ABSTRACT
This chapter brings the book to its overall conclusion by highlighting the analytical importance of investigating advanced technologies of targeting in their specific operational contexts. As such examining drone targeting in the context of counterinsurgencies highlights the complex relationship between law, visual technologies – analogue or digital – and the legitimation of violence. A relationship to which critical visual studies refer as visuality. Taking visuality as an analytical framework this book argued that the principle of distinction's description of the conditions for targeting humans during armed conflict merely reflects a particular stabilisation of adversarial politics (the element of knowledge) and technological conditions of visual discernability (the element of vision). These two elements are most vividly manifested in the distinctive modes of (in)visibility that the military uniform as law's original visual technology produces. Decomposing the legitimation of targeting decisions into its constitutive elements, knowledge and vision, reveals that the production of law's target is always already a technological practice. To introduce new technologies of target visualisation is, then, necessarily to introduce a new legal claim of targetability. This book ultimately asserts that the introduction of new visual technologies of targeting shapes law's matters of interest (here who and what is a target) in ways that civilians can be recatsed as targets on an unprecedented scale.
