Sramana Majumdar

"Violence, Identity and Self-determination: Narratives of conflict from the Kashmir Valley" 4:15 PM, Monday 18 Nov Room 239, BYC Bryn Mawr College

Exposure Index

Tired of paper and pencil questionnaires about integration and intergroup contact? Try the new and improved EXPOSURE INDEX (click tab above on this page).

Ex-Premier Is Set to Regain Power in Pakistan Vote

One of Premier-elect Nawaz Sharif’s main campaign planks was stopping the U.S. drone strikes, which are overwhelmingly hated by the people of Pakistan. It has also been argued that the drone strikes play into the hands of Taliban propaganda by making it easy to portray the U.S. as a faceless, distant, and uncaring imperial power.

Former Air Force Pilot Has Cautionary Tales About Drones

As drone pilots are never personally at risk and are often thousands of miles away it is easy to forget that they can still suffer psychological damage. Their very safety – the inequality/”unfairness” of their position versus their targets’ – could even make the stress greater.

Drones In Yemen: Does the U.S. Pay Families When Strikes Kill Innocent Yemenis?

This is yet another piece of information on the use of drones that is classified. It is known that there are documents on the subject, which implies the answer to be ‘yes’, however.

CIA Refuses to Acknowledge Drone Targeted Killings

The use of drone strikes is public known, extensively documented, and – bizarrely – still classified and officially secret.

Israeli drone strike kills suspected Islamic militants in Egypt

Egypt denied any cooperation with Israel on the strike, and even denied that a strike had taken place. This conflict between a government desiring drone strikes and a populace that sees them as signs of western imperialism and civilian casualties is familiar from Pakistan.

3 US drone strikes kill 12 militants in Yemen, officials say

As the debate over the limits and uses of domestic unmanned vehicles heats up, the drone strikes abroad continue. Variations of this article (originally by AP) also appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian.

Elysium (2013)

In Blomkamp’s Science Fiction parable of economic inequality, unmanned vehicles of all kinds are used to control, police, and oppress the protagonist and others. The most common use of unmanned vehicles in fiction has been – like this film – as tools of the antagonists and obstacles.

A Meta-Study of Drone Strike Casualties

This article investigates the high variance in attempts to count civilian casualties of drone strikes. While the government has at times claimed that there were no civilian casualties, the studies looked at here indicate 7% to 34% of deaths were noncombatants.

U.S. Drone Strike Kills at Least 6 in Pakistan

Article states that a senior commander in a Pakistani Taliban group was killed. It also states that Pakistan continues to see the drone strikes as counterproductive and an affront to their sovereignty.

DARPA Hydra, here comes the mothership designed to deploy drones

The goal of the project is an unmanned submarine capable of deploying smaller unmanned underwater and/or aerial vehicles. Unlike the Air Force, the Navy appears less culturally against unmanned vehicle, having tested long range autonomous vehicles for years, quietly implementing them for mapping and surveillance. This perhaps comes from decades of autonomous torpedo development. Deployable […]