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Defence Studies
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fdef20
Remote warfare – Buzzword or Buzzkill?
Rubrick Biegon, Vladimir Rauta & Tom F. A. Watts
To cite this article: Rubrick Biegon, Vladimir Rauta & Tom F. A. Watts (2021) Remote warfare –
Buzzword or Buzzkill?, Defence Studies, 21:4, 427-446, DOI: 10.1080/14702436.2021.1994396
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2021.1994396
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.
Published online: 10 Nov 2021.
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Remote warfare – Buzzword or Buzzkill?
Rubrick Biegon
a
, Vladimir Rauta
b
and Tom F. A. Watts
c
a
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK;
b
Department of Politics
and International Relations, School of Politics, Economics, and International Relations, University of Reading,
Reading, UK;
c
Royal Holloway, University of London, London, United Kingdom & University of Southern
Denmark, Odense, Denmark
ABSTRACT
The debates around remote warfare have grown signicantly over
the last decade, leading to the term acquiring a certain buzz in the
media, think-tank, and policy discourse. The lack of any serious
attempt to reect and take stock of this body of scholarship informs
the scope of this special issue, in general, and of this article in
particular. This paper addresses this former gap and, in doing so,
serves a threefold purpose. First, to provide a state-of-the-art review
of this emerging debate. Second, to both categorise what proper-
ties make a buzzword and to make the case for why existing remote
warfare scholarship should be approached in this way. Third, to
introduce how the various contributions to this special issue extend
the debate’s conceptual, theoretical, and empirical parameters.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 29 July 2021
Accepted 13 October 2021
KEYWORDS
Remote warfare;
contemporary conflict;
security studies;
international security
Over the last decade, the language with which we have been studying political violence
has sent the debate into “terminological and conceptual turmoil” (Rauta et al. 2019, 417).
The late Colin Gray argued that academics and officials share a propensity to be
“mesmerized by their own conceptual genius” (2007, 37). The (re)invention of concepts,
he went on to explain, offered the “illusion of intellectual control” (Gray 2007, 37) that
came, of course, at the significant cost of redundancy: the “discover[y] of a host of similar
terms, each with its subtly distinctive meaning and probably its unique historical and
cultural baggage” (Gray 2007, 37). This becomes clear when assessing the range of terms
populating the semantic field of political violence: grey zone warfare (Hoffman 2016;
Rauta and Monaghan 2021), hybrid warfare (Hoffman 2009; Lanoszka 2016; Renz 2016;
Mälksoo 2018; Rauta 2020b), liquid warfare (Demmers and Gould 2018), post-heroic
warfare (Luttwak 1995; Enemark 2013), proxy war(fare) (Rauta 2016, 2018, 2020a, 2021b;
Groh 2019; Moghadam and Wyss 2020; Fox 2021), surrogate warfare (Krieg and Rickli
2018; Karagiannis 2021), and vicarious warfare (Waldman 2021). With so many labels,
“war has burst out of its old boundaries” (Brooks 2017, 13) to such an extent that we are
“conceptually under-equipped to grasp, let alone counter, violent political challenges”
(Ucko and Marks 2018, 208; for why this is a problem for research progress and
cumulation, see; Rauta 2021a, 2021c). So, naturally, a new concept enters the fray: remote
warfare.
CONTACT Vladimir Rauta v.rauta@reading.ac.uk Department of Politics and International Relations, School of
Politics, Economics, and International Relations, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom
DEFENCE STUDIES
2021, VOL. 21, NO. 4, 427–446
https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2021.1994396
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
The study of remote warfare has grown significantly over the last decade across several
fields, including security studies, international relations, and law, yet there have been no clear
attempts at making sense of where the debate is, let alone where it is going. In the process, the
term has become a feature of British think-tank debates (Knowles and Watson 2018; Watson
and Karlshøj-Pedersen 2019), entered the policy realm (The Labour Party 2019; HC Deb
16 December 2020), and has become used in media reporting on American drone operations
(Robertson 2009). These usages have all contributed toward the term’s overall “buzz.”
However, remote warfare has been subject to fairly limited conceptual scrutiny and evalua-
tion (Watts and Biegon 2019; Watson and McKay 2021). As a consequence, its intellectual
development and application have remained largely atheoretical. This failure to take stock
fully of remote warfare scholarship, coupled with larger conceptual and theoretical inatten-
tion, represents a major gap in our knowledge of this subject.
More importantly, addressing this gap would seem even more imperative given that
remote warfare has been described, rather speculatively, as “central to modern state-
sponsored violence” (Adelman and Kieran 2020, 3) and “the most common form of
military engagement used by states” (Watson and Alasdair 2021, 7). In their clearest
form, these are over-statements yet to be subject to empirical scrutiny, and these should
be read as an attempted rhetorical validation of an emerging research programme.
Irrespective of how one might position the relevance of remote warfare on the spectrum
of contemporary conflict, its study must be built on strong conceptual foundations
because it is “through language that one selects not just a name for the observed
phenomenon, but where it starts and ends, as well as how one understands and explains
it” (Rauta 2018, 451). Without this clarity, remote warfare scholarship will not only be
unable to cut through the turmoil which characterises the wider debates on contempor-
ary political violence but, instead, will only deepen it.
