Forensic architecture

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Derek Gregory

Both Stuart Elden and I have drawn attention to Eyal Weizman‘s Forensic Architecture project – sketched in outline in his The least of all possible evils and the subject of his Society & Space lecture – but for those who want more…

Eyal Weizman (L) and Steve Graham (R) in the occupied West Bank [Derek Gregory]

Michael Schapira and Carla Hung interview Eyal in “Thinking the Present” at Full Stop. Here’s an extract where Eyal summarises his project:

‘Forensic Architecture is grounded in both field-work and forum-work; fields are the sites of investigation and analysis and forums the political spaces in which analysis is presented and contested. Each of theses sites presents a host of architectural and political problems.

In fields, lets say starting with Territories, I attempted to engage a kind of “archeology” of present conditions as they could be read, or misread, in architecture. This archeology is not always undertaken by direct contact with the materiality under analysis, but with images of it. The spaces that we debate, analyze, or make claims on behalf of, are very often media products. Similarly, drawing a map includes synthesizing satellite and aerial images as well as images from the ground. Some images are created by optics and some by different sensors that register spectrums beyond the visible. One needs sensors to read sensors.

So this is a kind of archaeology of spaces as they are captured in these different forms of capture and registration. You read details, speckles, pixels and patterns, connect them to larger forces, or at least you understand the impossibility of doing so, often noting paradoxes and misrepresentations. We have done this very close reading of aerial images of colonies in the West Bank, we have read almost all elements from architectural through infrastructural archaeological to horticultural ones visible in these images as a set of tools in a battlefield.

Then there is the forum: a site of interpretation, verification, argumentation and decision. International courtrooms, tribunals, and human rights councils are of course the most obvious sites of contemporary forensics. But there are other political and professional forums.

Each forum is different. The third component of forensics, beyond the architectural and aesthetic, is what you need in order to stand between that “thing” and the forum: an “interpreter.” In ancient Rome it would be the orator; in our days it is perhaps the scientist, or the architect, or the geographer — the “expert witness” that translates from the language of space to the language of the forum. This definition of forensics might help expand the meaning of the term from the legal context to all sorts of others. Politics, as it is undertaken, around the problems of space and its interpretations, is a “forensic politics” as far I understand it.

Each of the multiple political and legal forums in use today — professional, scientific, parliamentary or legal — operates by a different set of protocols of representation and debate. They each have another frame of analysis. Each embodies dominant political forces and ideologies — that is to say that each instrumentalizes forensics as a part of a different ideological structure. In the turbulence of a changing world, there are also informal, subversive and ad-hoc and crisis forms of gathering: pop-up assemblies of protest and revolt in which the debate of financial, architectural (the housing or mortgage crisis), and geopolitical issues are often articulated.

Forensic architecture should thus be understood not only as dealing with the interpretation of past events as they register in spatial products, but about the construction of new forums. It is both an act of claim-making on the bases of spatial research and potentially an act of forum-building.’

Eyal edited a special section of Cabinet magazine (#43) on “Forensics”, and there’s an early lecture (May 2010) on ‘Forensic Architecture’ here and an image-rich conversation with Open Democracy’s wonderful Rosemary Belcher on ‘Forensic Architecture and the speech of things’ here.

There is also a truly excellent website for the project, which is hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London within the Department of Visual Cultures.

Highlights for me include:

under Investigations, Forensic Oceanography (probing the deaths of more than 1500 people fleeing Libya across the Mediterranean in 2011, including a downloadable report), a report on the effects of airborne White Phosphorus munitions in densely populated urban areas like Gaza, and a challenging (I imagine preliminary) commentary on ways of recording and investigating deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas:

‘The near complete prohibition upon carrying recording equipment into this region of Pakistan, coupled with the non-existence of local maps has made the task of locating and representing the sites and consequences of drone attacks extremely difficult. This inability to produce corroborating evidence has, in turn, severely hampered the pursuit of legal claims. Forensic Architecture is working with human rights and legal justice organisations in both Pakistan and the UK to develop an alternate mapping system that can meet the unique challenges posed by the dilemma of creating accurate maps without relying upon technologies of exact recording, but only upon haptic techniques of observation and recall, or what has been called “transparency cameras”. This system needs to be matched, in turn, with a post-production methodology of transcription and interpretation of recollection data. Survivors and witnesses of drone strikes are typically brought to safe zones outside of Northwest Pakistan in cities such as Islamabad, where they are interviewed by legal staff and their stories cross-referenced and collated.’

