Kill Box

Reviews / Votes

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. -- Chris Cole, founder-director of Drone Wars UK 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. -- Jamie Johnson, lecturer in security, conflict and international development, University of Leicester 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. -- Michael Richardson, associate professor of media and culture at UNSW Sydney and author of <i>Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World</i> 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. -- Arin Keeble, Edinburgh Napier University 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. -- Beryl Pong, UKRI Future Leaders fellow and Director of the Centre for Drones and Culture, University of Cambridge