Drones: Robot eyes on racialized migrant bodies

摘要

A joint Border Forensics and Human Rights Watch investigation revealed that the Libyan Coast Guard (LCG) pull-backs are facilitated by plane and drone surveillance provided by the Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) to the LCG about migrant boats (Sunderland & Pezzani, 2022). Migrants who are returned to Libya are enslaved, extorted, tortured, raped and killed (UNHRC, 2023); among them, Daoud (pseudonym), a student activist from Darfur, Sudan explained, ‘When I was in Libya, I was like in 17th century, not the present’.1 Drones are increasingly used in migration control operations and gaining new functions with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nevertheless, there has been limited critical social scientific engagement around the connections between drones and migration. This commentary situates drones within the trend of militarization of migration controls, which carries significant surveillance, ethical and human rights implications, particularly for racialized migrants.2 Drones have emerged within, and significantly accelerated, the process of militarization of migration controls, which entails not only the transfer of military technology but also military rationalities to target migrants (e.g. Csernatoni, 2018). Pioneered by the US military in the post-9/11 context, drones have been heavily deployed in warzones by militaries to surveil, kill and destroy enemy targets. They have later been transferred to civilian applications, including urban policing and migration control. Even though planes have long been used in migration control,3 drones are increasingly preferred for their cost-effectiveness, speed, ability to operate in difficult weather, vast reach into difficult terrain and the low risk they pose for human operators (e.g. Lutterbeck, 2022). Drones have high levels of interoperability, can connect with other surveillance systems (such as satellites, databases and ground surveillance systems) and provide real-time video streaming of migration movements by various optical and thermal sensors, and radars, thus providing ‘situational awareness’. Following a militarized logic, drone surveillance typically results in targeting migrants as ‘threats’ along the borderzones, informing ground actors and pre-empting their entry, thus contributing to the neutralization of the ‘threat’ of migrants/migration. The data is also used for ‘risk’ assessment to understand migrant journeys and prepare future pre-emptive strategies. The ‘verticality’ (Weizman, 2007) of drone surveillance resembles Foucault's well-known metaphor of the Panopticon tower as the model of modern surveillance, which disciplines subjects under its hierarchical gaze (Foucault, 1991). But unlike the Panopticon, drones are mobile and dispersed (or ‘liquid’, see Bauman & Lyon, 2013), and they are less concerned with subtle forms of discipline and more with brutally sorting subjects and forcing them towards ‘death worlds’ (Mbembe, 2019: 92). And who are the subjects of drone surveillance? From the warzones where killing of civilians is defined as mere ‘collateral damage’ to border policing where enslavement of migrants is defined as ‘rescue’, the subjects are those who are denied even victim status: the racialized populations of the Global South/East. To build on Daoud's observation, drones combine 17th-century racial violence with 21st-century technology. Drone technology follows in the footsteps of another major migration control technology: fingerprint biometrics. Driven by Social Darwinist racist ideology, fingerprinting was born under British colonial rule in India to identify, differentiate and control racialized populations. It was later generalized as a form of identification for the general population, though still retaining its racist core (see Pugliese, 2010). Similar patterns of racial subjugation are also observed in the political economy of drones. Frontex uses Heron and Hermes drones produced by Israeli companies and used