Book part: Targeting from a Distance: Formatting Social Relations in Data-Driven Warfare
Abstract
In this paper we analyze enactments of a social scientific
methodology, namely social network analysis (SNA) as
described and depicted in contemporary US military discourses.
We follow the progressive digital grounding of
military organization and knowledge through the lens of
SNA. Framing SNA in this context, as a social technology
that is co-constituting the worlds it studies, we see
that it is embedded deeply in the logics of data-driven
warfare, as well as the massive industrial and governmental
efforts to map the social graph. By navigating
through military applications and realizations of the network
metaphor, we find SNA at the core of a rhetoric of
precision that underlines the potential to deliver “high
value” targets, and is outlined as computational counterterrorism
and counterinsurgency from a distance.
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