Pioneered by the Bush and Obama administrations during the Global War on Terror as a form of remote war, the Trump administration has invested faith and financial backing into drone warfare as a pillar of its America First strategy: a way to institute war without foot soldiers for an empire without colonies. Beginning with a different material and conceptual entry point – Pakistan – this talk develops an ethnographic and archival account of a U.S. drone base located inside a Pakistani air force facility in the southern Pakistani city of Jacobabad. Through analysis of drone and militarism logistics that ran through this region during the "war on terror," the discussion will focus on the infrastructures, routes, and corridors necessary for drone warfare—with implications for the new age of small drones.
Alyssa Paylor (Ph.D. '25), postdoctoral research fellow, will host the discussion with Madiha Tahir, postdoctoral associate and assistant professor of American Studies at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Tahir is an interdisciplinary scholar of technology and war with interest and expertise in digital war, surveillance, militarism, and empire and technology studies. A former journalist, she is the director of "Wounds of Waziristan," a short documentary that tracks two drone survivors who reflect on the afterlife of bombardment.
This event is part of a lecture series led by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, in partnership with its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Working Group, all part of the Keough School of Global Affairs. The series focuses on U.S. imperialism and U.S. military and humanitarian involvement in the Middle East. It conducts a critical evaluation of U.S. policy in the Middle East and calls for a reassessment of the nature and function of a U.S. presence, and the implications posed for peacebuilding practitioners and contemporary global affairs scholarship.
Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.