under Explorations, a sketch of what the project calls ‘Video-to-space analysis’ derived from the recognition that ‘remote controlled vision machines (satellites and drones) and the handheld devices of citizen journalists working independently of news-desks marks a shift in the ways in which human rights violations will increasingly be charted and mapped and the ways in which the spaces of conflict themselves will increasingly become known or offer up information.’

under Presentations, a record of a seminar in March 2012 with Bruno Latour who comments on a series of investigations (Paulo Tavares, “The Earth-Political”; Nabil Ahmed, “Radical Meteorology'”; John Palmesino, “North – The architecture of a territory open on all sides”): ‘Forensics is the production of public proof’ (with some interesting asides about ‘geopolitics’ and what he calls ‘politics of the earth’), and a tantalising glimpse of a conference presentation by Susan Schuppli under the title ‘War Dialling: Image Transmissions from Saigon’, which discussed the modalities through which, on June 8 1972, ‘a portable picture transmitter, took 14 minutes to relay a series of audio signals from Saigon to Tokyo and then onwards to the US where they were reassembled into a B&W image to reveal a young Vietnamese girl [Kim Phúc] running out of the inferno of an erroneous napalm attack.’

These reflect my own preoccupations, but there’s lots more – it’s a treasure trove of imagination and insight. Oh – and a reading list.

Drones and military violence: Readings and screenings

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Derek Gregory

I’m working on a presentation that will turn into a long essay that may turn into a short book – one day I will learn how to write in brief! – and I thought I’d share some of the bibliographic resources I’ve been using. This is not an exhaustive list, needless to say, but I hope it will be a useful springboard for others too; I’ve tried to indicate the range of journals and sources available, and some of the key areas of contention and concern. Much of the debate on drones has focused on the supposedly covert US air campaign directed by the CIA in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which plainly raises vital issues of ethics, law and accountability that can also be extended to parallel campaigns in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. But – as I’ve tried to show in my own work – this should not allow the overt air war in Afghanistan to escape scrutiny. Here the operational questions often become more complex because these platforms are integrated into extended networks in which surveillance is conducted by remote operators but the strikes may be executed by conventional aircraft: the geography of the kill-chain is crucial. For this, I’ve been drawing on a series of USAF publications and presentations.

But the focus on the US distract should not distract attention from the rapid expansion of remote capabilities by other militaries, including (as the listing below indicates) Israel, where the IDF developed a series of protocols for extra-judicial killing (assassination) long before the USAF or the CIA.

There are also important historical precedents to consider: the use of air power in colonial counterinsurgency operations, particularly by the British in Mesopotamia (Iraq), the North West frontier of India and Palestine, and the emergence of key elements of today’s remote operations in the Second World War and, in particular, during the US air wars over Indochina. For the former, the work of David Omissi, Air power and colonial control: the Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (1990), Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: the Great war and the cultural foundations of Britain’s covert empire in the Middle east (2008) [see also her essay on ‘The defense of inhumanity: air control in Iraq and the British idea of Arabia’, American historical review 11 (2006)], and Andrew Roe, Waging war in Waziristan (2010) are key sources. For the latter, see my ‘Lines of descent’ (DOWNLOADS tab).

There are some significant gaps in the listings that follow. There is already a book that gives a pilot’s view of these remote missions, Matt Martin‘s Predator, and there’s no shortage of media interviews with (American) crewmembers, usually based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. But, with rare exceptions, the media have shown little interest in documenting the victims of drone strikes, apart from (contentious) estimates of their numbers and claims of ‘high-value targets’ being killed. For preliminary assessments of the distortions of media coverage, see Timothy Jones, Penelope Sheets and Charles Rowling, ‘Differential news framing of unmanned aerial drones: efficient and effective or illegal and inhumane’ (APSA, 2011: available via ssrn.com) and Tara McKelvey in the Columbia Journalism Review (listed below).

