Just war theory and the drone contract: French drone use in the Sahel and the question of racialized consent

Abstract

The literature on the ethics of drones is vast, but little attention has been paid to the centrality of consent. Where consent is discussed, it tends to be in the controversial US context. To correct this oversight, this article advances the notion of the drone contract – the reciprocal relationship between a host state and drone-wielding state to permit drone use in the territory of the former by the latter. Why would a host or drone-wielding state enter the drone contract? Why would a host state remove consent? Why would the drone-wielding power accept the removal of permission? To answer these questions, the article conceptualizes the drone contract and explores drone use in the Sahel as a paradigm case to explore the contours of consent. Drawing insights from contractarian just war thinking and Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract, it identifies two types of consent: colorblind (based on the assumptions shaping the state-based international system and the laws of war) and racialized (steeped in colonial legacies that sometimes frame the drone contract, particularly when Western powers are involved). These shades of consent shape how drone-wielder and drone host perceive drone violence, offering insights in debates about drone violence and just war theory.

Keywords

Charles Mills consent drones France just war theory race

Introduction

When France conducted its first drone strike in December 2019 in Mali, in the Sahel region of West Africa, as part of Operation Barkhane, there was hope that the acquisition of armed drones might be a game changer. They became part of the broader G-5 Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania and Niger) Joint Force security agreement, with France having explicit permission to operate militarily in this geographical space. Fast forward three years and the situation had changed. Simmering tensions led to Mali, followed by Burkina Faso and Niger, withdrawing consent and forming a new security alliance, the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES), in September 2023 (Frowd, 2023). The drones patrolling the Sahel skies were no longer French; rather, AES drones (purchased from Turkey and Iran) now do the hunting. This snapshot, I argue, offers important insights about the future of (ethical) war if we take consent for drone strikes seriously.

The G-5 Sahel states hosting French drones is one example among dozens of small states hosting great power drones. Such hosting is likely to increase as drone proliferation accelerates and the fight against transnational terrorist groups stagnates and spreads. James Rogers explains what small states might gain from this relationship – ‘a certain leverage, control, and power in international politics’ – but warns, as the case of Niger hosting US drones shows, that ‘issues of transparency, sovereignty, public disquiet, and national stability must be carefully managed if the relationship is to remain stable and the positives maintained’ (Rogers, 2021: 60, 70). The case studied here builds on these insights, focusing on the salience of consent to tease out what buttresses (or erodes) the relationship between drone hosts and drone-wielding powers.

The literature on the ethics of drones is vast, but little attention has been paid to the centrality of consent (Enemark, 2023; McDonald, 2016; Schulzke, 2017). Where consent is discussed, it tends to be mentioned in passing or done so in the US context, for whom, despite many legal critiques, consent is not a necessary condition (Boyle, 2020: 59, 67; Byrne, 2016). The United States undertook drone strikes in Pakistan when the regime withdrew permission in 2013, while the legitimacy of those giving consent in Yemen and Somalia was questionable (Byrne, 2016: 106–107). The upshot is that drone strikes based on the unable–unwilling doctrine seem to suggest that consent, while nice to have, is not openly required, because drone use can be legitimized by a controversial view of imminence that flaunts international law (Brooks, 2014: 93). Some even argue legitimacy absent consent could be established post-strike. In their drone accountability regime, Buchanan and Keohane (2015: 20–21) make the case that states can give an explication post hoc as to why consent was not received – in civil wars or in so-called failed state contexts because there was no one to officially ask. These explanations eschew a moral world in which consent should be obligatory.

This article sets out to explore the different contours of consent between drone-wielding and host states. The logical place to begin when talking about consent is social contract theory, which means in the context of just war thinking, engaging with Benbaji and Statman’s (2019) contractual just war account developed in War by Agreement. In a recent symposium, Dill and Fabre (2022: 668) laud the book, and the critical replies, as ‘one of the most important joint contributions to just war theory of the last two decades’. The book comes at an ‘inflection point in the development of just war theory’ insofar as the just war tradition has witnessed the ascendency of ‘Anglophone academic philosophy with theorists developing individualist accounts of the morality of war modelled on the morality of killing in general’. Contra this revisionist view, War by Agreement offers a contractarian defense, derived from analytical reasoning, ‘of the moral foundations of the laws of war’ (2022: 664–665).

In a compelling critique, Finlay argues War by Agreement does not consider adequately how the balance of power between what Benbaji and Statman call decent and indecent international actors might impact the war contract. His critique is a stepping-stone to a broader call to arms for just war theorists to pay greater attention to the vagaries of power balances in the international order. While Finlay turns to John Rawls’s contractarian account of war to offer a correction whereby ‘just war theory would arise . . . as a consequence of the need to regulate relations between decent adherents to the essentially pacifist social contract and those that reject it or are unable to satisfy its provisions’, I take a more critical approach (Finlay, 2022: 727–729). One of the fundamental critiques of analytical reasoning in just war is that it essentially defends the status quo of the liberal world order, privileging Western moral reasoning about war that misses something fundamental about how colonialism shapes just and unjust violence today (Hutchings, 2019: 215, 227). The analytical method used by Benbaji and Statman occludes the latent imperial and racial hierarchies framing consent in the real world. In the spirit of scholarship that uses social contract theory to explore the inegalitarian power dynamics shaping racial, sexual and immigrant relationships to dominant groups, I turn to Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract as a lens through which to better understand consent (Mills, 1997; Pateman, 1988; Brunstetter, 2012). Mills contributes to international relations debates about race but unfortunately his work is mostly absent from just war debates (Mills, 2014, 2019). Moreover, it is worth noting that none of the critics in the symposium mentioned above engaged Mills’s critique of contract theory. Such lack of engagement is symptomatic of academia whereby ‘the focus on race and racism . . . often involves discourses among the like-minded, directed at but without the participation of mainstream scholars, who thus find it easy to ignore the challenge’ (Acharya, 2022: 42). To correct this failing, the metatheoretical contribution of this article is to engage mainstream scholars of just war theory, and drone ethics in particular, to push the logic of the analytical argument by showing where race does and does not fit.

