organizations, and even individuals and their
own self-government (Rygiel, 2008). Hence, citizenship as government is not just
internationalized but also privatized and individualized (Rygiel, 2008: 211). Private contractors bodies represent and absorb the synthesis of the RMA with the ideology of
securitization; they are actors whose sacrifice may be denied, celebrated and/or privatized. In other words, the meaning of their deaths is not determined a priori but rather
socially constructed by competing discourses. Thus, after 9/11, PMCs were hailed as
necessary actors in the successful implementation of the goals of the RMA: simply put,
one could not tell the story of the Iraq war without any [a] discussion of PMCs (Singer,
2004: 6). PMCs are the effect of the widening of the meaning of security such that the
boundaries of the nation-state were no longer capable of effectively administrating security as dwindling Euro-American state militaries were thought to be ineffective in new
wars (Duffield, 2001). Thus, there was an unprecedented intervention of PMCs into Iraq
following the American-led 2003 invasion, which was justified through the assertion that
Iraq was harbouring weapons of mass destruction, among other claims that falsely linked
Iraq with the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Simultaneously, the American government outsourced many of their operations to
PMCs, rendering the war effort unprecedentedly reliant on non-state, corporate actors
(Singer, 2004). In 2007, there were more private contractors than US soldiers on the
ground in that country (Hartung and Pemberton, 2008). At the height of the war, private
contractors outnumbered US troops, and some have estimated that there were as many as
50,000 armed security personnel (Singer, 2004, 2005). PMCs offer services in information technology, logistics and support, military training, combat and security (Alexandra
et al., 2008). PMCs therefore supplement weakening state armies, and they also satisfy
neoliberal sociopolitical and economic desires for techno-rational, geopolitical and scientific mastery of space and time. As such, they are now conceptualized as integral to
how states manage and imagine security threats. PMCs thus reflect, respond to and further blur the distinctions between civilian and combatant, war and peace (Kinsey, 2006).
Critically, wars are no longer fought on battlefields between opposing armies wearing

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uniforms. Instead, the battlefield is everywhere: cities, towns and countryside (Kinsey,
2006: 52). Battlefields are virtually constructed and simulated (Der Derian, 2001), and
threats are conceptualized as having transnational origins and effects. After the EastWest conflict officially dissolved, new threats, enemies and transnational security issues
emerged, such as the drug trade, environmental degradation, poverty and immigration
(Moskos, 2000). PMCs are a permanent fixture in the security industry, filling the gap
that asymmetrical wars create.

Drone warfare: The end of sacrifice?

Privatized warfare is a site where economic and military objectives intersect. This alignment cannot be separated from the dynamic social meaning attributed to war, combat and
sacrificial violence. The significant incorporation of private military contractors into cold
and hot war theatres shows how the discursive and material qualities of sacrifice are contested in relation to politics. PMCs are integral to the states use of violence in the mediation of social relations. Military privatization captures the tensions between fragmentation
and centralization: fragmentation occurs within military labour as a result of the RMA and
the need for flexible citizenship. Centralization is seen in ongoing attempts to generate
national consciousness through a public spirit that continues to glorify war and Americas
place in the world as democratic model. Liberals and civic republicans alike regard citizenship as a public mode of being, an affective and performative demonstration of belonging that implies an active and willing subordination to the rule of law in exchange for
sociopolitical rights and certain economic guarantees a public contract between the citizen and the state (Isin and Turner, 2002). But securitized, desacralized and flexible citizenship means that governing by contract (Freeman and Minow, 2009) has supplemented,
if not entirely replaced, governing from the social point of view (Rose, 1999).
Since 9/11, drones have been used in 95% of the United States targeted killings, thus
normalizing the technology and the surveillance practices that unfold from it. US President
Barak Obama dramatically increased their use, and the Air Force now trains more drone
pilots than fighter and bomber pilots (Helmore, 2009). Despite the clear preference for
weaponized drones loaded with precision-guided Hellfire missiles and the industries
near-obsessive insistence that they are more precise than ever, the kill ratio has been low.
A total of 50 civilians have perished for every militant killed (Sluka, 2013: 183). In other
words, the number of high-level targets killed, as a percentage of total casualties, is low:
roughly 2%. Still, the United States counts all military-aged males as militants, a claim
that can only be verified posthumously (Living Under Drones). Signature strikes target
people who are not identified but merely display a certain pattern of life racial profiling
gone global. CIA members do not personally identify these targets, but rather they exist
as digital profiles across a network of technologies, algorithmic calculations, and spreadsheets (Shaw, 2013). Indeed, what Shaw (2013) names a topological spatial power means
a drones victim never hears the missile that kills him (Rhode in Benjamin, 2013: 149).
Targeted communities are often referred to in dehumanizing and homophobic terms,
while the discourses of technology are saturated with sexual innuendo. For example, as
Benjamin (2013) states, people attempting to flee the attacks, commonly known as double taps, are referred to as squirters; the technological prowess of Hellfire missiles is

