Of Hummingbirds and Parrots: Drones Re-Producing the Temporalities of International Law

This paper looks at how the growing use of drones is re-producing the future orientation of law both expressed in the sense of law resting on precautionary, scenarios based thinking. It does this by focusing more specifically on how drones are actants in the creation of legal subjects, legal space and legal specialists that are based on a future orientation. As this indicates this paper is a very preliminary attempt to reach out to theories emphasizing on the role of technological actants (of which the drones are the example here)—as found e.g. in the context of the social studies of science or in the work of Friedrich Kittler—in generating social reality (in this case a specific form of legal temporality).