Although War by Agreement does not talk about drones, its contractarian account should provide moral guidance to consider drone use. Elsewhere, Statman articulates a defense of drones as offering real promise for moral progress, whereby drones are part of a just war waged by decent parties against indecent parties, such as non-state actors like Al-Qaeda (Statman, 2015: 474). The argument, however, skirts the question of consent and, in doing so, obscures the perceived colonial and racial hierarchies that sometimes structure drone violence. This shortcoming within contractarian just war theory merits further exploration by bringing Charles Mills’s critique of social contract heuristics into the discussion to explore what I call the drone contact. Doing so pushes just war theorizing in the same direction as international relations scholarship that moves beyond a Western-centric focus and emphasizes the role of race and colonialism in structuring liberal internationalism and ethical interventionalism (Abrahamsen, 2017; Henderson, 2024).

The centrality of consent and the Millsian lens raises a series of questions:

Why would a host state or drone-wielding state enter the drone contract?

Why would a host state remove consent and why would the drone-wielding power accept the removal of permission?

How do colonial legacies and race shape the conditions for consent?

Theorizing the drone contract has urgent real-world implications given drones are seen as key to counter-terrorism operations in the future, though they are anything but a panacea (Ajala, 2024; Okpaleke et al., 2023). At the time of writing, Togo, Benin, and Côte d’Ivoire are weighing the possibility of giving consent to France to operate its drones on their territory; Niger meanwhile has rescinded permission for the United States to operate drones from a US$110 million drone base operational since 2019, leaving the United States in search of different regional security partners. Meanwhile, the AES, since its inception, has made drones the centerpiece of its collective defense agreement to provide mutual aid against terrorism (Millecamps and Karaali, 2024). That some strikes have purportedly caused civilian casualties and motivated terrorist recruitment raises concerns oft associated with Western drones perceived as aerial technologies of domination (Emery and Brunstetter, 2015; Olumba, 2024).

Although I engage with the analytical philosophy of Benbaji and Statman, I follow Hutchings’s critique by recognizing how analytical thought experiments reinforce the identification of justice with the world of idealized liberal actors, whereas the distinction between decent and indecent states is far from clear-cut (2019: 222). The Millsian angle exposes that racial factors have been neglected in international relations theory and, until recently, mostly ignored in just war theorization (Wolfendale, 2025). Methodologically, I challenge the now dominant analytical turn in just war theory by following those who employ casuistic reasoning to prompt analytical philosophy to engage real-world cases (Brunstetter, 2021: 16; Walzer, 2006: xiv; cf. Frowe, 2023). Thus, French and AES drone use in the Sahel is a paradigm case, showcasing particularly illuminating moral arguments pertinent to the present character of the world, namely the role of consent and the impact of colonial legacies on perceptions of drone violence. Because I am concerned with actual judgments and justifications to tease out the moral contours of giving and rescinding consent, I draw on how key actors – state leaders, the UN, regional associations – articulate different shades of consent in official statements, press releases, and associated documents. The paradigm case (spanning 2012–2024) reveals two different kinds of consent that frame the drone contract – colorblind and racialized – which impact how drones are used and the perception of drone violence.

The article begins by laying out the assumptions of the drone contract as an extension of contractarian just war theory, with colorblind consent a key feature. Then, drawing on Mills’s The Racial Contract, it revisits these assumptions to showcase the racial underpinnings of consent, structurally forged via historical Western colonial exploits and the long-term geopolitical impacts that have ensued. The article continues by exploring the paradigm case, first from the French perspective that tracks with the conventions of colorblind consent, followed by Malian perspectives that reveal how drone violence can expose the racial undertones of consent. The concluding section turns to what just war scholars term the re-establishment principle to explore how regional states such as those in the AES might seize renewed agency using drones and the principal of ethical retreat to probe why powerful states like France might agree to disengage (Brunstetter, 2021: 98–102; Rutazibwa, 2013).

The drone contract

I call the assumptions and permissions that frame the legitimacy of drone use by one state in the territory of another the drone contract – the reciprocal agreement made between the host state(s) and drone-wielding state based on widely accepted international norms to use armed drones against nefarious parties for the sake of peace. Central to the drone contract is the notion of consent. In a world in which sovereignty is the backbone of international relations, consent confers legitimacy and accountability. The requirement of consent stems from a general presumption against the use of force on another state’s territory. The clearest form of consent is public consent made through official channels, such as bilateral agreements, regional associations, or under the auspices of the UN Security Council.

Scholars argue there may be instances when only tacit consent is sufficient because the government might face a backlash for inviting outside forces (Buchanan and Keohane, 2015: 20). Tacit consent, however, is problematic because it suggests a lack of transparent commitment and an unequal relationship between the drone-wielding state and host state. One could argue that corrupt governments, or those where power was seized by a coup that overthrew a democratic government, have no legitimacy to give consent or take it away (Buchanan, 2018: 307). This view taps into the liberal understanding that the people have a united voice that confers legitimacy but may be too high a standard. Governments can change through democratic elections, but also, as was the case with Mali, through (multiple) coups d’etat. Top down, bottom-up, factional – consent can be complicated, but nevertheless, essential. Enter social contract theory.

