The spatial antecedents for drone governance in Afghanistan

Abstract

This paper problematizes the use of surveillance technologies such as drones for security governance in Afghanistan by foregrounding the spatial conditions of the possibility of such measures. How did the security architecture in Afghanistan become so fragmented to require technologies such as drones as extensions of the government security surveillance apparatus to govern ungoverned space? While much literature on drones considers how drones rewrite spaces in their theaters of operation, it is also true that space is rewritten to enact governance-by-drone in the first place. In Afghanistan, historical shifts in the global political economy resulted in spatially fragmented security architecture, thus laying the spatial pre-conditions for security governance-by-drone. This paper brings together debates on geopolitics and geoeconomics with those of roll-back, roll-out, and roll-over neoliberalism to construct a genealogy of spatial reconfiguration in Afghanistan. It begins by exploring earlier geopolitical forms of statecraft in Afghanistan, which focused on augmenting state power through large-scale development projects. It then moves on to show how these were replaced by geoeconomic forms of statecraft that emphasized the rolling back of government involvement, heavy privatization, and foreign investment, resulting in deeply fragmented security architecture. Finally, neoliberalism's roll-out and roll-over phases correlate with reviving geopolitical forms of statecraft aimed at territorial consolidation. The new geopolitical, however, is a form of statecraft that tends toward territorial power through compensatory technological means like drones as opposed to meaningful development. Rulership was leaning toward this new authoritarian, technocratic model well before the capture of these technologies by the Taliban after its transition to power following the 2021 US retreat.