Review Article: Targeted Killing, Technologies of Violence, and Society

This article addresses the interaction between policies of targeted killing and wider social forces, particularly technology, through three recently published books. I suggest that while Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire does well to draw attention to the enclosing tendency of contemporary nonhuman environments and means of technological control – particularly drones, Kyle Grayson’s Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing provides a necessary contextualisation of these technological transformations by emphasising the cultural-political underpinnings of policies of targeted killing and of the assemblage of technologies into such policies. These perspectives are replicated in Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, which describes the political and strategic manipulation of space to implement Israeli nonterritorial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. I conclude by suggesting that these three works provide renewed avenues to reflect on the normative and conceptual impacts of lethal drones and other novel warfighting technologies, as well as on the relation between state violence and normalcy.