Social contract theory has a storied place in Western political philosophy, though the history and debates need not be rehearsed here. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls are household names, as are the main critics. The essence of the social contract conveys trading natural liberty for rights-based security via consent. The overarching tenets are well known and continue to inspire attempts to theorize about what is needed to ensure mutually beneficial long-term cooperation (Moehler, 2018). The tenets include the insecurity of the state of nature, the lack of a universal sovereign to enforce the rules, giving consent to accept a social contract so as to be better off than in the state of nature by gaining rights and protection but giving up the right to do anything one has the power to do, and the responsibilities that go with upholding the terms of the contract.

Contraction theory has seminal applications to just war theory. In War by Agreement, Benbaji and Statman (2019: 38) build on social contract theory – specifically a Lockean version in which states (like individuals) have rights and duties towards one another – to construct a contractarian framework for ethical war. Their metatheoretical goal is to bridge the moral impasse separating so-called traditionalists and revisionists. Much ink has been spilled on whether the morality of war is different from everyday morality and whether deep morality should guide our actions in war. These debates dividing just war theory need not be rehashed (Pattison, 2018). What is important for present purposes is that Benbaji and Statman (2019: 7) argue ‘morality should focus on the rules to be followed rather than directly the morality of the act’. They therefore try to uncover the rules ‘decent states whose aim is to preserve the peace of the status qua ante’ would devise via mutual consent to govern the use of force in international relations. Their theory, however, overlooks colonial legacies shaping the war agreement. While their methodology is largely analytical, critically engaging their assumptions through the paradigm case studied below is part of the process, as Knox (2014) argues, of unwriting and unwhitening of the international system if philosophy and international relations work in tandem.

Recognizing states exist in a realm of chronic insecurity, Benbaji and Statman build the case for a system of ‘minimally just symmetrical anarchy’, which can be attained through mutually beneficial cooperation whereby states agree to a social contract that defines the do’s and don’ts of war. The UN Charter and the laws of war, they contend, are best understood as a voluntary contract between decent states, aimed at maintaining peace (2019: 72). The war contract constitutes the jus ad bellum agreement among states to limit the inherent right to use force to solve disputes. The war agreement inhibits the right to wage some wars that could be pre-contractually permissible, such as preventive wars and humanitarian interventions, even though this might permit an unjust but stable peace: ‘the peace that the Charter aims to maintain is just a peace, not necessarily a just peace’ (2019: 4) They assume the ‘moral equality of states’ exists regardless of their authoritarian or democratic leanings, with the important caveat being that existing states do not turn into rogue states (2019: 88).

In her review of the book, Claire Finkelstein summarizes the contribution of the contractarian model:

it may be able to explain the need to adhere to international norms among nations, without treating such norms as binding because they are independently morally mandated. The norms of international law are binding . . . because adherence to them is ultimately in the self-interest of the states that have implicitly or explicitly agreed to be bound by them. (Finkelstein, 2021: 483)

Although drones do not figure in Benbaji and Statman’s argument, the drone contract should, given the use of drones to target non-state actors threatening civilian security, be seen as a layer within the broader contractarian view of war. Elsewhere Statman provides a defense of drones as no different from other weapons platforms and a defense of targeted killing which drones have arguably facilitated, but elides the question of consent entirely (2015: 483–484). And yet, consent should figure into the legitimacy of drone use. According to the war contract, the ‘self-help regime to which states subject themselves in order to avoid inefficient wars would treat any violation of territorial integrity as a just cause for war (unless the contract explicitly allows the violation in question)’ (Benbaji and Statman, 2019: 76) – in other words, when a host state gives consent to a drone-wielding state. While it is tempting to call this egalitarian consent, a more fitting term is colorblind consent because the abstract reasoning (and the laws of war-based system it defends) do not ‘see’ how race and hierarchy are part of the actual global architecture of the state-based system.

The drone contract rests on granting temporally bounded permission for a foreign power to operate on the sovereign territory of the host state. Because the drone-wielding state is invited to use force on the host state’s territory, such use is not aggression or a crime against peace. Rather, the drone contract would be, presumably, mutually beneficial to both states. For the host state, the foreign drones provide the means to defeat non-state actors challenging the legitimacy of the government. In ideal terms, the drone-wielding state acts as a third-party co-guarantor for the security of the host state’s citizens against internal threats because the host state is incapable of providing for such protections on its own. With consent, and assuming the laws of war are followed, drone use would be different from state-sponsored terrorism (Blakeley, 2018). Scholars citing the France–Mali case refer to this as the ‘sovereignty-enhancing’ drone strategy, but also warn of the ‘imperial slide’ if drones become a tool of power projection (Brunstetter and Férey, 2021: 145–146).

Essential to the drone contract is that permission can be rescinded. Should the reciprocal relationship of mutual benefits shift in a detrimental direction – because drones are causing too many civilian casualties or if trust breaks down for other reasons – then the host state can rescind consent. Removing consent means drone activities would have to cease. The drone contract’s rupture, however, does not mean a return to the Hobbesian state of nature defined by a war of all against all. The states do not become enemies. Rather, they are still bound by the broader war contract. If the drone-wielding party respects this by not using its drones on the other state’s territory without consent – an act of aggression – then no cause for war between them exists.

For scholars interested in drone ethics, nagging questions remain. What happens if, after consent is removed, threats to the drone-wielding state emerge from within the former host state’s territory? Can consent be bypassed and strikes, which violate the former host state’s territorial integrity, against threatening non-state actors be justified? The answer could be yes. However, if the war contract was agreed to by truly egalitarian parties, then the drone-wielding state would have to consent to other states using drones on its territory without permission against presumably legitimate targets. Yet, one can theorize various scenarios that Western drone-wielding powers which target non-state actors would not agree to taking place on their own territory, such as a drone-wielding state from the Global South targeting political dissidents residing in a Western state or settler colonialists as legitimate targets (Mares, 2021: 496). Such reciprocity, however, is problematically absent from the war agreement.