This special issue is the first to provide a corrective to these gaps. It aims to advance
the conceptual and theoretical study of remote warfare as an important step in support-
ing the continued and sustainable development of this nascent research agenda. The
articles extend the empirical discussion manifold: (1) on this topic toward a more
rigorous assessment of its history and relationship to new security problems and chal-
lenges such as assassination (Trenta 2021); (2) the dynamics and character of its use by
actors other than the United States and Britain (Stoddard and Toltica 2021); (3) by
extending remote warfare scholarship in new theoretical directions through the prism of
ontological security (Riemann and Rossi 2021b); and (4) with a focus on the legitimacy of
military capabilities (McDonald 2021). Other contributions develop the study of remote
warfare’s constitutive “remoteness,” highlighting how clearer thinking on this subject can
help us understand the empirical complexities of recent US military interventions (Watts
and Biegon 2021). This special issue also makes space for a dissenting discussion on the
limits of the notion in the form of a conceptual critique, in a way that invites considera-
tions of the degree to which remote warfare is truly analytically and practically useful
(Rauta 2021c). In line with the overall scope of this collective exchange, all contributions
pay at least some attention to conceptual issues as a starting point for broader theoretical
and empirical evaluations. Taken as a whole, this special issue aims to make a timely
intervention to remote warfare scholarship by investigating a complex set of conceptual
and theoretical puzzles that push the debate further beyond its traditional focus on issues
of efficacy and ethics (Adelman and Kieran 2020, 4).
428 R. BIEGON ET AL.
This extended introduction has three aims: to provide a state-of-the-art review of
remote warfare scholarship; to assess the buzzword appeal of remote warfare; and to
introduce the various contributions made by this special issue. It provides an overview of
the current state of the debate, its direction of travel and, perhaps most importantly, the
internal analytical tensions. It does so by building on existing reflections written from the
perspective of those working on its legal (Ohlin 2017a), cultural (Adelman and Kieran
2020), and policy (Watson and Alasdair 2021) implications. Our introduction performs
an important contextualising role, outlining the special issue’s core themes and helping
situate its contributions within this growing area of debate. For remote warfare scholars,
it refreshes existing reflections on the overall state of the debate in line with the rapid
expansion of the literature, which, amongst other contributions, has recently included
two interdisciplinary edited collections (Adelman and Kieran 2020; Watson and Alasdair
2021).
For a wider audience, this paper also develops the notion of a buzzword as a heuristic
for assessing the introduction of terms into the semantic field on contemporary political
violence. The notion of a buzzword is widely used across the social sciences (Cornwall
and Brock 2005; Cornwall 2007; Ravitch 2007; Bensaude Vincent 2014; Foulds 2014;
Routley 2014; Mason 2019; Schnable et al. 2021). Despite being mentioned in recent
scholarship on political violence (Almäng 2019, 192; Rauta 2020a, 115), its application in
this area has yet to be justified or deliberated. From a review of the existing literature, we
identify four properties common to all buzzwords: they are indicative of current fashions
or trends; are inherently vague; are associated with distinct actors who stretch the words’
meanings across various contexts; and are normative, having a role in setting or criti-
quing the policy agenda. Whilst “remote warfare” has yet to become widely used by
policymakers or defence officials, it meets all of the criteria of a buzzword. To be clear:
whilst the term buzzword has a pejorative connotation (Bensaude Vincent 2014, 238–39),
our use of it should not be read as a denigration of either remote warfare as a subject of
academic enquiry or the contributions made by existing contributors to the debate.
Rather, we argue, it is through discussing and identifying remote warfare’s “contingent,
situational and relational meanings,” to return to Cornwall and Brock’s understanding of
a buzzword (2005, 2), that its intellectual foundations can be strengthened. In short:
labelling remote warfare as a buzzword is not to call for a cessation of its study but rather,
consistent with the overall aims of this special issue, to encourage greater attention to the
conceptual issues involved with this research enterprise moving forward.
This introduction is structured into three sections. The first section reviews the
existing interdisciplinary debates on remote warfare and reflects on the major trends
within the debate. We highlight the ongoing expansion of remote warfare’s empirical
referents to include the study of multiple security agents and practices. This trend has
opened new research pathways, particularly when it comes to assessing the various policy
failures associated with recent Western military interventions and their socio-political
consequences. Yet, the addition of new referents has meant that the concept has travelled
beyond its original focus on technology in war toward the distinct set of analytical and
policy issues generated by delegation, creating a certain analytical tension of which
participants to the debate should remain conscious. The second section examines remote
warfare’s buzzworthy-ness. We show that, whilst remote warfare meets all four criteria of
a buzzword, policymakers have generally avoided using the term remote warfare and that
DEFENCE STUDIES 429
academically this has yielded some intellectual shortcomings. The third section outlines
the specific contributions this special issue makes to the debates on remote warfare and
maps the individual arguments onto our scope and in reference to the broader debate.
The study of remote warfare
Remote warfare is a subject of multidisciplinary debate. The breadth of the scholarship
on the topic complicates any evaluation of this nascent research debate while incurring
the risk of categorising discrete areas of study by imposing a sense of analytical neatness,
which belies the inherent messiness of the research enterprise and downplays areas of
shared enquiry and dialogue. Whilst remaining sensitive to these points, five broad areas
of remote warfare scholarship can be identified: (1) the ethics, legality, and experiences of
using various weapons technologies; (2) the cultural representations and consequences of
remote warfare technologies; (3) issues of delegation and privatisation in war; (4) the
transparency, efficacy, and human costs of recent Western counterterrorism and stabi-
lisation operations; and (5) remote warfare’s geopolitical logics and sociopolitical effects.
Whilst these contributions have progressed knowledge in multiple new directions,
they have also created a major tension within the debate. As we discuss, some accounts
have developed a techno-centric understanding of remote warfare, which focuses on the
impact of various weapons technologies on the conduct, cultural impact, and legality of
contemporary political violence. Others promote a more outcome-oriented understand-
ing of remote warfare, which, whilst retaining some analytical focus on various weapons
technologies, broadens the debate to study a wider set of security agents and security
practices that share the effect of distancing an intervening agent’s conventional ground
forces from frontline fighting. This analytical move opens up the discrete set of academic
and policy issues centred on delegation in war. This pulling apart risks not only
fragmenting the accumulation of knowledge but also reinforces the trend toward con-
ceptualising remote warfare in different ways. As we show below, each set of arguments
also provides conceptual quandaries that require addressing.
