To aid research on 'The Recognition of Risk: Drone Warfare and Strategies of Recognition'

MADIHA TAHIR, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received funding in April 2014 to aid research on 'The Recognition of Risk: Drone Warfare and Strategies of Recognition,' supervised by Dr. Elizabeth Povinelli. Renamed 'Drone Warfare and the Politics of Liberalism,' this project draws on fourteen months of research to examine how stories and testimonies of drone attacks in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are mediated and circulated. FATA, once the site of British bombing campaigns at the turn of the last century, has today served as one of the earliest sites of American drone bombardment. The search for 'militants' and 'terrorists' in the U.S. 'war on terror' has meant that those who survive the bombing often face intense suspicion. They, in turn, attempt to deploy media artifacts in tandem with human rights organizations to lay claim to their humanity and dignity in the local press as well as internationally. Through ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews, this project develops an understanding of how the (non)recognition of drone affectees is linked to the mediation of FATA itself as a particular kind of space that is produced through infrastructures of control and containment-and that has consequences for how media artifacts and testimonies are seen and heard.