Instead of accepting reciprocity, Benbaji and Statman accept caveats to the rules that re-enforce the hierarchy between decent and indecent states. Here is where the colorblindness of abstract just war thinking, and the shade of consent it theorizes, misses something important about the actual world. Indecent states, labeled rogue, are not privy to the permissions and constraints of the war agreement. Although the authors do not talk about drones, the obvious question is: could formerly decent states that remove consent for the drone contact come to be seen as indecent? If so, decent drone-wielding states could legitimately use drones on the territory of such states, without facing morally reciprocal consequences. Such a caveat tracks with analytical moral defenses of drones and would uphold the legal status quo of the US precedent (Statman, 2015; Brennan, 2012). But it is fraught with implicit epistemological hierarchy.

It is not hard to see the racial implications here if one steps outside the world of abstract philosophy and into a world in which Western states give themselves license to project power via drones, while civilians in non-Western states are subject to the violence that ensues. This is symptomatic, as one scholar notes, of mainstream just war thinkers having ‘failed to recognize the role of just war theory as a tool of expansion and colonialism – a far cry from the tradition’s claim that the just war tradition aims to only justify war for sake of peace’ (Wolfendale, 2025: 290).

Revisiting the drone contract through a Millsian lens sheds light on this epistemological hierarchy by showing how consent for drone use functions in a world defined by colonial legacies.

The racialized drone contract

The drone contract depends on decent states respecting each other’s sovereignty, measured in terms of colorblind consent assumed to be between equal partners. But this notion of equality is problematic in the Sahel, where France had a colonial presence, which it still maintains in the postcolonial world shaped by a form of postcolonial responsibility to help the Sahel states deal with jihadist threats (Holeindre, 2018: 152). Yet, colonial history impacts international relations, creating epistemic and normative hierarchies – civilized/barbaric, order/disorder, democratic/failed state – which drones arguably amplify (Williams, 2021: 124).

To capture such hierarchies, I turn to Mills’s (1997) critical book on social contract theory, The Racial Contract, to revisit the precepts of the drone contract. Mills uses the notion of the social contract, ‘not merely normatively, to generate judgments about social justice and injustice, but descriptively, to explain the actual genesis of society and the state, the way society is structured, the way governments function, and people’s moral psychology’ (1997: 5). For Mills, looking at the social contract through a racial lens ‘gives us a kind of X-ray vision into the real internal logic of the socio-political system. Thus, it does normative work for us not through its own values . . . but by enabling us to understand the polity’s actual history and how these values and concepts have functioned to rationalize oppression, so as to reform them’ (1997: 5–6; emphasis added). Mills does not want simply to diagnose the ills of the social contract, but to correct them.

I do not have the space for a broader discussion of Mills’s theory (and its critiques) (Garcia, 2001). Instead, I want to highlight the salient points that allow us to view the drone contract from a structural angle, focusing on the built-in inequalities of some interstate relations that magnify, in contrast to just war theory’s colorblind commitment to human rights and the laws of war, the asymmetrical effects of drone violence. More specifically, looking at the drone contract through a Millsian lens shows that where some see consent given to kill morally and legally, others see the footprint of a longstanding power differential steeped in colonialism and the racialized violence this entails.

Here are the takeaway points from Mills’s theory as applied to the drone contract. While contractarianism is supposed to be based on commitments to moral egalitarianism drawn from the deep Enlightenment – ‘the language of equality which echoes in the American and French Revolutions, the declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man’, to use Mills’s words – the color-coded lens of the racial contract shows the inequality that defines human (and interstate) relationships. These are based on historical and philosophical inequalities built into the social contract in its various guises, because certain groups are excluded from the benefits that the social contract is supposed to grant (Mills, 1997: 16). In addition, Mills highlights the dissent between the European view of the superiority and eventual triumph of Enlightenment ideals and ‘Third World’ theorists who highlight the lasting link between the proliferation of these ideals and the nefarious effects of colonialism (1997: 35). Finally, Mills warns that despite significant progress in dismantling (some of) the structures of the racial contract, there is a real risk of ‘taking the status quo of differential racial entitlement as normatively legitimate, and not to be investigated further’ (1997: 40). This is precisely what the analytical just war thinking structuring Benbaji and Statman’s war contract does. However, if we bring colonial hierarchy back into the theory’s assumptions as a founding assumption, then it becomes evident that colorblind consent is missing something important. I call consent fused with colonial history and the racial assumptions that underpin it racialized consent.

Despite the ideal notion of sovereign equality bequeathed by the international system, a deeper historical inequality undergirds the UN Charter and the ‘war agreement’. This inequality is steeped in the colonial past and its legacy, meaning the drone contract will also be impacted – and not just impacted temporarily, but for the long term and maybe irrevocably. The inequality, however, is not seen by the former colonial power, which acts according to perceptions of minimally just symmetrical anarchy and colorblind consent. Because of this, the asymmetrical violence is glossed over. Consider how Benbaji and Statman pragmatically justify collaterally killing enemy civilians, and how France uses othering language – lumped into the category of ‘terrorists’ or ‘jihadists’ that official French reports talk of ‘neutralizing’ – with little distinction paid to local identities and histories (2019: 143–144; Ministre des Armées, 2022). The upshot is this: when thinking about the drone contract between Western powers and non-Western partners once subject to colonialism, onlookers gain purchase by assuming the original position of inequality marked by racialized consent. This is a starkly different assumption compared to the equal partner assumption presupposed by France, or by decent states more generally, to use Benbaji and Statman’s terminology.

