Introduction
With the deployment of Predator by the USA in Afghanistan following the 9/11 event, the use of combat drones by warring parties around the world has increased dramatically. Owing to the accessibility of civilian drones, we have also witnessed non-state actors’ ability to exploit this technology for both combat and ideological purposes by transforming commercial drones into armed ones.[1] [2] One of the latest battle scenes where drone technology became one of the decisive factors in the outcome of war was the Second Karabakh War of 2020. During 44 days of military operations, Azerbaijan’s successful application of unmanned aerial vehicles contributed to the rapid falling of Armenian air defense systems, ground assets and weakened supply lines and logistics thereby opening an easy way for infantry and other forces to advance quickly.[3]
In parallel with the battle use of drones, Azerbaijani government utilized videos recorded by drone cameras during strikes by sharing them through social media with wider audiences.[4] This in turn affected society in many respects. Drone videos became a sign of success in the battlefield and created assurances for the people about the accomplishments of the army. Having been aware of the situation, people’s morale and support for the war remained high. Even in times of crisis among people regarding the developments in and out of the battlefield, drone videos were a kind of remedy, which will be touched upon in detail later on.
Having noted introductory points, it would be appropriate to lay out the goals and structure of this paper. The main goal of the research is twofold: to present the use of drone videos in social media by Azerbaijan for propaganda purposes, first, by exploring its impact on the audience, Azerbaijani society’s solidarity and support for the war; and second, by portraying symbolical aspect of the issue of aerial dominance and its links to sovereignty over territory. The use of social media channels by conflicting parties to increase or ensure conflict solidarity among people has found its place in literature, albeit to a little degree.[5] In a similar vein, I will try to explore the employment of drone strike imagery by the Azerbaijani government during the war with special attention to times of crisis and the effect or feedbacks from this attempt based on collected data from social media. Data will let us see trends of how and in what situations these videos were shared and what determined the degree of reactions to them by people.
Regarding the mentioned symbolic aspect, this issue has oftentimes been associated and accordingly researched around the non-state armed groups’ propaganda strategy. For example, indicating such groups’ intention in disseminating drone videos to emphasize their state like abilities, offensive capabilities, statehood claims over the territories authors have tried to interpret and put emphasis on drone’s importance as a propaganda element in addition to benefits accrued as warfare tool.[6] With that in mind, formulations of such narratives can also be applicable to the case of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict especially when we turn to the problems related to the territorial claim by parties and de facto and de jure aspects of it. In this sense, Azerbaijan’s usage of drone videos in social media symbolized de facto domination over the territory signaling audiences and the opposite side. Such formulation will in some instances follow footprints of research on ISIS’s case done by Archambault and Veilleux-Lepage while showing applicability of such an approach on interstate conflicts as well when it comes to the existence of contested territory.[7] As such, I will try to position the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict and drone imagery usage by sides as symbolic and psychological attempts to confirm or reject the claims over the territory.
Within the next section, theoretical frameworks for both directions of the research will be outlined. Then, methodology and data will be presented, which will be followed by explanation and interpretation of collected data by looking at processes in and out of the battlefield during the war. After that, the mentioned symbolic aspect of drone video propaganda will be applied by focusing on Azerbaijan’s perspective on the territory in the context of the whole conflict. In the final section, main findings and concluding remarks will be provided briefly.
Theoretical framework
Social media and conflict solidarity
As noted, as a tool to boost conflict solidarity and support for war social media channels offer to actors a solid ground for information operations. Here actors, in our case government, attempt to benefit from technology in a way that society’s goals, ideas, and motivations regarding situation align with political sphere. In literature, one of the first to emphasize the relationship between governments and people in times of war was Carl Won Clausewitz. Clausewitz in his well-known account on war argues that war is composed of “remarkable trinity”: 1) primordial violence, hatred and enmity all of which are characteristics of “people”; 2) the play of chance and probability that characterize the domain of “military”; 3) element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which constitutes the sphere of “government”. In other words, an act of war is not just about warfare but is combination of societal, military and political aspects.[8] Compared to the time of Clausewitz, today interaction and degree of influence between people and government are more complicated and harder to manage due to the development of information and communications spheres and technologies surrounding them.[9] Governments have to be operational in social domain in order to maintain adequate relations with people and be able to manage a crisis if it arises. In times of war, this becomes a more pressing issue and social media as one of the most used platforms that ensure the flow of information provides an environment for interaction between social and political domains.
