So why does the public seem to perceive France’s drone strikes in Africa as more legitimate than America’s? 11 Yet, American and French strikes are conducted on the same continent, against the same threat, and with the same type of drone, and they result in the same outcomes, including civilian casualties.
strikes have unnecessarily harmed Africans, 10 others have argued that France’s strikes are necessary for regional security. Whereas some observers have cautioned that U.S. French strikes receive 60 percent less media coverage than U.S. Though both France and the United States have conducted drone strikes in Africa since 2019, a search via LexusNexus of media coverage for these operations shows key differences in the volume and tone of reporting. The difference in the public’s perceived legitimacy of American and French drone strikes in Africa illustrates this puzzling trend. 8 This oversight is problematic because the public seems to view some strikes as more morally legitimate than others. 7 Mitt Regan adds that “there has been little effort to systematically study legitimacy” in terms of drones. 6 Larry Lewis and Diane Vavrichek argue that there has been an “inadequate consideration of legitimacy” in drone policy and scholarship. 4 Indeed, as Stephen Ceccoli and John Bing have noted, we know “surprisingly little” about the public’s perceptions of what constitutes legitimate drone strikes, 5 despite reoccurring claims that legitimacy is “central” to the sustainability of drone warfare. One such area that scholars have largely ignored is the moral legitimacy of strikes based on empirical evidence of the public’s perceptions. Though the literature has been described as a “drone-a-rama,” 3 there are nevertheless still several notable gaps. 2 To contend with the emergence of so-called “drone warfare,” the literature has evolved from studying drone proliferation to measuring the effectiveness of strikes to investigating the legal and normative dimensions of these operations. Over 100 countries and many stateless actors now possess drones. 1 Bush’s inaugural use of a drone for the targeted killing of a terrorist set a dangerous precedent. Bush authorized the first known use of an armed and networked unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, as it is commonly called, to kill an al-Qaeda leader in Yemen. The results show that the public combines moral norms to cast judgment about drone strikes and that these moral considerations are shaped by shifts in why drones are used and how they are constrained. To test this claim, I conducted an original survey in March 2021. Use and constraint, then, make up informal moral rules that may condition the public’s perceptions of legitimacy. How drones are used - tactically or strategically - and whether strikes are constrained unilaterally or multilaterally to protect against civilian casualties can shape the public’s intuitions of what constitutes morally legitimate drone strikes. But what explains variation in the public’s perceptions of what constitutes morally legitimate drone warfare? I contend that the public may combine moral norms to make such judgments.
Paul Lushenko Scholars often relate how the public views drone strikes to one of three moral norms: soldiers’ battlefield courage, the protection of soldiers, or preventing civilian casualties.
0 kommentar(er)