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described in phallic and sexually violent language, as being able to lock into targets
before or after a launch [and] engage targets to the side and behind them without manoeuvring into position (p. 44). According to one drone pilot, the code name for casualties is
bugsplat. Suspected militants are termed poor bastards, prairie dogs, barbarians,
savages and rats slithering through the slums and are imagined as mice being snagged
by hawks circling above (Martin and Sasser, 2010). In the FATA area of Pakistan, from
2004 to 2012, between 2562 and 3325 people were killed in drone strikes, of whom 474
881 of these casualties were civilians, including 176 children (International Human Rights
and Conflict Resolution Clinic, Living Under Drones). Despite suggestions that these
drone strikes are illegal under international humanitarian law, the US government has
only barely admitted to a drone programme. In May 2013, President Obama stated in relation to drones that dozens of highly skilled al-Qaida commanders, trainers, bomb makers
and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted Simply
put, these strikes have saved lives.4
The violence of drones is of course not just material. It is also symbolic since the
threat of immanent violence is maintained 24hours a day. It is a style of violence that
always-already exists as a future potential. Drones create a constant state of fear for targeted communities; people report curtailing their activities for fear of being associated
with the wrong person, landmark or situation. As the Living Under Drones Report attests
to, many people are traumatized and report fearing the presence of drones. They fear
death daily. As one interviewee said,
if, for instance, there is a drone strike and four or five of your villagers die, and you feel sad for
them and you feel like throwing everything away, because you feel death is near [death is] so
close

This terrorization has produced widespread distrust of the US military. Moreover, first
responders, neighbours and humanitarian workers, who attempt to rescue the injured and
to recover bodies, risk becoming victims themselves because of double tap policy, in
which an area is targeted multiple times in quick succession. The deaths of Pakistani
tribal members, who are a priori considered bare life, do not count in the registry of death
and suffering. This shows a deeply racialized politics underpinning the international and
soon to be domestic use of drones. As Shaw and Akhter (2012) explain, the FATA region
has long existed as a colonized space of exception, as an ungovernable buffer state:
The Pakhtuns [tribes] were theoretically to retain a measure of autonomy over their own affairs,
but control was exercised through subsidies provided to selected tribal leaders from the British.
The British state thus extended its control, but not its rule. (p. 1498, emphasis added)

Violence at a distance, as a moral-epistemological conundrum (Coeckelbergh, 2013),

exists at a micro- and macro-level: between the fighter and the enemy (embodied distance),
surpassing the enemy through full-spectrum dominance (spatial and temporal distance). As
previously stated, this technology attempts to generate governable, docile subjects. In
doing so, drones provide distance from the normative framework offered by the social
contract, privatizing and depoliticizing the experiences of those who are implicated in war
practices, as perpetrators and as victims (Baggiarini, 2013). To be sure, this domestic

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distance from the normative framework of the social contract, because it is marked by the
desire to overcome the politics of the body, produces violence, racialized and gendered
effects internationally. Ibrahim Mothana, a Yemini writer and activist, writes,
in Yemen, we fear that the signature strike approach allows the Obama administration to falsely
claim that civilian causalities are non-existent. In the eye of the signature strike, it could be that
someone innocent like me is seen as a militant until proven otherwise. How can a dead person
prove his innocence? For the many labeled as militants when they are killed, its difficult to verify
if they really were active members let alone whether they deserved to die. (Greenwald, 2013)

When violence is privatized, it is also depoliticized and de-historicized (Leander and van
Munster, 2007). Virtual war dehumanizes the victims, desensitizes the perpetrators of violence, and lowers the moral and psychological barriers to killing (Sluka, 2013: 187).
Drones, which supposedly offer clean warfare, result in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.
Furthermore, drones are part of a war strategy that is embedded in increasing cases of
post-traumatic stress disorder and an epidemic of suicide. Targeted killings promote a
sanitized war aesthetic both at home and abroad, characteristic of a postmodern virtual warscape. Despite ongoing and brutal civilian deaths, in which bodies are incinerated and destroyed in very unclean ways, the bombs are still regarded as smart. Survivors
often cannot recover the bodies of loved ones and thus cannot properly mourn. Killing
has become an invisible, mechanized practice. As corporatization and militarization are
increasingly indistinguishable, technologies of war will continue to simultaneously mystify and rationalize violence (Beier, 2012). Drones allow for the disavowal of sacrifice
and the transcendence of the physical, moral and economic limits of the human body.
Yet, the body is essential in the imagining of sacrifice. Without the political recognition
of bodies and without humans (including perpetrators) bearing witness to violence, the
myth of sacrifice appears as a cultural glitch.

