Cargando…

“This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision

Avoidance of civilian casualties increasingly affects the political calculus of legitimacy in armed conflict. “Collateral damage” is a problem that can be managed through the material production of precision, but it is also the case that precision is a problem managed through the cultural production...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Beier, J Marshall
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9125135/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35619627
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00108367211050274
_version_ 1784711879855177728
author Beier, J Marshall
author_facet Beier, J Marshall
author_sort Beier, J Marshall
collection PubMed
description Avoidance of civilian casualties increasingly affects the political calculus of legitimacy in armed conflict. “Collateral damage” is a problem that can be managed through the material production of precision, but it is also the case that precision is a problem managed through the cultural production of collateral damage. Bearing decisively on popular perceptions of ethical conduct in recourse to political violence, childhood is an important site of meaning-making in this process. In pop culture, news dispatches, and social media, children, as quintessential innocents, figure prominently where the dire human consequences of imprecision are depicted. Children thus affect the practical “precision” of even the most advanced weapons, perhaps precluding a strike for their presence, potentially coloring it with their corpses. But who count as children, how, when, where, and why are not at all settled questions. Drawing insights from what the 2015 film, Eye in the Sky, reveals about a key social technology of governance we have already internalized, I explore how childhood is itself a terrain of engagement in the (un)making of precision.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-9125135
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2021
publisher SAGE Publications
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-91251352022-05-24 “This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision Beier, J Marshall Coop Confl Articles Avoidance of civilian casualties increasingly affects the political calculus of legitimacy in armed conflict. “Collateral damage” is a problem that can be managed through the material production of precision, but it is also the case that precision is a problem managed through the cultural production of collateral damage. Bearing decisively on popular perceptions of ethical conduct in recourse to political violence, childhood is an important site of meaning-making in this process. In pop culture, news dispatches, and social media, children, as quintessential innocents, figure prominently where the dire human consequences of imprecision are depicted. Children thus affect the practical “precision” of even the most advanced weapons, perhaps precluding a strike for their presence, potentially coloring it with their corpses. But who count as children, how, when, where, and why are not at all settled questions. Drawing insights from what the 2015 film, Eye in the Sky, reveals about a key social technology of governance we have already internalized, I explore how childhood is itself a terrain of engagement in the (un)making of precision. SAGE Publications 2021-10-22 2022-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9125135/ /pubmed/35619627 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00108367211050274 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Beier, J Marshall
“This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision
title “This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision
title_full “This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision
title_fullStr “This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision
title_full_unstemmed “This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision
title_short “This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision
title_sort “this changes things”: children, targeting, and the making of precision
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9125135/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35619627
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00108367211050274
work_keys_str_mv AT beierjmarshall thischangesthingschildrentargetingandthemakingofprecision