Citizens gain political voice because their lives are exposed to war’s danger.

Evidence

Kant sets the arbitrariness of a zoopolitical sovereignty in opposition to a principle of citizenship: the sovereign can declare war only if the citizens who will risk their lives in it have expressed their “free consent” in a republican vote. If the citizens can have a say at this point, it is not because they generally make the decisions, but specifically because in this decision it is their lives and the exposure of their living bodies to the danger of death or wounding that are involved. This introduces a very important aspect to the situation: a form of political subjectivity set in opposition to war-waging sovereignty, something that I shall call the citizenship of the living or the citizenship of exposable lives. In other words, they must have a say in the decision because they run the risk of dying in the situation the decision may produce. It is because war-waging sovereignty exposes the lives of its subjects—live citizens—that they acquire a measure of control over this power that can wound or kill them. It is because it can destroy us that we must have some power over it. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 572

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the central concept of ‘citizenship of exposable lives’ — the exact frame whose erosion drone warfare triggers.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how drones break the citizen-sovereign bond forged by shared mortal exposure. — connects to: The sovereign’s exposure of subjects’ lives becomes the basis for limiting its war power; Hyperprotecting soldiers shifts the burden of risk onto civilians — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 300; Politics inherited the military model as a means of preventing civil disorder — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 252

Related

• The sovereign’s exposure of subjects’ lives becomes the basis for limiting its war power (similarity 0.94)
• Drones deactivate democratic war critique by removing citizens’ exposure to death. (similarity 0.83)
• Drone assassination reframes war as social defense through preventive security measures (similarity 0.81)
• Drone warfare deactivates the democratic critique rooted in exposable lives (similarity 0.81)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.81)
• Drone technology erodes the soldier’s defining scorn of death. (similarity 0.79)
• Protecting national lives through drones increases their social precariousness. (similarity 0.79)
• Protecting national lives in war increases those lives’ social precariousness (similarity 0.79)
• Kant reverses the protector’s command into a citizen’s claim over the sovereign. (similarity 0.78)