Toni Čerkez
In 2023, Banksy, the most famous unknown artist in the world, set up a new mural in South London (Banksy 2023). Painted over a traffic stop sign, the mural depicts three military unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones (presumably, Reaper class). As in most of Banksy’s art, the message is clear: Stop the war. What is striking about the artwork is not that it was a Banksy or even that it was stolen merely hours after it had been put up. Instead, it calls our attention to an unusual subject that has become normalized (Pong 2022) but is not really discussed in public: military and surveillance drones.
The issue of drone warfare has had academics and policymakers of various kins preoccupied for over two decades now (Enemark 2021). Drones are both hailed for their ability to execute targeted ‘precision’ or ‘surgical’ attacks, thus ostensibly minimizing unnecessary deaths in conflict. Others argue that this raises ethical issues. Namely, precision attacks are rarely, if ever, precise (Benjamin 2013, Pitch Interactive 2022). Furthermore, many question if it is legal or ethical to kill using drones (including important campaigns and NGOs such as Stop Killer Robots and Reprieve), largely because they are used outside of sovereign territories to execute extrajudicial kills. Put simply, extrajudicial kills are those where there was no due process involved in sentencing the target. However, we see increasing numbers of drones on our streets, in the air around us and in military deployments. What does all that mean for the ordinary citizen?
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