Lethal sterility: innovative dehumanisation in legal justifications of Obama’s drone policy

This article undertakes a textually oriented discourse analysis of six Obama-era arguments, delivered by key legal personnel, on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Our analysis situates these seminal texts within a broader discourse analysis of the emergent War on Terror, as articulated by President Bush between 2001 and 2003. This analysis finds that the Obama administration sought to situate their systematized killing programme within the existing confines of the law of armed conflict. In doing so, the Obama administration attempted to unilaterally rewrite the law of armed conflict to permit the killing of ‘terrorist suspects’ and ‘suspected terrorists’ outside of an active battlefield. Key to accomplishing this, our analysis shows, was the Obama administration’s use of innovative techniques of dehumanisation. Obama adopted a sanguine, bureaucratic language to veil the act of killing. The significance of our findings is two-fold. Our research contributes to critical complementary literatures on: (i) the role of dehumanization in US foreign policy, and (ii) the influence of power in the directional flows of law-making and law-receiving from West-to-East and North-to-South. Together, dehumanization and law acted as complementary enablers of political violence perpetrated by the US against those residing in the Global South.