Drone War as the Permanent State of Emergency

In 2001 began the so-called war on terror which gave rise to numerous and so far unknown strategies and technologies. One of the most important of them are military drones. Initially used for reconnaissance and looking for targets, they quickly became deadly weapons that change the course of war. Death in military conflicts, once inflicted directly by humans, today is inflicted indirectly by advanced technologies. Automated, mathematical algorithms make decisions whether an individual should live or be eliminated in the name of public security. In this article I prove that inflicting death through military drones is not just another war tactic but a new paradigm which may lead to the transformation of legal and political regime of Western countries. I analyze this paradigm in the light of Carl Schmitt’s category of the “state of exception”. I characterize the new methods of controlling law and governing population by Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “inclusive exclusion”.