Having said that, another component, conflict solidarity needs to be defined. Conflict solidarity can be considered the main element indicating popular support for war. For Bartos and Wehr, conflict solidarity among people is one of the causes of maintaining a high escalation level during war.[10] The conflicting party with more conflict solidarity and resources can sustain war efforts for a long time than its adversary who lacks the mentioned components. The factors that affect conflict solidarity are mainly feedbacks coming from battlefield, side effects of war in society (for example, prolonged war can impoverish some parts of society creating dissatisfaction with a situation), or brutal attacks from adversary intended to break the will of people.[11] Therefore, governments channeling required feedbacks into the public can influence dynamics of conflict solidarity and thus, preserve a high escalation level.
In the case of the Second Karabakh War, I will argue that the Azerbaijani government made use of social media to provide needed information and feedbacks from the ground to keep people assured and drone imagery constituted one of the most impactful parts of this strategy. Throughout the war, drone videos were posted on various social media platforms and in crisis or uncertainty regarding the process became the sign of success keeping people’s morale high. With the data at hand, I will delve into the processes more deeply and explain the case by looking at trends in social media.
Aerial domination and sovereignty over territory
As mentioned above in referring to the non-state actors’ use of drone videos to demonstrate statehood, power and sovereignty over a territory, I will argue that this logic can hold in interstate conflicts as well. In general, statehood is intrinsically linked to territory and its control by one actor. Max Weber in defining the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”[12] had in mind the same idea of territory and control. However, the development of military technologies, norms and practices has led us to define territorial control in multidimensional forms, not just as control of land or sea. Thus, conceptualizing “sovereign territory as a three-dimensional volumetric space encompassing the land, maritime and air spaces of a state”[13] became one of the defining characteristics of statehood. In this regard, controlling and dominating the aerial sphere of territory has meant carrying a de facto statehood status over the land as well. Similarly, as argued by Adey, Whitehead and Williams “height and verticality are values that are commonly associated with dominance and the projection of force.”[14] Katharine Hall Kindervater argues that sovereignty is not a constant and fixed phenomenon but is continually changing through power projections of actors and “the drone itself is an important factor in constructing and demarcating territory, not as much in the sense of patrolling territory but in how territory and state authority are imagined and evoked through the justification of the use of drones”.[15] As a continuation of this logic, drone presence over territory eliminates the need for physical and troop presence on land and “extends forms of control over populations and space in unique ways”.[16]
In a similar vein, Neocleous interprets airpower as an extension of police power, which is a core component of a modern state and argues that military and police should be seen as a continuation of the same logic, not as two different elements: “for air power in fact turns out to consist not just of bombing the enemy as a military strategy, but as a key mechanism of order-building” and “what becomes possible with the drone is permanent police presence across the territory.”[17] Tyler as another supporter of drone-policing relation says that UAVs works with the aim of security building and pacification of territory and are confirmation of the long-allied military-police continuum.[18] That is why “as a technology of pacification the drone must be understood, in its logic and design, as a technology of police and not merely military power.”[19] Understood in such a manner, drones provide another perspective to look at social media operations seeing aerial dominance as claiming de facto control of territory. This, in turn, gives a way other dimensions like symbolic and psychological signaling to opposite side. Interpreting the drone imagery of our case with such logic will be helpful considering the history of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and Azerbaijan’s perspective on it.
Method and analytical approach
In order to explain the government’s social media strategy during the war and answer the questions of how and when the audience responds to the material shared, I collected data from the Facebook page of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan (hereafter MoD/AzMoD)[20] which has more than 237k followers at the time of this writing and from where drone videos were publicized throughout the wartime. It is true that other platforms such as Twitter, Telegram and YouTube were also used by the MoD and drone videos were present there as well. However, the Facebook page was selected because of two main reasons. First, compared to, for example, Twitter, the audience of the Facebook page was local and composed mainly of Azerbaijanis and this, in turn, is crucial in measuring the responsiveness of people. Second, related to the first reason, the reactions feature of Facebook offers a suitable opportunity to assess the emotional status of people. Since the first introduction of this feature, there has been a great deal of work done using reaction types as labels[21] and it is confirmed that with minor shortcomings such an approach is useful in detecting user sentiment.[22] Data is composed of details of all drone strike videos posted by the MoD including duration of them, statistics of comments, all kinds of reactions present on Facebook (like, love, care, haha/laughter, wow/surprise, sad, angry) and time interval corresponding numbers of each day when a video was shared, etc. Following the classification of Almazan and Valle-Cruz, the first three reaction types will be considered as positive, showing joy, pleasure, support; laughter and surprise as neutral; and sad and angry as negative, showing disagreement about the post.[23] Besides, more importantly, I will look at the whole trend of reactions to drone videos and try to explain increases and peaks in the context of processes that happened.
