Abstract

Armed conflicts, relying on new technologies and controversial propositions about how to interpret relevant legal norms, have been reconfigured around threat anticipation. In line with the objective to anticipate threats, drone programs as well as AI decision support systems significantly rely on surveillance and data collection, and the use of force is only a small part of the operations they either consist in or lead to. Neglecting the predominance of surveillance systems in anticipatory warfare, the media and public discourse as well as scholarly debates tend to focus on strikes and targeted killings rather than on the surveillance apparatuses and their effects. The broader and long-term implications of surveillance on the battlefield, as a result, are widely overlooked and the primary focus on strikes and targeted killings has allowed operating states to escape criticisms of violations of sovereignty that go beyond the use of force. Building on seminal reports, this paper first accounts for some of the societal rearrangements, behavioural changes, and psychological ramifications that surveillance systems on the battlefield engender for the affected individuals and communities. The paper then conceptualises and legally translates these effects as rituals of sovereignty by contemplating how this sort of situation would be defined by human rights courts. Other scholars have proceeded this way to explore sovereignty questions raised by combat drones, but existing studies are mostly limited to drone strikes and targeted killings. By omitting to consider drone programs holistically and limiting the analysis to lethal strikes, the extension of the state’s jurisdiction is extremely difficult to recognize. Very differently, when drone programs – equipped or not by AI decision support systems – are studied as a whole, as surveillance systems that have effects on societies, human bodies and behaviors, this paper submits that the operating state’s extraterritorial jurisdiction and thus the extension of sovereign power can easily be recognized.