Masculine state terror: narratives of legitimising violence and monopolising truth

This case study examines the United States Military Drone Programme through a feminist and post-colonialist lens and highlights the logic of masculine legitimacy used to justify violence for reasons of state and reasons of ‘protection’. With reference to other pertinent examples of questionable state activities seemingly justified by a sovereign state’s claim to a ‘monopoly on violence’ for the maintenance of ‘public order’ and ‘sovereign borders’, this article criticises the notion that state violence is inherently justified and points out the heteropatriarchal and colonialist nature of such an assertion. Narratives of justified state violence and masculine legitimacy will be deconstructed with reference to the concept of the human ‘subject’ and ‘object’ before this paper concludes that such narratives should be abandoned in order to seek a political, discursive and social space which does not preference the violence of white men over the safety of othered groups such as women and people of colour.