CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Németh, Virág |
|---|---|
| Title | The Changing Discourse of the American Drone Debate |
| Summary | Drones that combine different revolutionary features, are the quintessential weapons of the twenty-first century. However, the very characteristics that distinguish them put drones in the center of a political debate. The central conceptual, theoretical as well as ethical problem with drones is that they cannot be easily categorized as merely conventional or non-conventional weapons. Drones are extensively used and relied on in the War on Terror as the weapons of choice by the United States as conventional weapons, although certain moral and ethical concerns put them in a ‘grey’ area. While an argument can be made that drones are not conventional weapons, their use on the battlefield is not restricted either; on the contrary they are deployed ever more widely. After contrasting the current drone debate with the nuclear debate of the 1950s, the main theoretical framework of this study uses Just War Theory (JWT) and the concept of Military Revolution to demonstrate that while drones are revolutionary weapons they possess questionable moral and ethical features that dominate the debate about the use of drones in the US. While this discourse plays out on a variety of levels, two levels of representation are central: the official discourse taking place between the government and its critics which is where ultimately decisions about the legality of drones will be made; secondly, public opinion that informs official policy and how it is shaped by representations in popular media. It is these two high impact levels this study examines in order to provide a better understanding of the complexities behind the current debate. |
| Supervisor | Cerny, Hannes |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/nemeth_virag.pdf |
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