The change is not just a matter of semantics; it captures a shift in moral perception of how drone violence is perceived. From the Millsian angle, the narrative that drone violence respects human rights is marked by a tension between commitment to the laws of war and the on-the-ground sentiment that human rights discourse somehow excludes those from former colonies living under drones. Paradoxically, the stronger that commitment is defended, the more the well-known nefarious aspects of drones garnered from the US drone paradigm – such as the fear of strikes ‘out of the blue’, the risk transfer scenario, and concerns related to aerial occupation – undermine trust and the egalitarian facade of colorblind consent (Brunstetter, 2021: 161). Human errors, ambiguity regarding certain strikes, or even legitimate strikes according to international law that cause proportional collateral damage, merely fuel the image of drones as instruments of colonial power.

The racial contract shows that the human rights agenda has historically been a circumscribed framework, with some groups left out. Such exclusion has deep roots in the just war tradition and is embedded in the assumptions of colorblind analytical just war scholarship (Brunstetter, 2018: 300; Hutchings, 2019: 214–215). As Wolfendale, drawing on Mills, argues, defining other states as ‘rogue’ conjures the civilized–barbarian dichotomy, which, instead of ‘serving to limit the wrongful uses of military force in the contemporary world, may effectively promote and reinforce white supremacist and colonialist tropes and justify the seemingly endless and unconstrained use of military force’ (Wolfendale, 2025: 287). Those who do not play by Western rules tend to be delegitimized, not unlike the rogue states hypothetically described in Benbaji and Statman’s war contract which are not protected by the contract’s restraints.

In the real world, especially if the US drone precedent is followed, it would be a small leap to categorize a state such as Mali as an ‘indecent state’ for not adequately dealing with the spillover threat terrorist groups pose and ignore the requirement of consent altogether. But the drone contract’s emphasis on shades of consent imposes a different moral story.

France and colorblind consent

Let us begin by understanding the drone-wielder’s position, which parallels the assumptions of contractarian just war, problematically eliding the Millsian critique. French military interventionism is shaped by an ethos, that is, the moral image France has of itself as a ‘great’ nation. Central to this image is the notion that France self-identifies as the birthplace of human rights and defender of universal values, which entails strong adherence to the tenets of international law, including the laws of war and respecting the sovereignty of other states. Despite the obvious contradictions given France’s colonial past, as well as its domestic political measures related to the war on terror and immigration, this ethos nevertheless structures how France views its place in the world (Gèze, 2005). Adhering to the drone contract by seeking consent from the host state follows from this ethos.

As the self-identified birthplace of human rights, France sees itself as holding a special responsibility to promote, protect, and uphold them, sometimes using military force.

As France pondered arming its drones, questions were raised about how they would fit into the dual French military doctrines of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – the intervention d’humanité (humanitarian intervention) and the droit d’ingérence (right to intervene) – with the colonial past a disregarded factor (Staunton, 2020: 30). Their eventual incorporation into the military ethos was not accomplished in a moral vacuum; rather, it was done in the backdrop of the controversial – because it arguably circumvented international law and the centrality of consent – US drone program, which France viewed with suspicion.

In 2017, the French Senate debated the possibility of arming its drones. The ensuing report, ‘Observation drones and armed drones: sovereignty at stake’, showcases the centrality of sovereignty. The parallels with the presumed equality of the Benbaji and Statman ‘war contract’ defining the international system, based on minimally just symmetrical anarchy as shared by equal sovereign states, should be clear. From the French perspective, drones risked changing the equation by providing the means to violate another state’s sovereignty with greater ease to attack threatening non-state actors operating within. The subsection ‘Arming drones: a necessary debate’ recognizes that following the US precedent would be problematic. This is not a minor disagreement, but one that carries substantial strategic implications. The French Senate debates set the contours for future French drone use in two ways: first, by challenging the US precedent, but not repudiating the legal and moral use of armed drones altogether (Perrin et al., 2017: 50). Second, the document signals the importance of consent as a necessary condition, giving clear indications of the conditions that make consent valid: the asking government must be the ‘legitimate government of the state’ and consent must be ‘explicit’ (Perrin et al., 2017: 56).

The hypothetical discussions were put to the test when France acquired armed drones. Using them in Mali and the greater Sahel region was, as discussed below, legitimated by colorblind consent between France and the Malian (and later G-5) government(s) communicated via a series of official documents. To avoid repetition, I focus here on how France viewed its end of the bargain by taking consent at face (egalitarian) value and using drones in ways that ostensibly respect the laws of war. Observance of the laws of war means adhering to the jus in bello principles of distinction, proportionality, and necessity. The 2017 Senate report describes the laws of war as a ‘constraint’ that ‘frames’ French interventions through a ‘corpus of rules and directives [aimed at] minimizing collateral damage’ and as ‘a full partner in the military culture of French forces’ (Perrin et al., 2017: 59). The report emphasizes the link between military restraint, French identity, and respect for human rights by quoting the foundational military text from 1999, L’exercice du métier des armées dans l’armée de terre (Perrin et al., 2017: 59). A direct link to the just war tradition is made in the new version from 2018, L’alliance du sens et de la force, published to reaffirm the guiding principles of France’s military ethos for the 21st century: ‘The French soldier is the humble inheritor and prolonger of that humanist tradition of the just war’, which influences the soldier’s formation. This ‘inheritance’ is a foundation upon which ‘the soldier of France founds his action on a professional ethics of force marked with prudence, temperance, and justice’ (L’Armée de Terre, 2018: 24, 27). Prudence and temperance restrain behavior in war, especially when it comes to protecting civilians from collateral damage. Justice links the use of force to the restoration of peace, as opposed to more vindicative forms of punishment that US drone strikes sometimes take on (Braun, 2019).