When it comes to the second part of the research, I will utilize multimodal discourse analysis’s logic in interpreting the shared content and used language. As an approach, MDA “extends the study of language per se to the study of language in combination with other resources, such as images, scientific symbolism, gesture, action, music and sound.”[24] Drawing from discursive analysis tradition it “looks at not just how individual modes communicate, but how they interact with one another to create semiotic meaning.”[25] Such an approach will assist to interpret the case based on the framework provided above linking it to the context of the conflict and Azerbaijan’s viewpoint over the territory.
Data
From 28 September to 9 November 2020 in a total of 91-drone strike videos were posted on the Facebook page of AzMoD. Videos included strikes against diverse targets ranging from air defense systems, tanks, armored fighting vehicles to various missile systems, infantry vehicles, individual groups of soldiers, etc.[26] Each video was included into the dataset based on its date, duration, quantity of each type of reaction and the total number of reactions, and the amount of comment it received. In total, about 782510 reactions were made to 91 videos while the average of reactions to them was around 8600. The number of all comments to videos was nearly 48487 and the average being around 533 comments. Together all videos made up about 2.15 hours and the average duration is around 85.1 seconds.
From Figure 1 and Figure 2 we can see that even if we exclude “likes” from the total as it is a kind of generic reaction, again the majority is made up from reactions indicating supportive and positive sentiments. Figure 3 provides more insightful information regarding the number of reactions and comments to drone strike videos each day they were posted. It is seen that some days experienced more interaction than others and in some instances dramatic increases are present. These can stem from two interrelated reasons. First, some days AzMoD shared several strike videos and, naturally, their numbers will be higher even if individually each video received average or fewer reactions. Second, we can read these high numbers as strategy of the AzMoD in reaction to events, critical situations among society to maintain high morale and support level. This second reason is linked to the first in the sense that more videos could be posted when “exceptional” situations arose with few departures. I will touch upon this issue more closely in the next section by explaining the causes of variation and higher levels of reactions in a couple of instances.
Drone imagery as a booster of conflict solidarity in times of crisis
Traditionally, with the proliferation of television, cinema and other similar forms of visual tools battlefield and civilian life have become much closer. They have always provided governments with means to influence societies by “linking, mobilizing and galvanizing” them for conflict.[27] Today’s wars are no different and drone cameras and social media are contributing to this trend as “weapons of war”. The Second Karabakh War was similar in this sense as well and conflicting parties’ attempts to gain upper hand against each other through information operations became indicative. Although 2020 was not the first time drones were involved in this conflict as during the Four-Day War in 2016 Israeli-made IAI Harop was used by Azerbaijan first time,[28] this year experienced a boom in terms of various models used and interest for them due to the introduction of “drone imagery”. These included Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2, Israeli-made Orbiter 1K, IAI Harop loitering munitions known as kamikaze or suicide drones, etc.
Azerbaijan’s application of drone technology within warfare was complemented with its dissemination on social media platforms and billboards in city centers.[29] With the war, drone imagery entered the everyday life of Azerbaijanis and in parallel, interest in drone technology increased at that time. Figure 4 describes the pattern showing search interest over time in Azerbaijan for drone-related keywords.[30] Starting from September each line started to rise reaching its peaks during the operations. Keywords I entered reflect the most popular UAVs of the war, namely “bayra ktar”, “harop” while the word “pua” is abbreviation of the Azerbaijani word for UAV (“Pilotsuz Uçuş Aparatı”). An increase in “pua” in July was also due to the application of UAVs during the clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenia happened at that time.[31]
As noted before, I will try to explain reasons behind the variation in reaction rates shown in Figure 3. I will argue that these rates were mainly caused by crisis-like and extraordinary developments regarding the war affecting society and leading the government to share drone videos. I will focus on reactions of 10 October, 17 October, 28-30 October, 1 November and 9 November. I will ignore the rise on 30 September because it was not caused by special circumstances and was a result of accumulation of a higher amount of videos: the average of reactions to nine videos on that day was about 4722, which was well below of total average. As opposed to this, in chosen instances of 10, 17, 30 October, 1 and 9 November averages were around 7583, 10660, 12420, 11633 and 7750 reactions respectively being close or well above total average.
