par Longuet, Samuel
Référence Pan-European Conference on International Relations (13: 11-14 septembre 2019: Université Sveti Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgarie)
Publication Non publié, 2019-09-13
Communication à un colloque
Résumé : The French and British militaries have been operating MALE (Middle Altitude Long Endurance) drones over warzones for more than a decade. British drones were armed from the beginning and French drones are to be armed as well in the very near future. To justify that MALE drones were a military technology that should be acquired and used military and political personnel have produced discourses that have shaped a “regime of truth” concerning military drones. A substantial part of those discourses was responding to the considerable critics received by the CIA’s targeted killings program. Since 2002, the CIA has been using MALE drones to track and kill suspected terrorists in countries in which the United States are not engaged in an armed conflict (Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia). The aim of this paper is to analyse the arguments developed for this purpose from a Foucauldian perspective. While some discourses produced by French and British officers, ministries of defence and members of parliament underline the merits of the CIA’s targeted killings program, most criticise it. However, all agree that the uses of French and British armed drones have nothing in common with this American program and therefore should not be impacted by its bad press. However, I argue that drone operations by France in the Sahel and Sahara and by the United Kingdom in Syria and Iraq are actually quite similar to the CIA’s targeted killings program. Indeed, discourses justifying those operations share some of the ideological foundations behind this program.