There are virtually no ethnographies of life (and death) under the drones: Shahzad Bashir and Robert Crews have recently curated some interesting essays on daily life in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands, but the title Under the drones (Harvard University Press, 2012) is opportunistic. The editors write of their desire to ‘illuminate aspects of the rich social and cultural worlds that are opaque to cameras mounted on drones flying many thousands of feet above this terrain’ – an admirable project – but not a single contributor illuminates the impact of the drone wars on those worlds. There are some sharp questions about the missing ethnographies of death – unlike the surgical dissections of sovereignty – in Anthony Allen Marcus, Ananthakrishnan Aiyer and Kirk Dombroiwski, ‘Droning on: the rise of the machines’, Dialectical Anthropology 36 (2012) 105. Some of the best reportage on the effects of drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan comes from CIVIC, but its most recent report on Civilian Harm and Conflict in Northwest Pakistan was published in October 2010 (this also documents the suffering caused by Pakistan military action), though there are some updates on its blog (listed below).

Noor Behram has provided an unforgettable photographic record of the aftermath of drone attacks in the same area (200 images from 27 sites) that formed a centrepiece for the Gaming Waziristan exhibition staged in the UK, the US and Pakistan in 2011: for online galleries see here and here. And other visual/video artists have not been slow to reflect on these new modalities of killing: see, for example, John Butler’s The ethical governor (available on YouTube and vimeo) or Omer Fast’s Five thousand feet is the best (in which a white American family is killed in a Predator attack).

In addition, Jordan Crandall has a performance work, ‘philosophical theatre’, called Unmanned at Eyebeam that I’d love to see…. It involves the crash of a drone in a suburban backyard in the American southwest.

If you think I’ve missed something that ought to be included, please let me know.

Note: Most militaries disdain the term ‘drones’ since these aircraft are piloted, and prefer ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ (UAVs) or ‘Unmanned Aerial Systems’ (UAS) or ‘Remotely Piloted Aircraft’ (RPAs). Most of the listings below are concerned with the use of these platforms to conduct air strikes; smaller drones are also deployed by ground forces for surveillance and no doubt they too will soon be able to carry out strikes.

Books

Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, Terminator planet: the first history of drone warfare 2001-2050 (Dispatch Books, 2012) – a sharp analysis of drone wars, past, present and future, culled from the regular reports of the TomDispatch principals; also available as an e-book

Medea Benjamin, Drone warfare: killing by remote control (OR Books, 2012)– a passionate critique from the co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange that also details the rise of activist campaigns against drone warfare; also available as an e-book

Matt Martin and Charles Sasser, Predator: the remote-control air war over Iraq and Afghanistan: a pilot’s story (Zenith Press, 2010) – most of the commentary on drones is concerned with covert campaigns waged by the CIA (with JSOC), but this is an account of USAF operations that also deserve close scrutiny….

Peter Singer, Wired for war: the robotics revolution and conflict in the 21^st century (Penguin, 2009) – about much more than drones, but Singer has a series of perceptive observations about them scattered throughout the book.

Websites and blogs

Drone Wars UK – focuses on the British use of drones, but also includes wider commentary and information and a useful Drone Wars briefing pdf by Chris Cole [see also Convenient Killing below]

Drones Watch – advertised as ‘a coalition campaign to monitor and regulate drone use’

Understanding Empire – ‘dispatches on the drone wars: the state of our unmanned planet’ – a brilliant news aggregating source with commentary too

Our bombs – created by Neil Halloran ‘a website and documentary film that looks at the human cost and strategic implications of U.S. air strikes’, including an ‘air strike tracker’ from 9/11 through to January 2011

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism – a not-for-profit organisation based at City University, London, that provides (among many other things) a stream of indispensable reports, investigations and critical commentary on ‘the covert war on terror’ in Pakistan, Somali and Yemen

The #drones daily – what it says: news and commentary updated daily

The Long War Journal – Bill Roggio’s site, politically distant from the sources above, but providess useful charts, maps and reports on covert US air campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen

New America Foundation – the Year of the Drone, mapping and reporting on US drone strikes in Pakistan 2004-2012 (and continuing): but its estimates of civilian casualties (in particular) have been sharply criticised by the BIJ here.

