In this book review of Paul Lushenko and Shyam Raman’s The Legitimacy of Drone Warfare: Evaluating Public Perceptions, Joseph Chapa examines how the authors purport to do four things: 1) deliver empirically verifiable differences in how citizens of various countries perceive the legitimacy of drone warfare (in this case, the US and France); 2) offer a novel definition of drone warfare; 3) deliver novel empirical data on the degree to which people perceive drone warfare as legitimate; and 4) show how the Obama Administration Presidential Planning Guidance took effect two years before President Barack Obama announced the policy change.
Chapa proceeds to focus on the validity of these claims by assessing Lushenko and Raman’s survey instrument and comparing their conclusions against common problems in drone warfare scholarship. Ultimately, the inadequate definitions of both “legitimacy” and “drone warfare” in this study limits the merits of the book’s purported findings.
Although the book does show a difference in US and French perspectives on warfare, and indeed shows how the Obama policy change went into effect two years before announced, these are small gains relative to the book’s stated goals. In the end, Chapa finds that Lushenko and Raman’s work falls victim to the biases and misconceptions common in drone literature that they attempted, but failed, to avoid. Nevertheless, their commendable attempt to begin answering critical questions in drone warfare can help identify how academics should proceed in developing this scholarship going forward.