The first set of studies emphasises the links between remote warfare scholarship and
the study of technology in war. In the context of war, technology is used by humans to do
things that the body cannot, whether this be to project force beyond the line of sight, react
to the speed of machines, or strike adversaries with precision. With the notable exception
of fully autonomous weapons systems, which would conceivably exercise their own
algometric judgment (Bode and Huelss 2021), the use of most technologies in war can
be understood as an extension of human agency. Whilst they may have some automated
capabilities (Gusterson 2016, 33), the much-debated MQ-9 Reaper drone operated by the
American, British, and French air forces are categorised as remotely piloted aircraft.
Despite the immense physical distances at which these technologies enable force to be
projected, their operators can exercise significant human judgment and control over the
use of force (Chapa 2021).
Some have argued that remote warfare scholarship has been “dominated by the
growing importance of armed drones, particularly in the US-led ‘war on terror’”
(Huelss 2019, 356, emphasis added). The ethics and the efficacy of drone strikes, as
with the experiences of British and American drone operators, have all been studied
under the label remote warfare (DeShaw Rae 2014; Schulzke 2016; Lee 2018; Chapa
430 R. BIEGON ET AL.
2021). Ohlin (2017a) has pushed to expand the empirical referents of remote warfare
scholarship to also include the study of cyber-warfare capabilities and Autonomous
Weapons Systems (AWS). Justifying this aggregation, Ohlin argues that these technolo-
gies share the characteristic of “allowing operators to use ever more discriminating force
while also receding further in time and space from the target of the military operation”
(2017a, 2). This wider understanding of remote warfare informs assessments of its
legality (Crawford 2017; Cullen 2017; Ohlin 2017b), as well as the challenges that artificial
intelligence presents to retaining meaningful human control over the use of force (Bode
and Huelss 2021).
In the context of this set of arguments, several conceptual problems arise speaking to
the gaps underscoring the aims of this special issue. To begin with, it is unclear whether
the basic “unit” of interest is (1) the drone, AWS, or cyber-warfare capability, (2) how
human agents interact with and experience the use of these technologies, (3) the effects of
these technologies on the conduct, laws, and costs of war, or (4) a combination of all of
these factors. Indeed, the exact technologies which should be studied under the umbrella
of remote warfare remain contested. Cyber-warfare, for example, has been singled out as
“a distinct venue for conflict,” which should be carved off from remote warfare scholar-
ship (Biegon and Watts 2020, 19–20). How these “remote” weapons technologies map to
wider historical trends is also somewhat ambiguous. Drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper
may eliminate the risk of physical (but not necessarily psychological) harm to their
operators. AWS, however, could transform the risk-calculus and conduct of war, in
part by shielding commanders from the emotional burdens of armed conflict (Bode
and Huelss 2021, 220–21). Yet, both technologies can be treated as the latest manifesta-
tion of a wider trend reaching back millennia: “the historiography of warfare is replete
with assertions that new capabilities to kill or injure from a distance have remade combat,
well before the advent of the computerized technologies that draw so much critical
attention today” (Adelman and Kieran 2020, 4). As Ohlin similarly notes, the use of
new technologies to impose an asymmetric risk of physical harm “has been the goal of
weapon design ever since the abandonment of the club as an instrument of blunt-force
killing” (2017b, 19). In this way, the debate would benefit from a further exploration of
the “remoteness” of remote warfare – the property which is used to justify the aggregated
study of multiple weapons technologies (Ohlin 2017a) – as well as the development of
clear conceptual foundations to help progress the debates on these issues.
Sharing a focus on the technological aspects of remote warfare, a second area of
research investigates the “cultural entanglements, imprints, and consequences of remote
warfare” (Adelman and Kieran 2020, 10). Animating this scholarship is a frustration with
the perceived gridlock that characterises the debates on the efficacy and ethics of killing at
a distance (Adelman and Kieran 2020, 4–10). The ways in which drone technologies alter
the experience of war has received attention in the debate (Williams 2015; Gusterson
2016; Lee 2018). A key notion emerging from this literature that overlaps with the debate
on the cultural impact of remote warfare (Demmers and Gould 2021) is intimacy. This is
a broad notion whose study is also a prominent feature of feminist approaches to
geopolitics and security (Sjoberg 2015). In the context of remote warfare scholarship,
intimacy is generally used as a shorthand to study the various “forms of proximity”
(Adelman and Kieran 2020, 16), which, somewhat paradoxically, are created through
intervention at a distance. The cultural strand of remote warfare scholarship broadens
DEFENCE STUDIES 431
the study of intimacy in remote warfare by probing the representations of drone pilots
and “remote wars” in literature (Buchanan 2020; Jelfs 2020), television shows such as
Homeland (Bjering and Graae 2020) and video games (Richardson 2020). Contributors
to this section of the debate have also traced the genealogy of the contemporary use of
drones to the writings of early aviation theorists such as Giulio Douhet (Zeitlin 2020) and
to the culture of “technological determinism” that has shaped the American military for
over a century (Walker 2018). Next to the above-mentioned requirement for historicis-
ing, therefore, sits a conceptual demand for a cultural account of the analytical assump-
tions generated by arguments that are over-reliant on technology.
Elsewhere in the debate, there has been a push to reconceptualise remote warfare as
something greater than the use of new technologies. This literature reorients the debates
focus away from direct combat operations through practices like air strikes toward
indirect efforts to work through local security forces and commercial agents. Studies
have examined the role of different security practices (military assistance and intelligence
sharing) and agents (private military security contractors and special operation forces) in
remote warfare (Watts and Biegon 2017; Krieg 2018; Kinsey and Olsen 2021; Richards
2021). These studies address similar questions: in what ways do particular security
agents/practices qualify as remote warfare? What role have they played in recent
British and American defence policy? And what are the risks and consequences of
these practices for the oversight and transparency of military intervention?
