A strange sky: Security atmospheres and the technological management of geopolitical conflict in the case of Israel's Iron Dome

Abstract

This paper uses Israel's technologically advanced Iron Dome short-range missile defence system as a deep empirical case study to examine how affective atmospheres mediate the relationship between state power and the agency of technological objects deployed to govern (in)security. Drawing theoretically from productive tensions between more-than-human theories of object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory and affect theory, it evaluates Iron Dome as a scintillating ‘bright object’ with variable capacities and limitations that exceed the sum of its components. Iron Dome both overreaches and contradicts the intentions and governance logics of state elites within a spatio-temporally distributed array of architectures, infrastructures and practices. Within this milieu, its affective power is ambivalent and capricious, and can both enhance and undermine the atmospheric production of security in ways that exceed both instrumental functionality and human intentions. These findings indicate how a geography of security that attends to the affective dimension of object politics can account for the complex and non-causal ways in which technologies can either reinforce or inhibit security as an anthropocentric endeavour.