Event Date: March 23, 2023 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Location: FSS 5028

Presented by CIPS and the International Theory Network (ITN)

This talk examines how contemporary war is waged through the manipulation and remaking of relations of distance. Significant attention has been devoted to how states seek to project military force across vast spaces through a variety of distancing technologies such as air power and armed drones. This presentation argues that through evolutions in contemporary warfare, states and non-state actors have increasingly adopted new tactics, technologies, and strategies that actively manipulate relations of ‘remoteness.’ Remoteness, I contend, is not only a fixed increasing spatial distance across which war is waged but rather a normative category which is actively shaped to legitimate and enable military violence. This presentation traces how and why contemporary warfare is made remote and waged through distancing, not across distance. This talk will draw on contemporary practices of aerial warfare in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism as well as on the use of drones by violent non-state actors, among others, to show how war is made and remade remote. Through this analysis of remoteness in contemporary war, this presentation will show how contemporary strategic, political, and ethical debates on military violence rely on discourses of spatial and temporal distance, and how making war remote in effect serves to make war legitimate.

This event will be held in English.

Speaker:

Emil Archambault is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, having completed his doctorate at the University of Durham in 2021. His research addresses historical and conceptual developments in practices of remote warfare, particularly the use of armed drones in contemporary war. His postdoctoral research is supported by the MINDS initiative of the Canadian Department of Defence and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Most recently, he completed a project funded by a MINDS Targeted Engagement Grant on non-state actors’ development of armed drone programs.

Moderator:

Nisha Shah is an Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa and a coordinator of the International Theory Network at CIPS.