On 10th of October, Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to a Russian-brokered humanitarian ceasefire after nearly 2 weeks of fighting.[32] That caused dissatisfaction among Azerbaijani society. As a supporter of the war evidenced by pro-war rally in July,[33] the people demanded continuation of operations interpreting this ceasefire as Russia’s move to buy time for Armenia to rearm and reconstruct its army or as a move to freeze the conflict again. Such a view of Azerbaijanis towards Russia originates from long-standing historical and political reasons. Seeing the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as Russia’s imperial project supporting Armenia limiting Azerbaijan’s maneuverability and dark memories of Bolshevik-Russian invasion and January Massacre of 1990 are notorious factors here.[34] Moreover, the ceasefire did not hold so long and the next day parties accused of each other violating the agreement. This was followed by posting of drone strike videos by AzMoD with captions referring to the ceasefire. For example, captions such as “Armored vehicle of the enemy violated ceasefire was destroyed”[35], “Enemy heavy artillery deployed to firing points to violate the ceasefire regime, was destroyed by precise strikes”[36] were added alongside videos. Such context resulted in higher reactions compared to other days and kept the morale high among people.
On 17th of October, Azerbaijan’s second city, Ganja was attacked with Scud missiles killing 15 and injuring 55 civilians.[37] This event intended apparently to break the will of the people leaving the Azerbaijani government to seem impotent created chaos and again led to revenge demands by the people. Aftermath of this bombing AzMoD posted several drone strike videos again two of which being 3 minutes long, that was well above the average duration.[38] [39] Videos included the targeting of individual soldiers as well which further boosted reactions by seeing them as a revenge of the Ganja event. This time again drone videos served to the public as a remedy.
After the ceasefire but this time brokered by the US on 26 October[40], starting from 27th of October and continuing the next day, two more attacks were carried out against civilian sites in the city of Barda. This round of bombing conducted with BM-30 Smerch and cluster munitions resulted in death of 26 people injuring over 85 civilians while international organizations confirmed that Armenia was responsible for the attacks.[41] [42] As before, the Barda event also caused anger and demands for retaliation among people. Followed days AzMoD posted a series of drone strike videos directly referring to the Barda events. Captions such as “units of the Azerbaijan Army destroyed enemy forces and equipment that shelled our cities and regions”[43], “The “Smerch”, which shelled Barda, was destroyed”[44], “The Azerbaijan Army Units destroy enemy units that subjected to fire our civilian infrastructure and peaceful population”[45] were indicative for intentions behind these series of imagery. Comments for these videos also showed association people made between the Barda events and drone strikes. Such a strategy did also create an image of Azerbaijan as a righteous side playing with rules by answering the opponent at the battleground and portraying Armenia as an immoral enemy.
On 1st of November rumors of killing of head of the separatist regime, Arayik Harutyunyan appeared[46] and this coincided with the video of 3:30 minutes long showing a strike against an Armenian military convoy creating the idea that Harutyunyan was present in this convoy.[47] [48] Although turned out to be false, such news was greeted positively by the Azerbaijani audience because if true it meant political and psychological end of the opponent. Shared strike video further boosted the morale and it represented itself in Figure 1. As the last day of the war, 9 November also experienced a rise in reactions. With the fall of the strategic Shusha city[49], the videos shared the same day naturally reflected the statistics.
To conclude the section, it can be said that both government’s strategy and people’s reactions reflected the wider context and events happening in parallel with clashes at the front. While AzMoD was posting the strike videos throughout the war, it put special emphasis on them on days of crisis or extraordinary period. On the other hand, people’s reaction variation was determined by such situations as well showing higher interest in posts that association with revenge and success was more apparent. Such interaction preserved the morale of people and kept them assured about the successes at the ground.