What does this military ethos bring to the drone contract from France’s perspective? France holds a (problematic) civilizational discourse whereby wielding force is for the betterment of humanity. This ideational hierarchy is compounded by the view in military circles that maintenance of a privileged sphere of influence in West Africa is central to France’s perception of itself as a global power (Bertrand et al., 2023: 288). At the same time, France sees itself in a world of equal partner states, where the right to use force is structured by accepted international rules and with regard to the drone contract, colorblind consent. At face value, this sounds like a rigid interpretation of international law. According to one French proponent of drones, such a military philosophy helps to explain why France is less susceptible to perversions of the just war doctrine compared to the United States, i.e. the doctrine of self-defense that legitimizes drone strikes outside of legal battlefields that threatens turning the world into a space of deterritorialized and endless war (Vilmer, 2018: 112).

From a just war perspective, the laws of war are a set of clear restraints, but they also offer a colorblind lens through which to minimize the effects of drone violence, such as civilian casualties understood to be unavoidable collateral damage, while emphasizing the surgical (and moral) aspect of drones. As discussed below, the strikes that did kill civilians were perceived differently through the Millsian lens. Following Benbaji and Statman, one might refrain from giving France any moral credit, but rather, see France’s position as a stance that decent states would agree upon because it is in their own interest; should the tables be turned, France would not want other states using drones on its territory without explicit consent. Even when relations deteriorated, France held steadfast to colorblind equality and did not fall prey to the caveat of treating Mali as an indecent state, all the while doubling down on drones as game changers. And what if consent is not always colorblind?

Mali and racialized consent

French perceptions of the drone contract are shaped by the egalitarian myth enveloping colorblind consent that mirrors the international laws of war. Problematically, however, the French do not ‘see’ how the extant international order is structured on postcolonial hierarchies. To avoid what Henderson calls the ‘norm of not noticing’, it is necessary to consider how the colonial past shapes the drone contract, which is why a Millsian lens is needed to reveal how racialist consent impacts the reciprocal relationship between drone welding and host state(s) (Henderson, 2024). The drone contract from the Malian perspective can be divided into three phases, which I will (too simplistically) spell out here. These demonstrate an oscillation between egalitarian and hierarchical perceptions of the relationship between France and Mali.

The first phase, reflecting the egalitarian assumptions of colorblind consent, is demarcated by Mali’s initial request for French military assistance. As an aside, an alternative reading might consider a different shade of consent here, namely corrupted consent, whereby unpopular and illegitimate regimes which lack broad consent from local populations seek ‘regime security’ agreements from Western powers (Carayol, 2023: 253–272; Olumba, 2024: 9, 16). Space does not permit further development of how corrupted consent impacts the drone contract, but on-the-ground reports suggesting Sahelian regimes, including Mali, have committed civilian atrocities with impunity raises questions as to the validity of such consent (Nsaibia, 2020). For the sake of argument, let us accept at face value, as did the international community, the validity of initial Malian consent as detailed below.

The spectacular military advances in January 2012 of separatist groups in the north – the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAU), which split from Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and Ansar al-Din – greatly unsettled Malian sovereignty. Driven by the government’s inability to deal with these groups, a military coup overthrew President Amadau Toumani Touré in March, resulting in an interim government led by Dioncounda Touré. By June, the separatist groups consolidated territory in the north, including the regions of Kidal, Timbuktu, and Gao, and threatened to march on the capital, Bamako. The interim president affirmed his request for French military aid through United Nations Security Council (UNSC) channels in January 2013, thus giving consent for French forces to operate on Malian territory (United Nations Security Council [UNSC], 2013). The French-led war, Opération Serval, was a qualified military success, halting the rebel forces’ advances but not defeating them entirely.

The second phase is that of renewal, for consent is not a permanent state of affairs. Rather, assuming reciprocal egalitarian respect, consent has a limited horizon insofar as it can be removed if relations between the host and the third-party state change. The French intervention may have helped the Malian state recapture territory, but the threat from separatist and jihadist groups remained high. In March 2013, the two governments exchanged letters to renew colorblind consent by formalizing a Status of Forces Agreement that permitted French forces to continue to operate in Mali (Décret n° 2013-364, 2013). The future use of French drones would fall under this agreement.

Democratic elections occurred in July 2013, while hostilities with northern antagonists persisted. Come summer 2014, Opération Serval transitioned into a counter-terrorism phase codenamed Opération Barkhane. The benefits of cooperation were recognized by the UN in June (Resolution 2164), while the operation shift was publicly acknowledged by a separate military cooperation agreement between France and Mali in July, which was eventually extended to the G-5 Sahel space through future public agreements (Assemblée Nationale, 2014). Colorblind consent was further renewed in 2020 with the creation of the Tabuka Task Force, a joint agreement between Mali (in conjunction with the G-5) and several European states that allowed for a European military task force under French command to aid in the counter-terrorism struggle. Renewing consent, whether through bilateral agreements or through the UNSC, is not just a formality; it demonstrates the host state openly supports outside forces operating on its territory and that such military operations are not violations of its territorial sovereignty. Mali was not, after all, occupied by France; it was a supposed equal partner in a battle against a shared threat.

But success remained elusive as violence persisted and French presence increasingly became seen as a hindrance. Relations soured between France and the new Malian government; a coup occurred in 2020, driven by many issues, including mounting frustrations with the existing government’s counter-terrorism strategy that relied on a partnership with France. A second successive coup, condemned by the UN, occurred in May 2021 and complicated matters further. Interestingly, this coup led to France suspending its joint military operations with Mali – purportedly until civilian rule was restored – only to resume them a month later after negotiations with the interim regime. The coups complicate the notion of consent, tapping into moral arguments that bypass non-democratic consent cited above, but the perception that the French presence was part of the problem cannot be ignored either (Bertrand et al., 2023).

