ABSTRACT
Vision and visuality play a crucial role in International Relations (IR). IR’s “visual turn” has demonstrated that aesthetic practices matter because of the “type of insights and understandings [of world politics] they facilitate,” and because “politics itself always has an aesthetic” – that is, political actors understand and communicate with and through aesthetics whether they do so consciously or not. In a Critical Studies on Security special issue, Antoine Bousquet, Jairus Grove, and Nisha Shah argue that critical IR scholars researching and writing on war need to develop expertise about the weapons so crucial to war’s operation. Drone vision overcomes some of the problems with human sight, but it is by no means all-seeing as is commonly characterized by government and military officials, and in aforementioned critical IR scholarship. The US Air Force’s hegemonic or dominant visuality reinforces American military power in the war on terror. However, like all visualities, it is open to interpretation and thus contestation.
