ABSTRACT
The air forces of France and the United Kingdom (UK) have used middle altitude, long-endurance (MALE) drones for intelligence purposes in several armed conflicts over the past two decades and military and political personnel have written extensively about their use. This chapter aims to demonstrate that discourse communities in France and the UK have participated in encouraging the practice of drone surveillance and have shaped their use in war or peace contexts and, therefore, have participated in the blurring of the distinction between those two contexts. This chapter first shows that the way in which wartime drone surveillance operations have been described in France and the UK drawn from the colonial matrix and that airpower is still very much the police power it once was when controlling colonial empires. It then analyses how those surveillance practices have been imported back into domestic security in France, revealing a common ban-optic logic to drone surveillance in both peace and war contexts.
