“This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision

Published date01 June 2022
Date01 June 2022
AuthorJ Marshall Beier
DOI10.1177/00108367211050274
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211050274
Cooperation and Conflict
2022, Vol. 57(2) 210 –225
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367211050274
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“This changes things”:
Children, targeting, and the
making of precision
J Marshall Beier
Abstract
Avoidance of civilian casualties increasingly affects the political calculus of legitimacy in armed
conflict. “Collateral damage” is a problem that can be managed through the material production
of precision, but it is also the case that precision is a problem managed through the cultural
production of collateral damage. Bearing decisively on popular perceptions of ethical conduct in
recourse to political violence, childhood is an important site of meaning-making in this process.
In pop culture, news dispatches, and social media, children, as quintessential innocents, figure
prominently where the dire human consequences of imprecision are depicted. Children thus
affect the practical “precision” of even the most advanced weapons, perhaps precluding a strike
for their presence, potentially coloring it with their corpses. But who count as children, how,
when, where, and why are not at all settled questions. Drawing insights from what the 2015 film,
Eye in the Sky, reveals about a key social technology of governance we have already internalized, I
explore how childhood is itself a terrain of engagement in the (un)making of precision.
Keywords
childhood, drones, legitimacy, noncombatants, precision, subjecthood
Introduction
Eye in the Sky, a 2015 film from director Gavin Hood in which a drone strike on sus-
pected members of the al-Shabaab militant group is hampered by the presence of a young
girl within the projected kill zone, offers an instructive (if incidental) glimpse into the
constitutive social terrains on which seemingly objective properties of some of the
world’s most advanced weapons systems are at least partially founded. Fundamentally
an exploration of the dilemmas posed in weighing utilitarian and deontological ethics,
the film has been analogized to the famous “trolley problem” (see, for example, Cole,
Corresponding author:
J Marshall Beier, Department of Political Science, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton,
ON L8S 4M4, Canada.
Email: mbeier@mcmaster.ca
1050274CAC0010.1177/00108367211050274Cooperation and ConflictBeier
research-article2021
Article
Beier 211
2016; Crockett, 2016; Robson, 2020), presenting a scenario in which the life of the child
comes to be measured against the lives of a far greater number of civilians expected to
be killed if the strike is not carried out immediately. Tension builds as a 9-year-old Alia
Mo’Allim (portrayed by Aisha Takow) unwittingly moves in and out of harm’s way
while the intended targets are seen fitting two would-be suicide bombers with explosive
vests and readying them to carry out a presumably immanent attack. Desperate to strike
their targets from a watchful MQ-9 Reaper drone loitering in the sky above, British mili-
tary officers struggle to attain an assessment of the risk to Alia low enough to satisfy
political masters whose authorization is needed in order to proceed. Ultimately, the
extent to which the child is within or without the weapon’s assessed lethal radius is what
makes the strike alternatingly viable and unviable.
As a contemporary take on a familiar thought experiment in applied ethics, Eye in the
Sky makes for compelling viewing. It reflects too on deeper ethical questions around war
waged from afar in its depiction of a real-time web of actions and deliberations among
powerful figures in the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, and China—all
safe, secure, and far from the site of the violence they will each participate in wielding—
before the unseen drone, remotely piloted from an air-conditioned trailer on the outskirts of
Las Vegas, Nevada, dispatches its Hellfire missiles with devastating effect. The child, Alia,
and the Reaper itself are key to these explorations, each giving important meaning to the
scenario without which its deeper reflections would not be possible. Left unexplored, how-
ever, is an aspect of the relationship between child and weapon that is revealing of impor-
tant indeterminacies in the seemingly objective properties of each. Key in this regard is
how the child, once subjectively constituted as such, becomes determinant of what is nor-
mally treated as though an objective property of the weapon: the degree of its precision. In
what follows, I draw on insights from the sociology of childhood in arguing that the very
ascription of “child” is a terrain of engagement whose outcome bears directly on the con-
stitution of precision as a social “fact” requisite to the perceived legitimacy of recourse to
political violence. And though this is not something addressed directly by Eye in the Sky,
the film is nevertheless revealing of it—perhaps less in the filmmakers’ intent than in the
social competencies we bring to viewing it—inasmuch as its narrative strategy relies on it.
When things change
Set in 2015, Eye in the Sky opens with scenes of everyday family life in the mostly Somali
Eastleigh suburb of Nairobi. A mother bakes bread in an outdoor oven on the grounds of a
modest home while her husband makes a toy hoop for their 9-year-old daughter, Alia. The
camera ascends to reveal danger beyond the walls that separate their small dusty yard from
the street outside, where armed militias patrol. These images are soon placed in wider con-
text by way of references to the 2015 massacre at Garissa University College and the deadly
2013 Westgate Shopping Mall attack, video from which is shown in connection with fiction-
alized news coverage of the al-Shabaab killing of a man who we learn had, per the storyline,
been working with British and Kenyan intelligence services to disrupt recruitment of radi-
calized Westerners. The scenes that follow introduce a cast of characters who, though spread
around the globe, are connected in real time as they perform integrated roles in an operation
to apprehend suspected members of al-Shabaab at a safehouse that happens to be adjacent

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