The third phase is rupture. Relations continued to deteriorate. By February 2022, the interim Malian government officially withdrew consent: ‘In view of its repeated breaches of the defence agreements, the government invites French authorities to withdraw (French forces) without delay’ (Diallo, 2022). Permission granted by the 2013, 2014, and 2020 agreements mentioned above was therefore explicitly removed (Antouly, 2021).

The French officially withdrew by August of the same year. This decision could be seen as being made between equal actors bound to uphold the duties tied to colorblind consent, but such an assumption downplays power differentials shaping on-the-ground perceptions of drone violence that become apparent when viewed through the lens of racialized consent. The Millsian lens elucidates the conditions of rupture by placing the use of drones in the broader time horizon of postcolonial violence and hierarchy. While the French ethos has evolved since colonial times to map onto the dominant discourse of the international laws of war and sovereign equality, the colonial power dimensions still structure interstate relations. France’s sphere of influence over former colonies, nominally termed the policy of Françafrique, has been marked by asymmetric economic benefits and asserted political power, often to the detriment of locals (Leboeuf and Quenot-Suarez, 2014; Powell, 2017). According to Gegout, military interventions occur in a context of perceived European supremacy over former colonials that transcends decolonialization and official statements. Despite claims by recent French presidents announcing a new era of French foreign policy departing from colonial hierarchies, Opérations Serval and Barkhane can be seen as extensions of this hierarchical relationship where violence has been asymmetrically felt by the locals (Gegout, 2018: 57). Drone violence only exasperated the perception of an unequal partnership based on racialized consent.

The tensions emulating from racialized consent came to limit France’s political leverage in Mali and ‘undermined Paris in the eyes of both regional governments and populations, fueling considerable scepticism surrounding France’s motives and driving a rise of conspiracy theories about France’s actions’ (Bertrand et al., 2023: 288). Yet, as security conditions deteriorated – a UN briefing from 2020 shows that rather than solving the terrorist problem, French presence was seemingly exasperating it insofar as violence against civilians had increased fivefold in the Sahel region since 2016 – the lure of drones as a panacea strengthened France’s dedication to the civilizing mission undergirding the Western ‘war on terror’ (UN News, 2020). That same year, barely a calendar year after French drones entered the fray in a shift the French consider to be ‘a true operational turning-point’, 58% of counter-terrorism airstrikes were conducted by drones (Assemblée Nationale, 2021: 25). Despite reports of collateral damage and in keeping with the colorblind assumptions of the laws of war, a 2021 French report on drones highlighted their tactical advantages to undertake ‘strikes of opportunity and thus to intensify our action against the armed terrorist groups operating in the Sahel’, but said nothing about how these strikes are perceived on the ground.

Although not overtly racial, the tactical lens bears the hallmark of the risk transfer critique that privileges the security of ‘our’ personal over that of locals and the drone strike ‘out-of-the-blue’ fear which negatively impacts the daily lives of local populations; both fuel the hierarchical elements of racialized consent (Brunstetter, 2021: 216–218). Yet, as if to re-enforce the colorblind lens, the report goes as far as to explicitly dismiss the critique of drones by Gregoire Chamayou, whose claim that drones constitute a ‘death ethics’ used to project Western imperial power across the globe framed early debates on drones in France (Assemblée Nationale, 2021; Chamayou, 2013). Chamayou’s critique was sidelined as relevant only to the US example, because the Americans did not seek host state consent (Vilmer, 2018). Fair enough. But not ‘seeing’ the racial dimension of colorblind consent does not make it go away.

Western drone use has been accused of following patterns of colonial domination by operating within categories inherited from the colonial past, whereby those killed – including civilians – are seen as expendable, while ‘civilized’ violence exerts a controlling fear-based reality that supplants normal social behavior (Espinoza, 2018: 381; Olumba, 2024: 9). These critiques map onto Malian perceptions of French drone use, fueling anti-French rhetoric and propaganda laced with colonial accusations (Essa, 2021; Vincent et al., 2021). News reports and propaganda put the accent on France’s military presence as failing to show proper respect for Malian lives by not protecting Malian civilians from non-state actors, asymmetrically putting Malian forces in danger zones while keeping French forces out of the fray by relying on drones, and inflicting unjust violence through high casualty drone strikes (Daho et al., 2022: 112–114; Gazeley, 2022: 280). On the ground, interviews with locals reveal communities gripped by fear of drone strikes ‘out of the blue’, coupled with growing resentment for French military presence (Carayol, 2023: 226–230). Added to this, during the period of French withdrawal, Mali recorded multiple violations of its territorial integrity by French drones, including alleged espionage and ‘subversive operations aimed at further weakening Mali’ (Diop, 2022). On the ground and through official channels, France was painted as not respecting Mali as an equal, but rather, projecting its imperial power. Seen through a Millsian lens, these narratives bear the hallmark of the inegalitarian nature of racialized consent.

Rescinding the drone contract did not make France an immediate enemy. Rather, France returned to being an equal member state of the international community governed by the broader war contract, with which war was possible if it breached the rules by violating Malian sovereignty. Meanwhile, Mali acquired its own drones and, in a new iteration of the drone contract, obtained consent from neighboring states to use them to combat extant terrorist threats in the Sahel.

Conclusion

This study explored the role of consent in regulating drone use in international relations. Building on contractarian innovations in just war theory, it posited the drone contract based on ostensibly egalitarian colorblind consent to conceptualize how drone-wielding and host states might agree to the use of drones in a world where non-state actors contest inherited international order. Recognizing international relations is shaped by colonial legacies whereby Western drone-wielding states project power in ways that shape and reinforce colonial hierarchies in host states, it then pivoted to see drone violence through the lens of racialized hierarchical consent.

