Drones, Surveillance, and Violence: Theory and Evidence from a US Drone Program

We investigate the impact of the US drone program in Pakistan on insurgent violence. Using novel details about US-Pakistan counterterrorism cooperation and geocoded violence data, we show that the program was associated with monthly reductions of around 9-13 insurgent attacks and 51-86 casualties in the area affected by the program. This change was sizable as in the year before the program the affected area experienced around 21 attacks and 100 casualties per month. Additional quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that this drop is attributable to the drone program. However, the damage caused in strikes during the program cannot fully account for the reduction. Instead, anticipatory effects induced by the drone program played a prominent role in subduing violence. These effects stemmed from the insurgents’ perception of the risk of being targeted in drone strikes; their efforts to avoid targeting severely compromised their movement and communication abilities, in addition to eroding within-group trust. These findings contrast with prominent perspectives on air-power, counterinsurgency, and US counterterrorism, suggesting select drone deployments can be an effective tool of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. ∗Corresponding Author: Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC, Stanford University, alimir07@stanford.edu. For helpful comments, the authors would like to thank Christopher Clary, Martha Crenshaw, C. Christine Fair, James Fearon, Andrea Gilli, Mauro Gilli, Gemma Staton-Hagan, Sana Jaffrey, Ethan B. Kapstein, Sameer Lalwani, John Mearsheimer, Robert Pape, MJ Reese, Jacob Shapiro, Paul Staniland, Monica Toft, Kevin Weng, Jeremy Weinstein, Amy Zegart, the editors of ISQ, numerous anonymous reviewers, and participants of seminars at the 2018 Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association, CISAC Social Science Seminar, Empirical Studies of Conflict Lab Meeting, Stanford Security Working Group, University of Chicago Program on International Security Policy, and the Stimson Center. Asfandyar Mir thanks University of Chicago Committee on Southern Asia Studies and the Social Science Division for financial support for data collection and fieldwork. All remaining errors are those of the authors alone. †PhD Student, University of Michigan, dtmoore@umich.edu