Conclusion
I argued that military privatization is an effect of the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism. In this context, state and non-state actors have competing biopolitical investment in
the meaning and application of sacrificial violence. Liberal governments aim to control
the communicative potentiality of sacrificial rhetoric. Part of the states strategy for managing sacrifice is to privatize it and move the effects of the deaths of soldiers into the
domain of the private family, thereby neutralizing them by placing it within a gendered
framework of mourning (Butler, 2006; Taussig-Rubbo, 2009: 86). The relationship
between citizenship and sacrifice has weakened in light flexible citizenship, and the private contracting of soldiery captures a shift relative to the sacrificial logic that is bound
up with the archetype of the soldier-citizen. If it is the case that private contractors cannot
make any claims to sacrifice, then we must ask why the state might deem the end of
sacrifice beneficial in strategizing future, corporatized drone wars. If state-soldiers place
an increasing burden on the state, because of the political toll of unpopular wars, or the
financial costs of lifetime support for veterans in an era of austerity, the inclusion of

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private contractors and high technology provides respite for the state. The end of sacrifice will make the death of soldiers profane, thereby reconfiguring the relations between
soldiers, citizens and states (Baggiarini, 2014).
To sell war to mass audiences, the drawing of a fundamental distinction between us
and them is required. National identity fuels this distinction giving the dichotomous
rendering racial and ethnic symbolic content. But the corporatization and privatization of
war not only allow the disavowal of sacrifice but also make only precarious and timesensitive space for sacrificial discourse. When states use sacrificial rhetoric, it risks being
regarded as a thinly veiled attempt to resuscitate national identity and thus appears, at
time, as anachronistic. As US society becomes even more unequal, making legitimate
war will become more fraught and thus possibly even more remote, clandestine, discrete
and un-human: the unbearable humanness of drone wars (Shaw and Akhter, 2012).
In contrast to Girard, I have suggested that the content of sacrifice, especially in relation to globalized wars, is deeply political and cannot be theorized universally but rather
only in particular contexts. This essay has illuminated how postmodern war suggests not
the end of sacrifice per se, but a clear trajectory showing the increasing unevenness of
sacrifice as war becomes more antisocial. The imagery of sacrifice as being tied to
blood, transcendence and moral achievement through the negative destruction of the
body and ultimately death seems only to gain content in moments when a nationalistic
and militarized consciousness is in need of regeneration. In practice, there is a clear
avoidance of this kind of sacrificial performance. Photographs of dead soldiers no longer
circulate for public consumption or oversight. Governments shy away from politicizing
or calling attention to the deaths of soldiers, and the deaths of private military contractors
are not considered sacrifices. In the spirit of Foucault, power no longer recognizes death.
North Waziristan is one exceptional site of governance among several where violence
(as a broad continuum of acts) is externalized onto the bodies of racialized others in the
form of extrajudicial killings. Here, the rules of conventional warfare do not apply. The
victims make up a community of scapegoats in the negotiations between the United
States and its allies or enemies in the Global War on Terror. Drone technology is hailed
as the final solution, that which will save us from (or at least sanitize) our collective sins.
Drones are thus Barak Obamas solution to the spatial, political and economic limitations
and unworkability of detention centres like Guantanamo Guantanamo on wings. Girard
and Gregory (1979) write of a scene of violence, wherein two men come to blows, blood
is spilt, both men are thus rendered impure (p. 28). Drones, as a high-tech expression of
pre-modern violence, enable the purity of nineteenth century imperial civilizing missions to continue, well into the present.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Professors Elisabetta Brighi and Antonio Cerella, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable criticisms.

Notes
1. Private contractors are key partners in the Central Intelligence Agencys (CIA) counterterrorism and drone assassination programme. The company formerly known as Blackwater is

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active in the assembling and loading of Hellfire missiles onto Predator aircraft, work formerly
done by CIA personnel. Benjamin (2013) quotes Scahill claiming, it is Blackwater that runs
the program for both the CIA and JSOC because
contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just dont care. If theres one person theyre going after and theres
thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. Thats the mentality. (pp.
6364)
2. A 2010 report by Mission: Readiness, an organization of retired, senior military experts,
warned that childhood and adult obesity might soon pose a threat to national security. It
claims that 75% of young Americans are unable to join the military because of weight, educational inadequacies, asthma, criminal records and drug abuse (Mission: Readiness, 2010).
3. The Department of Defences (DOD) report, entitled Unmanned Systems Integrated
Roadmap FY20132038 claims that research and development in automation are advancing from a state of automatic systems requiring human control toward a state of autonomous
systems able to make decisions and react without human interaction (p. 29).
4. See the Recommendations and Report of the Task Force on US Drone Policy.

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Author biography
Bianca Baggiarini is a PhD Candidate in sociology at York University, Toronto. Her research interests include postmodern feminist and citizenship theory, genealogies of violence and privatizations therein, and drones. She has previously published in St. Anthonys International Review and
Advances in Gender Research and has a forthcoming chapter in a book on gender and private
security, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Maya Eichler.

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