Kill Box - (Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society) by Alex Adams (Hardcover)

About the Book

Kill Box examines how contemporary military drone systems trouble many fundamental philosophical and political concepts and categories, such as sovereignty, the justification for military force, and even gender roles. The book's critical readings of cultural representations of drone warfare show us what is at stake in today's imperial propaganda.

Book Synopsis

Kill Box examines how contemporary military drone systems trouble many fundamental philosophical and political concepts and categories, such as sovereignty, the justification for military force, and even gender roles. The book's critical readings of cultural representations of drone warfare show us what is at stake in today's imperial propaganda.

Review Quotes

A searing exposition of how the cultural portrayal of drone warfare in many films, TV series and books are part and parcel of the kill box. Adams carefully lays out how many of these productions-even those that appear at first blush critical--relentlessly legitimise the use of the drone to enforce state power. A must read for all drone scholars.

Briskly paced and wide-ranging, this timely book shows how popular representations of drone warfare in film, television, and literature encode some of the most pressing ethical and political questions surrounding remote violence, including its entanglements with imperialism, heteronormativity, and racism. The kill box, Adams argues, is nothing less than a regime of truth that legitimizes, even as it occludes the workings of, extrajudicial power. It is both the stuff of cutting-edge military technologies and the stuff of everyday culture, hidden in plain sight.

How does a global project of state terror come to be seen as a normal, necessary, and legitimate feature of international order? Kill Box provides a compelling account of how popular representations of drone warfare have seduced publics and audiences into tolerating the seemingly intolerable. Engaging and incisive, Alex Adams expertly maps the cultural terrain of drone warfare in order to show we might challenge this new imperial ideology.

This book confirms Alex Adams' position as a vitally important scholar and critical voice on state violence and the global war on terror. Kill Box is an urgent, searing study of how literature, film and television mediate our understanding of drone violence and offers a compelling, broader theorization of the kill box as cultural-political knowledge system. Adams' meticulous close readings of a diverse set of texts show how drone fictions work ideologically to naturalize or suggest the inevitability of this form of state terrorism-and also how some works have forcefully challenged it.

With fierce urgency on every page, Alex Adams exposes the cultural artefacts and political imaginaries that legitimate drone warfare. Through attentive and insightful readings of drone fictions, Adams shows how the kill box is not only a military technique but an apparatus for knowing and acting in the world.

About the Author

Alex Adams is an independent scholar based in the UK with a PhD from Newcastle University School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. They are author of Death TV: Drone Warfare in Contemporary Popular Culture;How to Justify Torture: Inside the Ticking Bomb Scenario; and Political Torture in Popular Culture: The Role of Representations in the Post-9/11 Torture Debate.