Panel Discussion: Unmanned

Join us for a timely panel discussion reflecting on the growing use of armed drones in modern warfare.

The use of unarmed aerial vehicles both in combat and surveillance is one of the most controversial and opinion dividing elements of modern conflict. Drones are remote operated and thus pose little risk to the attacker but this type of intervention poses many cultural and moral problems. Furthermore surveillance drones raise significant issues for privacy and civil liberties.

The panel discussion consists of leading voices on the issues and complexities of this type of warfare. Our panel of speakers will provide an invaluable, and often shocking insight into the use of drones in on-going armed conflicts around the world as well as their growing use in civilian surveillance closer to home.

The panel includes:

Chris Woods is a London-based investigative journalist, whose book Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars publishes in April. A former senior producer with the BBC’s Newsnight and Panorama, he has been covering the Global War on Terror since 2001. His investigations have taken him to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as to Israel and Palestine – all nations where armed drone have come to dominate. Woods set up and ran the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s award-winning Drones team back in 2011. He is presently producing a major TV series on Al Qaeda’s operations in Saudi Arabia, and runs a project monitoring the international air war in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State.

Julian Stallabrass is a writer, photographer, curator and lecturer. He is Professor in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is the author of Art Incorporated, Oxford University Press 2004. He is the editor of Documentary, in the MIT/ Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series; and Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, Photoworks, Brighton 2013.

Elspeth Van Veeren is a Lecturer in Political Science and member of the Global Insecurities Centre at the University of Bristol. Specialising in American security cultures, politics and foreign policy, she previously held research positions at the University of Sussex, University of Copenhagen, and at York University in Canada. Having published extensively on Guantanamo and the War on Terror, including the forthcoming Security Collisions, her work continues to engage with questions surrounding the practices, technologies, and cultures that mobilise publics for and against war. Her latest project is a study of invisibility and security.

Additional panelists will be announced soon.

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