Theorizing the drone contract is not an exercise in ideal theory, for consent to use drones does seem to matter. In the paradigm case studied here, the concerned states made a public effort, through official channels, to secure or rescind consent. This came with real-world benefits and costs. However, consent can be perceived differently. Whereas states such as France see consent as colorblind and thus between equal partners, the perception of drone violence can erode the egalitarian facade to expose hierarchical foundations that track with the inegalitarian assumptions of the racial contract. Our theories of just war should take such shades of consent into consideration.

While the acute nature of drone violence exposes the original position of inequality of consenting parties between host state and drone-wielding state when colonial hierarchies are involved, the situation can evolve. To follow Mills’s (2008: 119) lead, the racial contact shows the ‘starting point is a particular social stage of an already-existing unjust society’, but not necessarily the end point. For Mills (2008: 121), engaging the dilemmas of the racial contract can help to (in part) fix inherent structural issues, but doing so requires ‘choosing between various non-ideals . . . given common ancestral historical factors’. Insofar as the drone contract is part of the broader war agreement, Global South host states and (Western) drone-wielding states can both make choices that ameliorate the historical and structural differences, albeit with imperfect outcomes. Assuming the view that host states lack sovereign stature and are forced to bear the brunt of imperial drones is thus a misleading conclusion to draw. The power to grant and remove permission is one step towards equalizing status, which tracks with scholars who argue integrating Africa into international relations theory – and just war theory too – must be done in ways that validate local perspectives navigating existing international norms to their advantage (Abrahamsen, 2017).

The re-establishment principle, new to just war theorizing, contends drones could be used to root out terrorist groups contesting host state sovereignty, with the goal of restoring a more peaceful social order (Brunstetter, 2021: 99; cf. Okpaleke et al., 2023). While considerable ink has been spilled on Mali’s problematic turn to the Wagner group for security support, a more instructive angle would be to probe the contractarian defense agreement of the AES, which provides another version of the drone contract between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. The founding Liptako-Gourma Charter (2023) states in Article 1 the alliance’s objective is ‘to establish an architecture of collective defense and mutual assistance between the contracting parties’; Article 4 expresses the purpose: to join forces in the fight against terrorism ‘in the space of the Alliance’; Article 11 opens the possibility that other states join; while Article 14 offers contracted parties the right to rescind consent. What kind of consent is this? Colorblind? Corrupted? Or might it problematically map onto pre-colonial understandings of race in the Sahel that still have relevance today, to be tainted by racialized consent? (Hall, 2011; Keenan, 2016). AES states have actively procured drones and used them within the tri-state area, sometimes killing civilians. Algeria formally complained to the UN about the 2024 Tinzawaten incident where 21 civilians (including children) were killed in an AES drone strike (Lapalce and Alilat, 2024). Interestingly, the postcolonial critique that accompanied the perception of French drone violence was absent, with the critique hinging on violation of the international laws of war. It remains to be seen whether AES drones will succeed where French drones did not. Regardless, AES drone use raises important questions: do critiques of (Western) drones as tools of necropolitics or state terrorism also apply to the AES? Can the drone contract between drone-wielding African states be seen as a pan-African security partnership between equals that supplants aerial colonialism by Western drones (Afxentiou, 2018; Olumba, 2024: 16)?

Drone-wielding states must also play their part. France’s withdrawal echoes the theory of ethical retreat – the idea that Western powers ought to choose to be less involved in the affairs of states in the Global South. Rutazibwa (2013: 87) argues retreat can be a form of ‘ethical engagement through disengagement, because it might be beneficial for the receiver’. Instead of prioritizing the motivations and intentions of drone-wielding states (democratic state building and upholding human rights), the focus shifts to the well-being of host states, localized in the right to rescind the drone contract. If drone-wielding powers respect the drone contract, doing so may work to reduce historical power asymmetries, which scholars see as essential to the moral commitment to reducing violence in the world (Kellison, 2019). More importantly, taking ethical retreat seriously by respecting the right to rescind puts the onus on host states as capable of helping themselves, instead of relying on assistance hitherto shaped by postcolonial domination. Respecting the drone contract marks a departure from ethical foreign policies that have historically (and recently) colored just war discourses, driven by the assumed benefits of Western humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which carry the implicit belief that non-Western states are incapable of emerging from crises on their own and thus need Western intervention (Rutazibwa, 2013: 91).

Looking ahead, understanding the role of consent for drone use in its various guises is crucial to the evolving security relations in the Sahel. As France seeks new regional partners to host its drones, the blind spots of colorblind consent – and the realities of racialized consent – risk undermining these partnerships. For the AES, the lure of drones as a panacea for regional insecurity may convince new states to consent to join the drone contract, while the fall-out from an uptick in drone violence may alienate local populations, lead to accusations of corrupted consent, or create the conditions for extant partner(s) to rescind consent.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Daniel Brunstetter

Daniel Brunstetter is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he directs the Center for Citizen Peace Building. His work on just war thinking spans the historical to contemporary debates about the use of force. He is co-editor of three edited volumes that cover a variety of themes related to the ethics of war: The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited: Moral Challenges in an Era of Contested and Fragmented Sovereignty (w/Georgetown University Press), Just War Thinkers: From Cicero to the 21st Century (w/Routledge) and Just War Thinkers Revisited: Humanists, Heretics and Radicals (w/Routledge). His work on drones has appeared in Ethics & International Affairs, The Atlantic, the Journal of Military Ethics, the International Journal of Human Rights and elsewhere. His most recent monograph, Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force, was published with Oxford University Press.

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