Unearthing Banality in Remote Warfare, Unsettling the Law of Armed Conflict and Unmooring from Colonial Humanity

This dissertation interrogates the significance of remote weapons to existing modes of warfare and the potential futures of armed conflict based on trends in their use. Despite a clear upward trend in their use, growing evidence regarding persisting civilian casualties creates incongruity between narratives around the perceived efficiency and safety of these technologies in conflict. The dissertation will appraise the relationship of remote warfare to existing provisions of the law of armed conflict, with particular attention to current rules regarding the protection of civilians and non-combatants, concluding that remote weapons have engendered the banalization of evil in warfare. In presenting the ongoing damage and persecution that remote weapons levy against protected people living in target zones, this dissertation will articulate the impact of this harm on legal subjectivity and the capacity to assert the status of “legal subject” protected by humanitarian law. This analysis will draw on traditions of feminist and queer theory, poststructural Marxism and fugitive Black studies to present a “traumascape” of remote war. In order to meaningfully constitute humanity beyond abject suffering and destruction at the ends of remote war, this dissertation articulates a strategy for meaningful death, rooted in an understanding of thanatopolitics as a counter to biopolitical, colonial regulation of life. Ultimately, this dissertation calls for a breaking point in international law’s consideration of humanity and protection in regulating the conduct of hostilities, pushing for a version of the “human” and “protection” that is unmoored from the colonial, banal regimes of suffering as entrenched by remote warfare.