Symbolic propaganda: restoring territorial integrity through drone cameras
When it comes to the symbolic aspect of drone propaganda, I will attempt to interpret the Azerbaijani side’s strategy in disseminating drone videos in the context of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and of what Azerbaijan perceives through drone lenses. Archambault and Veilleux-Lepage in their research on ISIS’s drone propaganda link such acts of the organization with its claim for sovereign statehood and order-building narrative: “If state failure is understood as the de facto absence of a sovereign power, which is taken as the justification for foreign intervention, ISIS here seeks to demonstrate its reverse: the de facto presence of a state, made visible through its diffusion of aerial images, which renders the space governed and ordered.”[50] In other words, as explained in the theoretical section above relating air power to sovereignty as a symbolic link, dominating and controlling airspace gives the ISIS opportunity to enforce statehood claim as being above is powerfully strategic.[51] In this regard, I will apply this logic to our case by associating drone visuals with de facto control of the territory over which the war was going on. Of course, in many respects, this case is different from ISIS’s situation. One fundamental difference is ISIS’s non-state actor status. Stemming from that difference ISIS was claiming sovereignty over the territory left unordered as a result of state failure, not occupation or so. However, seeing Azerbaijan’s perspective the linkage between air power and sovereignty holds, which I will try to explain below.
Image 1: Orbiter 1K flying right through the target footage of a Bayraktar TB2 striking
Before the latest war, the Nagorno-Karabakh region and surrounding territories had been controlled by Armenian forces even though that territory is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. As seen, Azerbaijan having de jure sovereignty over the territory was not able to enforce de facto control since the First Karabakh War. That is why Azerbaijan conducted the operations during the latest war to achieve de facto sovereignty over the Karabakh and restore territorial integrity. Similar to the case of ISIS, Azerbaijan’s drone imagery represented the de facto presence of the state over the territory creating “new order”. As interpreted by Kindervater “territory of sovereign power is reconfigured, and the zone of the drone strike is incorporated into the scope and extent of state power. It is seized in the lens of the drone.”[52] Therefore, I argue by imitating the line noted above for the case of ISIS, AzMoD through drone videos created a visual narrative that if occupation is understood as de facto absence of recognized sovereign power, Azerbaijan through imagery from above demonstrates reverse of it by reordering the territory.
From a similar perspective as argued before, drone imagery by Azerbaijan demonstrated the police mission of the effective state over the territory while maintaining pacification and security there. Image 1 taken from the drone strike video by AzMoD is representative of drone presence and “policing” during the war. Here “police” is considered as a more general process of administration, security and order not in the popular sense of crime prevention and so on.[53] Thus, it was no coincidence that in several instances the war was narrated by some governmental bodies and in social media as “anti-terror operations” hinting at the sovereign right over the territory.[54] In visual discourse as well, the drone propaganda served to portray the territories cameras recording as under de facto control of Azerbaijan.
For Azerbaijan, role of the drones became decisive in achieving domination through airspace and victory in general. However, it would be an exaggeration to give all credits to the drone technology in this war since the air defense systems of Armenia were not sophisticated enough to detect UAVs and the role of infantry, especially special operation forces was influential on the outcome.[55] As both Robyn Dixon and Michael Kofman argue because Armenia’s air defense systems were older Soviet-made and not designed to counter drones, they were unable to defend airspace from Azerbaijani attacks.[56] [57] With that, the war experienced a kind of “drone hunting” race especially by the Armenian side claiming several times shooting down of Azerbaijani drones. Even if sometimes such claims turned out to be false, it symbolized Armenia’s rejection of the air control by Azerbaijan. Armenian officials and media platforms posting images and videos of “destroyed Azerbaijani drones” were trying to signal that Azerbaijan’s air domination and thus, sovereignty claims were not fulfilled and control was in Armenia’s hands.[58] [59] However, as said such statements sometimes turned to be false or counterproductive. For example, then Armenian Defense Ministry Spokesperson Shushan Stepanyan posted a video showing the destruction of AN-2 aircraft by air defense systems.[60] However, Azerbaijan on purpose let the destruction of AN-2s, which were transformed into unmanned format as decoys, in order to reveal locations of Armenian air defenses.[61] [62] In another instance, On 2 October, Armenia’s Defense Ministry claimed that 107 Azerbaijani UAVs had been shot down, although some may have been suicide drones that were crashed intentionally.[63] In the end, be they true or false these claims were intended to show rejection of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over the Karabakh to both Armenian and foreign publics. Additionally, with dissemination of such content on social media Armenia tried to assure its people in order to preserve conflict solidarity. These in turn align with the section’s claimed link between air power and sovereignty in the context of drone imagery. In other words, drone imagery shared by the Azerbaijani side reflected air domination at the battleground thereby symbolizing reconfiguration of and state-building exercise over the territory.