Intentionally or not, this literature reorients the thematic focus away from the study of
technology in war toward the separate debates on delegation in war: an intervening
agent’s indirect attempts to “build partner capacity,” and work “by, with and through”
other agents – whether these be foreign security forces or security contractors.
This trend began in the notion of remote-control warfare coined by Paul Rogers in
2013. The failure of the nation-building campaign in Iraq, he argued, accelerated a major
trend within Western defence policy: the use of drones, private military security con-
tractors and Special Forces to minimise – if not avoid – the deployment of “boots on the
ground” in frontline fighting (Rogers 2013). This conceptualisation of remote warfare
was extended by the Oxford Research Group’s (ORG) Remote Control Project (renamed
the Remote Warfare Programme in 2018), a now-defunct, London-based think-tank that
advocated for more sustainable and accountable approaches to security (Moran 2015).
Through its activities, which included publishing practitioner-oriented reports on the
conduct of British counterterrorism and stabilisation operations (Knowles and Watson
2018; Watson and Megan 2019), the ORG helped develop a network of researchers to
assess, among other topics, the failures and costs of recent Western military interventions
in the Sahel (Goxho 2021) and Yemen (Shiban and Molyneux 2021). A resultant con-
ceptual requirement for the future of the debate is, thus, to balance the inherently policy-
practitioner origins of the notion with its ability to translate into a robust analytical
concept useful for the academic debates. Equally important is the focus on distinguishing
variations of delegated interventionism into a conceptual property of relevance to the
definitions of remote warfare.
The more holistic conceptualisation of remote warfare pioneered by the ORG and
others provides the empirical framework for a fifth area. The focus here is less on
prescribing changes to how remote warfare should be approached in policy and more
on examining its geopolitical logic(s) and sociopolitical consequences. Biegon and
432 R. BIEGON ET AL.
Watts argue, for example, that remote warfare was central to the “retooling” of
American primacy following the Iraq War (2020) and has also played an important
role in maintaining security partnerships with states involved with counterterrorism
operations in the Horn of Africa (Biegon and Watts 2021). Demmers and Gould
(2021) have examined remote warfare’s appeal to Western democracies, paying
particular attention to the ways in which it has obscured democratic oversight over
the use of force and concealed the human costs of political violence. Riemann and
Rossi (2021a) have explored the “normative commitment” to distancing “privilege
spaces” in the Global North from the realities of political violence, and the ways in
which the growing use of military contractors have altered societal understandings of
sacrifice and remembrance. As with the policy-oriented literature on remote warfare
from which it has drawn inspiration, this segment provides a more holistic empirical
framework for studying how Western states have projected force in recent years. Yet,
since the trend in Western warfighting toward intervention from a distance and the
study of its social-political effects are already prominent features of the semantic field
on contemporary political violence, it raises questions about remote warfare’s con-
ceptual distinctiveness and boundaries of contrast, to use Rauta’s explanation of how
terms overlap in the wider semantic field (2021b).
Thematically, the five branches of remote warfare scholarship speak to a common
set of questions. Is there anything new about the recent trend toward distancing
conventional ground forces from frontline fighting? What explains this trend? How
are the various forms of distance created through this process experienced by
different audiences? Is intervention from a distance ethical and efficient? What are
the effects of intervention from a distance on politics, society, law, and culture? Their
principal point of divergence is the relative weight given to the study of technology
vis-à-vis delegation in war. As we have shown, across five sets of arguments, remote
warfare is deployed with multiple meanings, to address different empirical problems,
and by bringing together policy, practitioner, journalistic, and academic perspectives.
This presents an invitation to think more creatively about the concept by trying to
make sense of its contradictions as well as to harness its analytical potential.
The notion of remote warfare: worth the buzz?
Having outlined the uses and abuses of the notion, one cannot but agree with the fact that
remote warfare has acquired a certain “buzz.” This raises a set of questions: is remote
warfare a buzzword? What does this mean? And does this offer a productive pathway to
articulate a conceptual and theoretical framework for remote warfare? As we argue in this
section, the term “remote warfare” meets all four criteria of a buzzword which can be
generated from how the notion is understood throughout the social science literature: it is
indicative of current fashions or trends; it has an inherent vagueness; it has been associated
with distinct actors who stretch the words’ meanings across various contexts; and it is
normative, having a role in critiquing or supporting the policy agenda. As a buzzword,
“remote warfare” has value as a heuristic; it offers a useful shortcut for navigating the
debates on contemporary political violence, providing a starting point for further study.
DEFENCE STUDIES 433
“Buzzwords” as heuristics
Buzzwords tend to capture and reflect the zeitgeist. They help define the “hot topics”
of a given moment (Schnable et al. 2021, 26–27). Whilst this suggests that they can
have a degree of presentism and ephemerality, they can also be convenient ways of
providing “new and shiny concepts” (Mason 2019, 213). Because they are seen as
denoting something that is in vogue, buzzwords can be uncharitably likened to fads. In
this way, they are sometimes depicted as being detrimental to social science (Alvesson
et al. 2017, 10, 20). Others point to how the notion of a buzzword has helped shed light
on a variety of challenging subjects, ranging from development discourse (Cornwall
2007), feminist foreign policy (Mason 2019) and technoscience (Bensaude Vincent
2014). A sufficiently loud “buzz” can focus attention on novel trends, setting the stage
for more detailed empirical, conceptual, and theoretical inquiry. Against this back-
ground, we argue in this sub-section that buzzwords often function as useful
heuristics.