Also on Pakistan, Amnesty International has ‘Eyes on Pakistan’, focusing on human rights abuses in FATA, including maps of drone strikes, through 2009, while CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict) has a field blog that provides reports on war victims in Pakistan (and elsewhere)

Articles and essays

Although (too) many of these are behind a pay-wall, I’ve tried to list publically accessible versions wherever possible. Please don’t assume that inclusion means agreement!

M.W. Aslam, ‘A critical evaluation of American drone strikes in Pakistan: legality, legitimacy and prudence’, Critical studies on terrorism 4 (2011) 313-29

Chris Cole, Mary Dobbing and Amy Hailwood, Convenient killing: Armed drones and the ‘Playstation’ mentality available here

Jordan Crandall, ‘Ontologies of the wayward drone: a salvage operation’, Theory beyond the codes (2011)available here

Aliya Robin Deri, ‘“Costless war”: American and Pakistani reactions to the US drone war’, Intersect 5 (2011) available here

Christian Enemark, ‘Drones over Pakistan: secrecy, ethics and counterinsurgency’, Asian Security 7 (3) (2011) 218-37

Keith Feldman, ‘Empire’s verticality: the Af/Pak frontier, visual culture and racialization from above’, Comparative American Studies 9 (4) (2011) 325-41

Jenny Garand, ‘Robotic warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan’ (December 2010) (Medical Association for the Prevention of War, Australia) available here

Derek Gregory, ‘From a view to a kill: Drones and late modern war’, Theory, culture and society 28 (7-8) (2011) 188-215 (see DOWNLOADS tab)

Derek Gregory, ‘The everywhere war’, Geographical Journal 177 (2011) 238-250

Derek Gregory, ‘Lines of descent’, Open Democracy, 2011 (see DOWNLOADS tab)

Leila Hudson, Colin Owens, Matt Flannes, ‘Drone warfare: blowback from the New American way of war’, Middle East Policy 18 92011) 122-132

Human Rights Watch, Precisely wrong: Gaza civilians killed by Israeli drone-launched missiles (2009)

David Jaeger and Zahra Siddique, ‘Are drone strikes effective in Afghanistan and Pakistan? On the dynamics of violence between the United States and the Taliban’ (Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, Discussion Paper 6262, December 2011) (available via ssrn.com)

Jake Kosek, ‘Ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee’, Cultural anthropology 25 (4) (2010) 650-78 (see pp. 666 on)

Katrina Laygo, Thomas Gillespie, Noel Rayo and Erin Garcia, ‘Drone bombings in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas: Remote sensing applications for security monitoring’, Journal of Geographic Information Systems 4 (2012) 136-41

Jane Mayer, ‘The Predator War’, New Yorker, 26 October 2009

Tara McKelvey, ‘Covering Obama’s Secret War’, Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2011

Avery Plaw, Matthew Fricker and Brian Glyn Williams, ‘Practice makes Perfect? The changing civilian toll of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’, Perspectives on terrorism 5 (506) (December 2011)

Lambèr Royakkers, Rinie van Est, ‘The cubicle warrior: the marionette of digitalized warfare’, Ethics & Information Technology 12 (2010) 289-96

Noel Sharkey, ‘The automation and proliferation of military drones and the protection of civilians’, Law, innovation and technology 3 (2) (2011) 229-240

Ian Shaw, The spatial politics of drone warfare (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Arizona, 2011) available via the university’s open repository here

Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter, ‘The unbearable humanness of drone warfare in FATA, Pakistan’, Antipode (2011) [Early View]

Jeffrey Sluka, ‘Death from above: UAVs and losing hearts and minds’, Military Review (May-June 2011) 70-76

Bradley Strawser, ‘Moral Predators: the duty to employ uninhabited aerial vehicles’, Journal of military ethics 9 (2010) 342-68

Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan, ‘Surveillance and violence from afar: the politics of drones and liminal security-scapes’, Theoretical criminology 15 (2011) 239-54

Alison Williams, ‘Enabling persistent presence? Performing the embodied geopolitics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle assemblage’, Political Geography [early view] doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.08.002

