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SUMMARY:Clare Hall Tanner Lectures 2016: Reach from the sky: aerial violen
 ce and the everywhere war - Professor Derek Gregory\, Peter Wall Distingui
 shed Professor and Professor of Geography at the University of British Col
 umbia
DTSTART:20160113T170000Z
DTEND:20160113T190000Z
UID:TALK62894@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Amanda Barclay
DESCRIPTION:Bombing is back in the headlines – but then it never really 
 left. Over the last hundred years\, bombing has become the preferred milit
 ary option for many states\, but it has supposedly been radically transfor
 med over the last decade or so by the introduction of unmanned aerial vehi
 cles (‘drones’). Their use has attracted a lively debate\, inside and 
 outside military circles\, but this has rarely situated Predators and Reap
 ers within the longer history of aerial violence or the larger matrix of m
 ilitary violence within which they have been deployed.\n\nThese lectures s
 eek to fill both those gaps by addressing two fundamental questions. First
 \, how have people – both those who carry out air strikes and those publ
 ics who endorse them – been persuaded of the legitimacy of aerial violen
 ce? Four responses run like red threads throughout the long history of bom
 bing from the air: bombing saves lives\, especially when compared with ‘
 boots on the ground’\; bombing is a virile\, thoroughly masculine affair
 \; bombing is scientific\, objective and precise\, articulated through an 
 extended ‘kill-chain’ that ensures efficiency and disperses responsibi
 lity\; and bombing is legal and therefore legitimate. These are all rhetor
 ical devices that have certainly been transformed by today’s drone wars\
 , but all four are vulnerable to critical discussion.\n\nSecond\, what spa
 ces have been produced through the changing ‘destruction line’ that ha
 s animated military targeting? Here there are two issues of crucial import
 ance. One concerns the locus of targeting: in particular the emergence of 
 ‘wars without fronts’ and the extension of military violence beyond an
 y demarcated battlefield\, and the subsequent ‘individuation of warfare
 ’ in which targets have contracted from areas and boxes to groups and in
 dividuals. The other concerns the grammar of\ntargeting: in particular the
  transformation of intelligence\, surveillance and reconnaissance and the 
 incorporation of digital signatures into the activation of the killing fie
 lds.\n\nAnswers to these questions have much to tell us about the changing
  contours of later modern war and its adjudication of what is to count as 
 a ‘grievable life’ in the twenty-first century.\n
LOCATION:Robinson College Auditorium
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