Drones in the civilian domain of Germany
: A contestation of visual, legal and socio-spatial verticality?

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

Abstract

Within the past decade, the scope of drone application has shifted from military employment to rapid expansion in the civil domain. The surveillance aspect of this device derived from military application and is deeply intertwined with concerns of privacy and uneven power relationships. Drawing on Foucault and Lefebvre as a means to theorise the relationship between power and space, a conceptual bridge is formed pertaining to the concept of verticality. Anchoring drones in visual, legal, and socio-spatial aspects of verticality unlocks an understanding of how civilian drone application complicates everything.While a great deal of research has finished by calling for comprehensive regulation, there is currently a lack of a global harmonised set of rules. Instead, there are fragmented approaches from different nations and an intensive analysis of how this regulatory process takes place is needed. It is at this point that this thesis moves into largely uncharted territory: there is relatively little empirical work on how the spaces in which drones operate bring stakeholder groups into being—consumer,commercial, and governmental—and still less into how interactions between those stakeholders are shaping the kinds of spaces in which drones can operate, but most important of all is the fact that an Anglo-centric approach dominates the analysis of drone-power and that consideration of other contexts should reveal alternative configurations and relations that deepen our understanding of this relationship.The case-study addresses these issues empirically, applying two qualitative methods: (i) semi-structured interviews and (ii) observation with stakeholders in Germany and at the European level. Focusing on stakeholder discourses provides an in-depth analysis of the regulatory process in civil drone implementation, highlighting the complexity of power relations. The results contribute to the geopolitical debate on verticality and complicate our understanding of how issues raised in the two dimensional multiply in the three-dimensional. This points to the importance of a nuanced understanding how the handling of drones in civil airspace—which in the German context is characterised by rigid regulation and bureaucracy that simultaneously constrains both, bottom-up and commercial applications—and vertical commodification promotes a dissolution of public space that makes political participation increasingly difficult. 
Date of Award1 Apr 2021
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • King's College London
SupervisorJonathan Reades (Supervisor) & Andrew Brooks (Supervisor)

Cite this

'