Since the end of the Cold War, there have been multiple waves of conceptual innova-
tion aimed at capturing the global trend toward more indirect forms of military inter-
vention conducted from a distance, without the deployment of large numbers of the
intervening agent’s conventional ground forces. During the 1990s, the humanitarian
interventions conducted principally from the air in the Balkans prompted debates on
post-heroic warfare (Luttwak 1995), virtual war (Ignatieff 2001) and virtuous war (Der
Derian 2001). The Obama administration’s turn toward what it labelled “innovative, low-
cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve [US] security objectives” (Department of
Defense 2012, 3) in the aftermath of the nation-building campaigns in Afghanistan and
Iraq prompted the arrival, (re-)discovery, or invention of some of the terms outlined at
the start of this article.
Our review of the debate pointed to remote warfare being caught between its under-
standing as “an approach used by states to counter threats at a distance’ (Watson and
Alasdair 2021, 7) and a form of “technologized warfare” (Adelman and Kieran 2020, 11).
These differences are consistent with buzzwords more generally, as their (relative)
ambiguity is constitutive of their ability to generate “buzz” and travel widely across the
discursive terrain. Buzzwords are intrinsically capacious (Schnable et al. 2021, 27–28).
They cannot have singular meanings. This has elicited comparisons between buzzwords
and Gallie’s “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie 1955; Cornwall 2007, 472).
Buzzwords are different, however, because contestations over meaning are “drowned
out” by the noise, even as the “buzz” creates the appearance of consensus (however thin
or superficial). In the case of buzzwords, there tends to be agreement on the importance
of the term, if not its precise meaning.
Writing about buzzwords in the context of development policy, Cornwall and Brock
argue that they often act as “fuzz-words,” particularly when they are used for reasons of
political expedience (2005, 10). In an influential report for the United Nations, Cornwall
and Brock wrote that it was an “almost inherent property of buzzwords that they facilitate
a multiplicity of contingent, situational and relational meanings” (2005, 160). The “fuzz”
of the buzzword speaks to the inability of the term in question to produce concrete or
actionable consensus; as buzzwords are negotiated politically and institutionally, differ-
ences in perspective reveal contestation over meaning, impacting how the buzzword is
434 R. BIEGON ET AL.
translated into the policy process (Cornwall and Brock 2005, 2). At the same time, the
buzz/fuzz-word obscures these complications, in part because of the multiple ways in
which the term finds resonance.
Different (groups of) actors can utilise buzzwords in different ways (Cornwall and
Brock 2005; Schnable et al. 2021). The abstractness of such terms allows their meaning
to be modified as they travel across different audiences (Foulds 2014). Contingency
and real-world events can drive such changes. The 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea,
and its subsequent interventions elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East below the
threshold of open hostilities, generated debate on proxy wars (Rauta 2016) and hybrid
warfare (Hoffman 2009; Lanoszka 2016; Renz 2016; Mälksoo 2018; Rauta 2020b). In
the case of hybrid warfare scholarship, this took its study in a new direction and away
from its focus a decade earlier on irregular and terrorist threats in the Middle East
(Hoffman 2009). Semantic adoption can also have an evolutionary character. For
instance, “the use of buzzwords within published academic studies could hypotheti-
cally occur either after or before practitioners popularise the terms.” Thus, buzzwords
tend to start as (abstract) concepts rather than “objective” phenomena (Schnable et al.
2021, 29).
As noted by Cornwall (2007, 478), it is a peculiar feature of buzzwords that, “just as
they appear to rise ‘above’ ideology, they are densely populated with ideological projects
and positions.” This normative function has both negative and positive features –
negative in the sense that buzzwords, like jargon, can “mystify” the public, providing
a false sense of reality (Ravitch 2007); positive because they frame solutions to problems
and can focus the policy agenda by facilitating greater policy consensus (Cornwall and
Brock 2005; Bensaude Vincent 2014; Mason 2019). In the case of development policy,
buzzwords are understood to have legitimised the general direction of certain policy
agendas, even as they have co-opted opposition and deradicalised challenges to the status
quo (Routley 2014; Schnable et al. 2021). In some instances, the heuristic function of
buzzwords means they become a “slogan” or “advertisement” for the agendas they help
consolidate (Bensaude Vincent 2014).
Remote warfare as a buzzword
Remote warfare is presented by its supporters as fashionable. According to those who
deploy the concept, it reflects clear trends in current practices of military intervention.
“Across the globe,” write Watson and McKay, “there is a discernible trend of states
engaging militarily from a distance” (2021, 10). It is a trend seemingly comprised of other
trends – risk aversion, technological advances, networking (Demmers and Gould 2021,
37–39) – which have coalesced today. The nature of these trends, of course, is open to
debate, remaining largely unsupported by the established research clusters of military
intervention and conflict research, whose rigorous conceptual categories and robust
trend assessments methodology outpace and outmatch such statements. However,
there is a general consensus that intervention from a distance – whether achieved
through the use of weapons technologies or a wider set of security agents and practices –
can reduce the various costs associated with military intervention. This has proved
appealing to states in recent decades, and the trend has grown more pronounced in the
wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This trendiness would seem to follow from
DEFENCE STUDIES 435
a concurrent fascination with drones and drone warfare. Indeed, the “remote” appella-
tion stems, in part, from the study of “remote control” technologies that is an integral
part of the interdisciplinary debates on drone warfare.
“Remote warfare” is a vague term. References to its imprecision have become routine.
This is wholly consistent with buzzwords more generally; their elusiveness being con-
stitutive of their ability to generate buzz, allowing them to “travel” across the discursive
terrain. The “remoteness” of remote warfare has been open to multiple interpretations. It
is understood to come from the physical separation of an intervening state’s conventional
ground forces from frontline fighting (Watson and Alasdair 2021, 7), but also the
distancing of Western publics from the daily experiences and sacrifices of war
(Adelman and Kieran 2020, 8; Brunck 2020; Demmers and Gould 2021; Riemann and
Rossi 2021a). At the same time, however, other contributions have unpacked the various
“intimacies” – or proximities – that are simultaneously produced through these actions.
