Special issue  

Drawing upon a quantitative opinion survey conducted in the Swiss Canton of Neuchâtel in 2015, the paper provides insight into how far the current proliferation of private drones truly reaches. The paper also studies how the usage and societal diffusion of civil drones is perceived and lived by the population at large. Such a perspective is needed to understand the driving forces that shape current drone developments, and to explore the wider societal implications of the technology.

The paper highlights how the use of Swiss military drones facilitates and limits the acquisition of knowledge for the missions of the border guards. It then demonstrates the way in which the mobile and flexible nature of this technology also gives rise to new surveillance practices and identification controls. Moreover, through this study, the aim is to rethink the real interest of the modern states in acquiring and using new technology to secure the national territory.

This article discusses the potential of using drones for community based counter-mapping. Drawing on action research conducted along the Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, we describe how drones were used for political interventions against land grabs by palm oil and mining companies. We argue that self-built drones can be used by local activists in an emancipatory and inclusive way, thereby becoming a weapon of the weak against land and resource grabs.

The paper explores in what ways we might examine the drone from other points of view that are technical and political, but also theological, magical, artistic and aesthetic. The paper draws on notions of aesthetics and politics, not in order to compare the drone with other flying figures and objects, but to enable very different visual and aesthetic regimes to begin to help us see a whole new set of invisible relations, from gender to sexuality, within which the drone is caught.

This paper discusses the development of the market for small commercial drones in the USA. I suggest the market does not just develop by itself, but through a whole series of struggles by various people and institutions. Drones are also part of an increasing dependence by society on machine decision-making, which is replacing human decision-making. I was interested in examining these developments in the context of small drones and the possibility of new geographies of the sky.

Protester operated drones are beginning to appear in the skies above protests, offering protesters new ways to watch the police. Previous work on resisting surveillance has focused upon resisting surveillance by state authorities, such as the police. This article, however, reverses this arrangement and explores the ways in which the police can attempt to resist surveillance by protesters. It explores legislation, physical and electronic efforts to minimise the effects of the gaze of the drone.

This paper explores the urbanization of drone warfare and the targeting of the surplus population. Increasingly, the security threats generated by replacing masses of workers with nonhumans is managed by policing them with robots, drones, and other technical apparatuses. This paper looks at the theoretical implications of using police drones across a post-9/11 battlespace in the cities in Europe and North America. It contends we are witnessing the rise of the dronepolis, the city of the drone.

This paper explores the commercial or civilian drone. In so doing, it focuses on the way in which the drone is rhetorically framed at trade shows. Drawing upon fieldwork experience at a number of industry and advocacy "expo" gatherings, the paper critically unpacks two dominant framings of the drone, namely those of possibility and inevitability. This paper thus responds to calls for further exploration of the non-military drone and to aspects of its "life course" prior to its "functioning".

The paper outlines a politico-geographical research agenda for the investigation of the making, functioning and implications of drone systems. Such an agenda, it is claimed, could afford deepened insight into the driving forces that are behind current drone developments, would show how drones work in different institutional contexts, and could highlight how drones impact on the envisioned reality.