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doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12113452pmid: N/A
This special section grows out of “Technologies of Power,” a virtual series convened between fall 2021 and spring 2022, where twenty-one scholars, artists, writers, and activists gathered to examine the entanglements of empire, technology, and violence across the longue durée of the global “war on terror.” We interrogate how technologies—from maps, censuses, and drones to smartphones, platform governance, biometrics, and AI—mediate governance, surveillance, and subjectivity, embedding themselves within infrastructures of domination while generating new forms of racialized, precarious, and disposable life. Contributors foreground the afterlives of colonial violence as they persist in digital enclosures, juridical regimes, and surveillance systems. Palestine, in particular, emerges as a critical field of refraction, revealing how military technologies tested there reverberate globally. Spanning geographies across South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, this section contributes to a technology and data studies of war that deliberately recenters analysis away from the United States and Europe, reframing technologies of power through relationality, resistance, and the lived experiences of those targeted by digital war. These essays underscore how technologies are artifacts of fertile empires—repurposed, defied, and contested by the dispossessed—offering an urgent call to rethink technology, power, and critique amid persistent infrastructures of war and authoritarian resurgence.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12113500pmid: N/A
This essay scrutinizes the visual configurations that continue to shape critical understandings of Africa and its relationship to war and empire in the twenty-first century. It explores how maps of US military bases simultaneously enable and foreclose critical analysis, reproducing a lingering fascination and preoccupation with US technological and military power. Against theorizations of empire that privilege the spectacular, the omnipotent, and the overtly militaristic, the essay argues that AFRICOM's network of military bases is only one aspect of a much wider set of power formations that intimately shape the lifeworlds of people across the continent. The essay draws on the works of feminist scholars of war, empire, and geopolitics to call for a situated epistemological and methodological approach—one that exceeds the visuality of the military base and that is more attuned to the sensorial, embodied knowledge formations of populations that have been caught in the crosshairs.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12113476pmid: N/A
This essay examines three pivotal instances where late Ottoman maps served as “gimmicks of war.” Forgotten and reactivated, these visual artifacts gained renewed political significance years after their production on battlefields. The analysis focuses on three maps: an 1878 map of Eastern Anatolia delineating six Armenian provinces, a wall map of Palestine featured at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, and a map of Lebanon that facilitated the proclamation of the state of Greater Lebanon in 1920. Each instance reveals a shared tactic: staging the authority of old maps to underpin territorial claims in the present. Though tied to specific historical moments, these maps weren't just traces of a bygone moment; they embodied an ongoing relationship with an aesthetic form, functioning as gimmicks that transcended their original contexts while retaining the empirical authority they had conveyed. The actors at play did not passively deploy these maps as fixed, inert objects. Instead, they breathed new political life into relational and increasingly commodified artifacts with a unique affective intensity, mobilizing them to inscribe new facts on the ground. As gimmicks, these artifacts constituted a temporally sensitive form that surfaced at decisive moments, staged on negotiation tables and the walls of political assemblies.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12113388pmid: N/A
In 2020, Azerbaijan's army forcibly reincorporated most of the majority-Armenian breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Drones sped up the tempo, and commenters credited them as the “magic bullet” that delivered a swift victory. The drones dominated Karabakh's airspace as well as its airtime. Peeling away the techno-spectacle reveals how drones too form overlapping alliances and actor-networks. Connecting drones with pipelines, airplanes, oil, and officials in Tel Aviv, Baku, and Washington, DC, complicates the ethnic conflict narrative by showing how the United States and its regional collaborator, Israel, were at least as consequential in this conflict as Azerbaijan's Turkish “ethnic brethren.” Another alliance—with operators, artificial intelligence, and advanced munitions—demonstrates how drones, much like their human collaborators, arrived in Karabakh with experiences from elsewhere across Asia and Africa. Human and machine then applied their experiences and data from Karabakh to places like Ukraine and Gaza. Locating Karabakh within these developments on the human-machine learning curve shows how drones did more than help Azerbaijani forces displace Armenian communities from the place they call Artsakh; they also continue to displace human fingers from the triggers of increasingly autonomous weapons.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12113420pmid: N/A
Beginning with a material and conceptual entry from the global South, this article theorizes drone warfare as an instance of what the author terms distributed empire. The US imperial formation has generally been reticent to establish formal colonies even as it projects power. This political logic has found sociotechnical form in its key technology—the weaponized drone. Media and US publics today are awash in techno-fetishist propaganda that touts the US ability to conduct “remote” war and “over-the-horizon” warfare. In this context, distributed empire is a relational account that draws attention to the assemblages that constitute weaponized drones and foregrounds the situatedness of drones within specific geopolitical and sociotechnical environments. Attending to distributed empire yields a decolonizing orientation toward the study of the drone war, one that decenters a global North–centric account of such violence and attends to the rest of us—the majority world—as entangled agents in our own right.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12113412pmid: N/A
This essay examines how Turkic Muslims in Northwest China have attempted to use a US consumerist technology regime to circumvent aspects of Chinese state contractor surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the past decade in and across the border from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, it considers the utility of iPhone consumer privacy protections as an Uyghur uptake of something it calls the “imperial in-between”—a practice of using imperial sovereignty of one digital regime against another as a tactic of protection. This framing juxtaposes the imperial ambition of global Apple data control, as an outgrowth of US capitalist hegemony, with the colonial data harvesting of the People's War on Terror in China and the talismanic frisson that emerges in this tension. By opening up a critical examination of imperial multipolarity, the essay invites an understanding of the way targets of contemporary imperialism endure even as they are immobilized by it. Such a mode of becoming, it argues, can turn a fetish object into an anti-colonial talisman—an object that enables a powerful protection of relationships and the self.
doi: 10.1215/1089201x-12113436pmid: N/A
This essay for the “Technologies of War” special section of CSSAAME reflects on the relationship between tech worlds and Dalit activism. The author deploys the idea of the “pivot” and the “swerve” to undertake a two-part analysis. First, the essay describes the use of the tech pivot to describe a movement to produce value that has been a particular, and particularly lauded, feature of data-centric entrepreneurial cultures, namely, the ability to move from one project to the next and to experiment with different modalities of data. These tech pivots allow tech companies to experiment on populations even while they also allow them to evade responsibility for the violence done by means of these experiments. Second, the essay discusses through lavani, a dance form practiced by Dalit women in Maharashtra and discussed in the work of Shailaja Paik, another kind of pivot. This pivot allows Dalit activists to dance toward and away from tech companies in an attempt to change tech company policy. The author argues that while the pivot and the swerve are deployed by theorists such as Gilles Deleuze to open up different modes of understanding history, the pivot also responds to a much longer set of Dalit activist tactics.
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