These include various forms of civilian harm (Shiban and Molyneux 2021; Watson and
Alasdair 2021, 14–16) and the psychological stress experienced by some Western drone
operators (Williams 2015; Lee 2018). Speaking to what Riemann and Rossi (2021a, 82)
label its “radical duality,” remote warfare has, thus, simultaneously invited debate on how
the realities of political violence are pulled closer for some audiences whilst being pushed
further away from others. The study of these dialectical processes (Jelfs 2020) speaks to
the abstractness of its existing meaning.
The ambiguity around “remote warfare” is due in part to its association with dierent
actors. As alluded to in our earlier review, part of the popularity of the term appears to
stem from its ability to resonate differently with researchers, observers, and critics across
disciplinary or institutional contexts. Given the increasing scope of the security agents
and practices studied under its umbrella, remote warfare’s ability to generate both buzz
and multiple meanings is intuitive. Furthermore, problems of precision and meaning are
not contained to recent remote warfare scholarship. The concepts of hybrid warfare and
grey zone war have also been challenged and/or questioned over their ambiguity (Rauta
2016, 2020b; Ucko and Marks 2018; Almäng 2019). Even before they become buzzwords,
the meaning of newly coined terms can be opaque, muddying the contexts that determine
the boundaries of war itself (Almäng 2019). The contributors to this special issue offer
different and, in some respects, competing definitions of remote warfare. This is in
keeping with the capaciousness of buzzwords, as we understand them, and shows the
value of buzzwords-as-heuristics for generating vibrant research agendas.
In the case of remote warfare, the term took root outside of the academy. The objective
was not to use jargon to obfuscate the phenomenon but to find the right language to draw
attention to it. In 2014, the ORG, a London-based charity and think-tank advocating for
more sustainable and accountable approaches to security, created the Remote Control
Project, which would be recast as the Remote Warfare programme in 2018. Again, this
illustrates the salience of the “remote” adjective, which, through its association with
“remote control” devices, evoked the perceived centrality of drone technologies to recent
Western security practices. The ORG helped consolidate a wider network of NGOs and
civil society organisations working on the oversight of remote warfare, with particular
focus on human rights, governance, and transparency issues. This helped bring the
concept and terminology to new audiences – particularly in Great Britain, but also
elsewhere.
436 R. BIEGON ET AL.
As a buzzword, remote warfare has a normative dimension. It has often been
approached as a set of real-world practices which, implicitly or explicitly, need changing.
Adelman and Kieran (2020, 11) emphasise the importance of challenging remote war-
fare’s depiction by state actors and promoting a “continual reconsideration of scholarly
assumptions about it.” The ORG scrutinised several policy challenges created by remote
warfare (Watson and Alasdair 2021, 14–21), recommending changes to the doctrine,
training and planning approach used within the British military (Knowles and Watson
2018). Riemann and Rossi (2021a, 79) point to the “ethical imperative” at the centre of
the real-world practices of remote warfare, and others call to “‘make strange’ the evolving
normalisation of remote warfare as the lesser evil – as precise, efficient wars of necessity”
(Demmers and Gould 2021, 43). Remote warfare is also understood to undermine
elements of international law, even if complexities mean that its effects are not as one-
sidedly negative as is sometimes suggested by activists (Crawford 2017; Cullen 2017;
Ohlin 2017b). These understandings of remote warfare as normatively undesirable
conceivably influences the thinking behind whether the label is considered appropriate
in policymaking and defence circles.
As Bensaude Vincent notes, “the term ‘buzzword’ itself has a pejorative connota-
tion” (2014, 238–39). The same might be said about remote warfare. Some history is
instructive here. William Fitts Ryan, a Democratic Congressman from New York, was
a public critic of the Vietnam War and the first member of Congress to vote against
additional funding for the conflict (Knight 1972). In a 1968 debate on defence appro-
priations, Ryan claimed that it was “as if the Vietnam war has become a permanent and
inevitable fixture in American life, like the interminable, remote warfare predicted in
Orwell’s 1984” (Congressional Record House 1968, 16675, emphasis added). Striking
a similar tone, a 1973 issue of the socialist magazine Science for the People singled out
remote warfare as a key tool of “American Imperialists” and “a war of human machines
against the human body” (New England Action Research 1973, 39, 42). In the Vietnam
context, remote warfare was seen as a techno-political challenge to be overcome, in
part by raising popular awareness of its hidden costs and threats to democratic
governance. This normative undercurrent continues to inform much of the multi-
disciplinary debate on remote warfare, resulting in a call to “mak[e] visible . . . [the]
moral and political challenges that this new way of war has given rise to” (Demmers
and Gould 2021, 43).
Although remote warfare meets the criteria of a buzzword, it is therefore under-
standable that politicians and officials have used the term only sparingly. It has not (as of
yet) been utilised explicitly to set policy agendas so much as critique existing practices. In
its 2019 General Election manifesto, the (opposition) Labour Party pledged “to assess the
security challenges facing Britain, including new forms of hybrid, cyber and remote
warfare” as part of a Strategic Defence and Security Review (The Labour Party 2019). The
term remote warfare is not defined in this context and is mentioned only once. In
December 2020, Alyn Edward Smith, Member of Parliament for Stirling and the
Scottish National Party’s shadow spokesperson for the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, presented a Private Members Bill on “Arms (Exports and Remote Warfare).”
Amongst its other aims, this bill was intended to “prohibit the use of lethal autonomous
weapons” (HC Deb 16 December 2020). It also aimed to create more “effective mechan-
isms for democratic oversight or transparency” on both arms exports and drone
DEFENCE STUDIES 437
operations, whilst also “updat[ing] UK policy on drones, particularly on the rules of
engagement, adherence to international law, and . . . post-strike assessments to learn
lessons on how the technology is evolving.”
