Reporting Beyond the Pale: UK news discourse on drones in Pakistan

This article on drone strikes in Pakistan offers a distinctive empirical case study for critical scholarship of counterterrorism. By asking how cosmopolitanism has developed through UK news discourse it also provides a constructivist contribution to the literature on drones. I argue UK news discourse is not cosmopolitan because it focuses on risk and places the Other beyond comprehension. US and UK Governments networked counterterrorism operations have complicated accountability and while a drive for certainty promoted more scrutiny of policy, news media outlets, academics and activists turned to statistical and visual genres of communication that inhibited understanding of the Other.