Book review: Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Author | Marcel LaFlamme |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616659809 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
659809TCR0010.1177/1362480616659809Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews
book-review2016
Theoretical Criminology
2016, Vol. 20(4) 519 –528
Book reviews
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480616659809
tcr.sagepub.com
Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, translated by Janet Lloyd, The New Press:
New York, 2015; 9781595589750, $26.95 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Marcel LaFlamme, Rice University, USA
“The police is a hunting institution,” Grégoire Chamayou contends in his history of the
manhunt (2012: 89). Entrusted by the state with tracking and capturing those who violate
its laws, the police adopt rational, scientific practices for pursuing their quarry, even as
they cannot entirely escape their association with the criminals they aim to understand.
In his latest book, Chamayou argues that the global war on terror has given rise to a novel
form of state violence, one that marries police tactics with those of the military to stage
a manhunt that knows no borders and that prefers killing to capture. For Chamayou, this
unholy marriage flouts the existing law of war and obscures the political roots of conflict
by imposing a logic of criminality. “Within the categories of policing,” he writes, “political
analysis dissolves” (p. 69).
Scholars like Mark Neocleous (2014: 587) have questioned the novelty of this con-
juncture, tracing the use of military technologies back to their use in colonial policing
and arguing for “a critical theory of state power that assumes that war and police are
always already together”. But in Theory of the Drone, Chamayou offers a materialist
analysis of the unmanned aircraft as the technology that makes the militarized manhunt
possible. By turning piloting into shiftwork, he argues, drones afford the possibility of
persistent aerial surveillance which, when fused with other sources of data, can create an
archive of movements or establish a generalized pattern of life....
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