Two tentative conclusions can be drawn from the term’s use in recent British policy
discussions. First, there appears to be a lag – if not contestation – of the recent
reconceptualisation of remote warfare as “an approach used by states to counter threats
at a distance” (Watson and Alasdair 2021, 7). Where the term has been used in a policy
setting, its meaning centres on weapons technologies like drones and AWS. The bill
introduced by MP Smith, noted above, deals mainly with British arms exports, and its
title, “Exports and Remote Warfare” [HC Deb 16 December 2020, emphasis added],
implies the sale of military equipment is considered separate from remote warfare.
Second and perhaps more importantly for our purposes, the term’s use by policymakers
suggests the underlying pejorative connotations traceable to the Vietnam War have
persisted, albeit in a form reconfigured to the particular contingencies of twenty-first
century British politics. On the rare occasion that “remote warfare” has been used in
policy debates, then, it continues to be approached as something that needs to be
scrutinised, regulated and ultimately “made better.”
Special issue structure and contributions
The term’s recent trendiness points to the importance of the phenomena that its use is
meant to capture. Despite the various contestations that have played out, remote warfare
is a substantive topic, which has the potential to make a series of important and timely
contributions to the debate on contemporary political violence. The contributions to this
special issue explore an array of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical puzzles. They do
not come to a consensus on how remote warfare should be conceptualised. Instead, they
propose a variety of pathways for moving the debate forward, with the overarching aim of
bringing greater clarity to its meaning for academics, researchers, and practitioners.
In their contribution, Stoddard and Toltica examine Saudi Arabia’s and the United
Arab Emirates’ recent intervention in Yemen as a case of remote warfare. In doing so,
they take an important first step toward addressing the gap within the outcome-oriented
literature on remote warfare for the detailed, empirical study of non-Western approaches
to remote warfare. As Stoddard and Toltica trace, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates have also combined the use of airpower, special operation forces, private
military security contractors, and local partners to intervene from a distance, if in
a different operational and strategic context. Drawing from practice theory, Stoddard
and Toltica develop a novel conceptualisation of remote warfare as a set of practices,
which, whilst varying in its exact tactical configuration, produces the strategic effect of
advancing a state’s political interests without the deployment of large numbers of its
conventional ground forces. According to the authors, this practice-based understanding
of remote warfare helps “de-essentialise” the concept by moving beyond binary questions
of classification. It provides a framework for the more nuanced conceptualisation of
remote warfare as a continuum of different configurations of tactical practices. Such
a move, they argue, provides a stronger foundation for comparative studies of the use of
remote warfare by different actors, and helps to better position remote warfare within the
larger debate on the changing character of political violence.
438 R. BIEGON ET AL.
In the following paper, Trenta proposes a timely conceptual distinction between the
remoteness and the covertness of remote warfare. Through a review of recent remote
warfare scholarship, Trenta highlights the problematic conflation of “two distinct dimen-
sions that characterise deployments of force and, more broadly, governments’ engage-
ment in conflict and political violence” (2021). Existing understandings of the
remoteness of remote warfare, he argues, “has come to conflate the means or methods
governments use in the deployment of violence and the ways in which they deploy these
methods.” To disentangle these notions, Trenta proposes that remoteness be approached
through the means of military power used by an intervening agent to advance its strategic
interests, being understood as the degree of physical distance separating the armed
combatants involved in conflict. Trenta argues covertness, in contrast, should be
approached through how military force is deployed, more specifically whether it is
used in an opaque or overt manner. This distinction makes a timely contribution to
remote warfare scholarship by providing the conceptual clarity needed to move toward
a more sophisticated understanding of the complex interplay of remoteness and covert-
ness in political violence. Trenta takes an important step in this direction through
a detailed empirical study of the US government’s use of assassination as a foreign policy
tool since the beginning of the Cold War. In this way, Trenta also makes a second set of
important contributions to remote warfare scholarship: not only does his paper help
extend the historical focus beyond post-9/11 counterterrorism and stabilisation opera-
tions toward the Cold War but also develops the study of assassination as a remote
warfare practice.
Riemann and Rossi make a much-needed corrective to the debate on the use of
Security Force Assistance (and similar practices, including security cooperation) as
a form of remote warfare. They theorise its growing prominence in British foreign and
defence policy through an ontological security perspective to explore the role of self-
identity as a driver of intervention from a distance. In this way, Riemann and Rossi begin
to reorient remote warfare scholarship away from a narrow focus on “security-as-
survival” toward “security-of-being.” The United Kingdom’s growing use of SFA, they
argue, can be mapped to its “autobiographical narrative” – a “story” which actors create
about themselves in order to understand and navigate the world – which they call
a “global engagement identity.” At its core, this “global engagement identity” centres
on the United Kingdom’s self-perception as a globally active island nation with a great
power mindset. In an era of increasing uncertainty, the growing prominence of SFA is
seen to serve three purposes: “first, it reinforces/reinstates routinized relationships with
significant others; second, it re-establishes a sense of temporal continuity in the UK’s
activities; and third, it tames the existential anxiety generated by the current uncertain
and unpredictable international security environment” (Riemann and Rossi 2021a,
2021b). In this way, Riemann and Rossi (2021b) conceptualise remote warfare as an
“attempt to recreate order and hierarchy to keep threats at a distance, establish routines
and stability, and (re)establish a coherent autobiographical narrative.”
Similar to Trenta’s contribution, Watts and Biegon investigate the “remoteness” that
constitutes remote warfare. This examination is a step toward identifying the analytical
specificity of remote warfare within wider debates on contemporary political violence.
According to the authors, it also holds analytical relevance for understanding wider
empirical developments including the complexities of recent US military interventions.
