The first thing you notice is the darkness. Monrovia, Liberia's capital, is an hour from the airstrip, and other than the occasional dimly lit chop-hut serving rice and fish, the way into the city is obscure. One is almost tempted to idealize this perfect darkness and its accompanying quiet as pristine elemental beauty, rather than what it really is: the wreckage of a disaster whose depths, as Ryszard Kapuściński writes, “condemned some to death and transformed others into monsters.”

From a moral standpoint, lethal drones are intrinsically no worse as a means of warfare than bombing or sending commandos to kill enemies. From the perspective of their users, they have six major advantages over more conventional weapons: they are often cheaper; their use can be more readily concealed; they allow for more precise targeting, with the potential for less “collateral damage”; their use can involve less serious infringements of sovereignty than invasion by troops; and they may be less likely to provoke widespread hostile reactions by the population of the country in which they are used than military operations involving troops on the ground. But these advantages generate three major risks: of violating sovereignty, of over-using the military option, and of making it more difficult to identify violations of constraints against targeting noncombatants. To deal with these risks, a Drone Accountability Regime is needed that imposes obligations on states, which in turn would be required to impose them on their agents. Since it would be infeasible to negotiate a treaty-based legal regime at present and for the foreseeable future, the Drone Accountability Regime should be informal and should involve transnational actors as well as states. Its key principle should be transparency, helping enable civil society to hold states accountable, and its central agent would be an Ombudsperson with broad authority to investigate situations and publicize her findings. No institution can ensure that states, or operators, are held fully accountable to appropriate standards of conduct, but such a regime could increase the degree of accountability for the use of lethal drones.

Responsibility for the provision of global public goods is generally couched in moral terms: terms that, to one side of the important moral argument, signal the deficit of global collective action despite recent engagements in the normative concept of “sovereignty as responsibility.” In this context the article seeks greater emphasis, in morally informed reflection on world politics, on political responsibility. The argument is made in two steps. The article considers first the specificity of moral responsibility and the inextricability of moral and political interest in international relations. Having situated both with regard to the decision-making structures of national government, the article argues, second, for a normative reconfiguration of political duty in terms of task-efficacy, republican legitimacy, and political leadership. As a result, a badly needed marriage between national priorities and global threats and challenges is made possible.

This article argues that the use of just war theory as the principal framework for ethical assessment of the use of drones for targeted killing is hampered by the absence of a spatial dimension. Drawing on critical political geography, the article develops a concept of “distant intimacy” that explores the spatial characteristics of the relationship between drone deployers and their targets, revealing that the asymmetry of this relationship extends beyond conventional analysis to establish “dronespace” as a place where the autonomy of the target and the possibility of reciprocity are structurally precluded. This extends ethical critique of drone use beyond established concerns and establishes the importance of space and spatiality to the possibility of ethics in a way that just war theory has, to date, been unable to fully appreciate.