Paul Lushenko and Sarah Kreps
Following 9/11, the United States ushered in the use of armed unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to kill terrorists. Scholars have studied the United States’ use of drones for two decades. Indeed, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, New America Foundation, and other watchdog groups aggregate data for U.S. strikes. Yet aside from UK Drones and the Yemen Data Project, few databases exist to account for other countries’ adoption of drones.
To bridge this information gap, we compared how varying a country’s specific use and constraint of drones shapes the public’s perceptions of legitimacy, which scholars suggest can influence political officials’ use of force abroad. We focused on the United States as a benchmark and included France, which has conducted dozens of strikes in Africa — namely, Mali — since December 2021 alone. French citizens, then, provide a convenient litmus test for non-U.S. perceptions on the use of drones.
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