Conclusion
The paper aimed to assess the role of drone technology outside the battleground in the Second Karabakh War. This was conducted from two perspectives. First, by looking at how the Azerbaijani government’s strategy in sharing drone imagery and the audience’s response variation to it was determined. Through the data collected from the social media account of the AzMoD, I explored patterns of reactions to drone videos within the context of conflict. I found that the main contributing factor to both higher interaction and government’s motivation was crisis-like exceptional situations happening in the background. In reaction to such situations, the government opted to share drone strike videos by associating them with the causes of dissatisfaction of people to maintain conflict solidarity. This in turn resulted in higher reaction levels, which were experienced in a couple of instances. Another reason for high interaction level, albeit in some instances, was success-related events prompting people to engage more with such content. To put it shortly, the audience welcomed drone videos as signs of success and assurance about the situation.
The second perspective I tried to examine was drone imagery’s symbolic link with air sovereignty. I portrayed the drone propaganda of Azerbaijan as an attempt to demonstrate effective control of the territories over which the conflict emerged. Interpreting both sides’ attempts to prove or reject air sovereignty over the territory, I applied the abovementioned symbolic link between air power and sovereignty to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. To explain this link, I included both Azerbaijan and Armenia’s visual discourse during the war into the analysis by examining them within the context of the whole conflict. The main point observed is that while Azerbaijan through drone visuals was trying to show the control it had over the territory, Armenian side was countering such a strategy by claims of drone destruction. Hence, such visual discourses confirmed the link between air power and sovereignty in this case too.
References
[1] (2020) Non-state Armed Groups and UAVs: Uptake and Effectiveness, Armed Conflict Survey, 6:1, 19-22, DOI: 10.1080/23740973.2020.1761610
[2] Peter Bergen, Melissa Salyk-Virk, David Sterman, World of Drones. (2020). Retrieved 21 December 2020, from https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/world-drones/
[3] Shaikh, S., Rumbaugh W. The Air and Missile War in Nagorno-Karabakh: Lessons for the Future of Strike and Defense. (2020). Retrieved 21 December 2020, from https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-karabakh-lessons-future-strike-and-defense
[4] Eckel, M. Drone Wars: In Nagorno-Karabakh, The Future Of Warfare Is Now. (2020). Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.rferl.org/a/drone-wars-in-nagorno-karabakh-the-future-of-warfare-is-now/30885007.html
[5] See, for example, Zeitzoff, T. (2017). How Social Media Is Changing Conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61(9), 1970–1991. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002717721392; de Vries, M., Simry, A., & Maoz, I. (2015). Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water: Using Facebook to Mobilize Solidarity Among East Jerusalem Palestinians During the 2014 War in Gaza. International Journal Of Communication, 9, 28. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3581
[6] Ash Rossiter (2018) Drone usage by militant groups: exploring variation in adoption, Defense & Security Analysis, 34:2, 113-126, DOI: 10.1080/14751798.2018.1478183; Charlie Winter (2020) Framing war: visual propaganda, the Islamic State, and the battle for east Mosul, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 33:5, 667-689, DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2019.1706074; Speckhard, A. (2017). ISIS Drones: Evolution, Leadership, Bases, Operations and Logistics – ICSVE. Retrieved 22 December 2020, from https://www.icsve.org/isis-drones-evolution-leadership-bases-operations-and-logistics/
[7] Emil Archambault, Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, Drone imagery in Islamic State propaganda: flying like a state, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 4, July 2020, Pages 955–973, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa014
[8] Clausewitz, C. von [1832] (1989) On War, eds and trans Michael Howard & Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press) p. 89
[9] John Mark Mattox (2008) The Clausewitzian Trinity in the Information Age: A Just War Approach, Journal of Military Ethics, 7:3, 202-214, DOI: 10.1080/15027570802277755
[10] Bartos, O., & Wehr, P. (2002). Using Conflict Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511613692 p. 111-113
[11] Ibid p. 111
[12] Weber, Max (1946). “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press p. 78
[13] Williams, A. (2010). A crisis in aerial sovereignty? Considering the implications of recent military violations of national airspace. Area, 42(1), 51-59. Retrieved December 23, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27801439
[14] Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead and Alison J. Williams, ‘Introduction: visual culture and verticality’, in Adey et
al., eds, From above, p. 2
[15] Katharine Hall Kindervater (2017) Drone strikes, ephemeral sovereignty, and changing conceptions of territory, Territory, Politics, Governance, 5:2, 207-221, DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2016.1260493
[16] Christine Agius (2017) Ordering without bordering: drones, the unbordering of late modern warfare and ontological insecurity, Postcolonial Studies, 20:3, 370-386, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2017.1378084
[17] Neocleous, M. (2013). Air Power as Police Power. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(4), 578–593. https://doi.org/10.1068/d19212
[18] Wall, Tyler. (2013). Unmanning the Police Manhunt: Vertical Security as Pacification. Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes. 9. 10.18740/S4F591.