DEFENCE STUDIES 439
As is clear from discussion of the American public’s relative detachment from the
realities of war (see, for example, Adelman and Kieran 2020, 9), there is growing scholarly
interest in the topic. When it comes to remoteness itself, however, there is a persistent
and troubling lack of clarity. Remoteness, Watts and Biegon argue, exists on
a continuum, and its study should be separated from the debates on physical distance,
even if the two notions are somewhat connected. Defining remoteness in relation to the
public’s socio-psychological detachment from the realities of political violence, as
mediated through knowledge and spectatorship of the use of military force, the authors
build on recent analyses of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of remote warfare. The
dynamics of remoteness are illustrated and “unpacked” by way of an often-overlooked
case of remote warfare: US intervention in Libya during and after the “Arab Spring.” The
Libya case shows that, while the physical distancing of US forces from frontline fighting
contributed toward the public’s remoteness, a thorough accounting of remote warfare
requires us to consider the public’s role and positioning with respect to the conflict.
Next, McDonald explores the military capabilities that are used as part of remote
warfare through the prism of political legitimacy. In doing so, he questions the impor-
tance of remote warfare scholarship to wider debates on the transformation of military
power. Following a theme also discussed by Stoddard and Toltica (2021), McDonald
proposes conceptualising remote warfare as a family resemblance of legitimacy problems
created through the use of military capabilities. The concept of remote warfare, he argues,
is “difficult to successfully differentiate and distinguish from like concepts.” It “covers
a variety of diverging phenomena, which are problematized for diverging reasons, and its
novelty is unclear” (2021). For McDonald, remote warfare cannot, therefore, be
approached as a particular category of war. Its reconceptualisation as a family resem-
blance of legitimacy problems provides a clearer boundary of contrast by way of its “focus
upon the consequences of integrating military capabilities at a systems level in order to
generate military effects” (2021). It also helps better explain remote warfare’s newness –
a subject of limited existing debate (Watts and Biegon 2019; Zeitlin 2020; Watson and
Alasdair 2021, 10–14) – in terms of the greater direction that policymakers can exercise
over the use of military capabilities overseas. Building on this framework, McDonald
continues to explore the core legitimacy problems involved with remote warfare, exam-
ining the role of state agency, government agency and responsibility. His analysis
concludes with a discussion of the legitimacy of the infrastructure and basing arrange-
ments needed to intervene at a distance.
Finally, Rauta’s paper offers a dissenting view that questions the extent to which “remote
warfare” should be advanced as a conceptual alternative. Rauta’s article presents a conceptual
critique that locates “remote warfare” and its conceptual problems in the broader semantic
field of political violence. As one of the latest arrivals in the ever-expanding vocabulary of the
study of political violence, “remote warfare” has contributed to a democratisation of the
debate around war and warfare by appealing to the practitioner, policy, think tank, and
academic worlds in some shape or form, thereby permitting an intellectual exchange
relatively unconstrained by each worlds’ modus operandi. Nevertheless, for “remote warfare”
to make significant strides, its proponents need to engage with the notion’s intellectual
infrastructure, and in this way, engage in the wider debate on how we think about political
violence. Rauta’s article argues that “remote warfare” should not be an exception, especially
as – so far – the record stacks against the notion. First, Rauta unpacks the lack of analytical
440 R. BIEGON ET AL.
value: what intellectual leverage does it hold over existing terms making similar claims?
Second, he presents an analysis of the many paradoxes with which “remote warfare” arrives,
all requiring examination before casting the notion as relevant to the discourse on contem-
porary war and warfare.
Conclusion: is remote warfare worth the buzz or just a buzzkill?
Debates on contemporary political violence are complicated and contentious. The seman-
tic field has become populated with a growing list of terms, newly coined or repurposed,
which tend to reflect comparable concerns and speak to similar processes and phenomena.
Of course, the introduction of new concepts is an important tool for creative thinking
about political violence in the twenty-first century. Conceptual innovation can help under-
line inadequacies in the existing lexicon and provide a window into areas of the debate that
have been overlooked or marginalised (Ucko and Marks 2018). Yet, the proliferation of
concepts may also foster disorder and a general sense of scholarly unease. For those
operating in this field, the dizzying array of overlapping and competing labels can create
a troubling sense of redundancy; the excitement of exploring elements of the perceived
zeitgeist can be undermined by a sense of confusion and narcissism of small differences.
Such “buzzkill” may be understandable, but it is not inevitable. Although we acknowl-
edge the challenges that accompany the further development of a relatively new concept,
the fact of the matter is that “remote warfare” has already firmly established itself in the
study of political violence, having taken root across a range of disciplinary and profes-
sional contexts. As we discussed, it has grown more prominent in recent years, becoming
a “buzzword” used not only by academics but by policymakers and practitioners.
Thinking about remote warfare as a buzzword means approaching the latter heuristically.
This move does not mean discrediting existing contributions, which can stimulate
cutting-edge scholarship on a range of interrelated topics and issues. At a minimum, it
offers an entrance into messy debates that extend well beyond any single conceptual
framing – a topic which is explored further in the remainder of this special issue
Acknowledgments
We thank our contributors to the special issue, the two anonymous reviewers for their very con-
structive feedback, and the journal’s editor, Simon Smith, for his support. We share equal authorship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
The authors have no funding to report.
DEFENCE STUDIES 441
Notes on contributors
Rubrick Biegon is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent. His research
interests include US foreign policy, international security, and remote warfare.
Vladimir Rauta is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Politics,
Economics, and International Relations at the University of Reading. His research focuses on
conflict delegation and proxy wars and has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as
International Studies Review, International Relations, Studies in Conict and Terrorism, Civil Wars,
Cambridge Review of International Aairs, RUSI Journal, and Contemporary Security Policy.
Tom F. A. Watts is a Teaching Fellow in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of
London, and a researcher on the AUTONORMS project based at the University of Southern
Denmark. His research focuses on American foreign and security policy, remote warfare, and
lethal autonomous weapons systems.
ORCID
Rubrick Biegon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4337-809X
Vladimir Rauta http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3870-8680
Tom F. A. Watts http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5385-6334
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