Brian Glyn Williams, ‘The CIA’s covert Predator drone war in Pakistan, 2004-20010: the history of an assassination campaign’, Studies in conflict and terrorism 3 (2010) 871-92

There is also a rapidly developing literature on international law, lawfare and targeted killing that integrates the use of drones into its discussions:

Philip Alston, ‘The CIA and targeted killings beyond borders’, New York University School of Law Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series, Working Paper 11-64 (2011)

Kenneth Anderson, ‘Targeted killing and drone warfare: how we came to debate whether there is a “legal geography of war”, American University, Washington College of aw Research Paper 2011-16 (available via ssrn.com) [there are multiple papers by Anderson on these issues, usually available via ssrn.com]

Jack Beard, ‘Law and war in the virtual era’, American Journal of International Law 103 (2009) 409-445

O. Ben-Naftali, and Karen Michaeli, ‘We must not make a scarecrow of the law: a legal analysis of the Israeli policy of targeted killings’, Cornell International Law Journal 36 (2003)

Laurie Blank, ‘After “Top Gun”: How drone strikes impact the law of war’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law (2012)

Amitai Etzioni, ‘Unmanned Aircraft Systems: the legal and moral case’, Joint Forces Quarterly (57) (2010)

Neve Gordon, ‘Rationalising extra-judicial executions: the Israeli press and the legitimisation of abuse’, International journal of human rights 8 (2004) 305-24

Kyle Grayson, ‘Six theses on targeted killing’, Politics 32 (2012) 120-8

Kyle Grayson, ‘The ambivalence of assassination: biopolitics, culture and political violence’, Security dialogue 43 (2012) 25-41

Lisa Hajjar, ‘Lawfare and targeted killing: developments in the Israeli and US contexts’, Jadaliyya , 15 January 2012 here.

Chris Jenks, ‘Law from above: unmanned aerial systems, use of force and the law of armed conflict’, North Dakota Law Review 85 (2009) 649-671 [available via ssrn.com]

Sarah Kreps and John Kaag, ‘The use of unmanned aerial vehicles in combat: a legal and ethical analysis’, Polity (2012) 1-1=26 [early view]

Michael Lewis, ‘Drones and the boundaries of the battlefield’, Texas International Law Journal (2012) [available via via ssrn.com]

Nils Melzer, Targeted Killing in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘Seductive drones: learning from a decade of lethal operations’, Journal of law, information and science [special edition: The law of unmanned vehicles] [available via ssrn.com]

Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘The international law of drones’, American Society of International Law Insights 14 (36) November 2010

Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘Unlawful killing with combat drones: a case study of Pakistan, 2004-9), Notre Dame Law School, Legal Studies Research paper 09-43 (2009) available via ssrn.com

Andrew Orr, ‘Unmanned, unprecedented and unresolved: the status of American drone strikes in Pakistan under international law’, Cornell International Law Journal 44 (2011) 729-752 [available here ]

Joseph Pugliese, ‘Prosthetics of law and the anomic violence of drones’, Griffith Law Review 20 (2011) 931-61

Noel Sharkey, ‘Saying “No!” to lethal autonomous targeting’, Journal of military ethics 9 (2010) 369-83

Ryan Vogel, ‘Drone warfare and the law of armed conflict’, available via ssrn.com

Eyal Weizman, ‘Thanato-tactics’, in in Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi (eds), The power of inclusive exclusion: anatomy of Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories (New York: Zone Books, 2009) pp. 543-573 and in Patricia Clough and Craig Willse (eds) Beyond biopolitics: essays on the government of life and death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011)

Start-up

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Derek Gregory

It’s midsummer and I’m juggling several projects – finishing a new book, “The everywhere war”, and continuing a research program on the cultural and political histories/geographies of bombing (more on both later) – but I’ve been persuaded by several of my friends (and more on them later too!) that a blog isn’t a distraction but a helpful way of sorting out ideas and opening up conversations. We’ll see…. and since the question of seeing, of the visual or scopic regimes of (late) modern war, casts a long shadow over both my current projects, it seems appropriate to begin with a link to a clutch of videos on drone wars produced by Alternate Focus.