Drone Programs: A Techno-Legal Machinery

With the kind participation of >Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi, Assistant Professor in International Law and Security at the University of Manchester, LLMs/MA Programme Director for Public International Law / International Law & Security.

Drone Programs: A Techno-Legal Machinery

Join us to delve into a story about how war, technology and the law interact and reshape one another in counterterrorism context. We will discuss how law helped institutionalize and normalize the use of drones, with far reaching consequences for the extension of war in time and space. We will examine drone programs as a network, embedded in a social and historical context, of interacting and interdependent factors including the contemporary technological capacities of drones.

Beyond drones and the techniques of governmentality they deploy through the bodies of individuals living under drones, this discussion an opportunity to reflect on and challenge great divides between society/technology, human/non-human, and strategy/law/technology.

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is an Assistant Professor in International Law and Security at the University of Manchester and the LLMs/MA Programme Director for Public International Law / International Law & Security.

Her book Drones and International Law: A Techno-Legal Machinery is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (early 2023). She is currently working on a second monograph entitled Governing Images: Digital Governance as Regulation of the Visible. Rebecca holds a PhD from the European University Institute and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Her work reflects on contemporary legal and security architecture, the policy choices underpinning it, as well as the techniques of governmentality it sustains. Her research also seeks to show that security practices are not only sites of transformation of the state and its traditional categories and techniques of governmentality, but also spaces to investigate and re-conceptualize law and law-making processes.

Joining via Zoom is also possible:

For receiving the link and further information on the Law&Tech Reading Group please get in touch with Assistant Professor Beatriz Botero Arcila (beatriz.boteroarcila@sciencespo.fr) and PhD candidate Marta Arisi (marta.arisi@sciencespo.fr).