[19] Ibid
[20] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi. (n.d.) In Facebook [Facebook page] Retrieved 24 December 2020 from https://www.facebook.com/wwwmodgovaz
[21] See, for example, Mancosu, Moreno. (2018). Populism, Emotionalized Blame Attribution and Selective Exposure in Social Media. A Comparative Analysis of Italy and UK. Comunicazione Politica. 1. 10.3270/89738.; Sandoval Almazan, Rodrigo & Valle-Cruz, David. (2018). Facebook impact and sentiment analysis on political campaigns. 1-7. 10.1145/3209281.3209328.
[22] Ye Tian, Thiago Galery, Giulio Dulcinati, Emilia Molimpakis, and Chao Sun. 2017. Facebook Sentiment: Reactions and Emojis. SocialNLP
[23] Sandoval Almazan, Rodrigo & Valle-Cruz, David. Facebook impact and sentiment analysis on political campaigns
[24]O‟Halloran, K. L. (2011). Multimodal Discourse Analysis. In K. Hyland and B. Paltridge (eds) Companion to Discourse. London and New York: Continuum.
[25] Multimodal Discourse Analysis. (2019). Retrieved 22 December 2020, from https://www.diggitmagazine.com/wiki/multimodal-discourse-analysis#:~:text=Multimodal%20discourse%20analysis%20is%20an,another%20to%20create%20semiotic%20meaning.
[26] See for all targets identified via posted drone videos: The Fight For Nagorno-Karabakh: Documenting Losses on The Sides Of Armenia and Azerbaijan. (2020). Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2020/09/the-fight-for-nagorno-karabakh.html
[27] Stahl, R. (2013) What the drone saw: the cultural optics of the unmanned war, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 67:5, 659-674, DOI: 10.1080/10357718.2013.817526
[28] Hambling, D. (2020). The Weird And Worrying Drone War In The Caucasus (Updated). Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/06/22/the-weird-and-worrying-drone-war-in-the-caucasus/?sh=4d68d52b45da
[29] Shaikh, S., Rumbaugh W. The Air and Missile War in Nagorno-Karabakh: Lessons for the Future of Strike and Defense. (2020). Retrieved 21 December 2020, from https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-karabakh-lessons-future-strike-and-defense
[30] “Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means that there was not enough data for this term.”
Data source: Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends
[31] Armenia, Azerbaijan resume fighting. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://eurasianet.org/armenia-azerbaijan-resume-fighting
[32] Nagorno-Karabakh: Armenia and Azerbaijan agree to ceasefire. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/10/nagorno-karabakh-armenia-and-azerbaijan-agree-to-ceasefire
[33] Thousands of pro-war protesters rally in Azerbaijan. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://oc-media.org/thousands-of-pro-war-protesters-rally-in-azerbaijan/
[34] Rahimov, Rahim. (2020). Perceptions of Russia in Azerbaijan: Challenge for Moscow’s Peacekeeping Mission – Jamestown. Retrieved 24 December 2020, from https://jamestown.org/program/perceptions-of-russia-in-azerbaijan-challenge-for-moscows-peacekeeping-mission/
[35] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, October 10) “Atəşkəs rejimini pozan düşmənin zirehli texnikası məhv edilib” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/wwwmodgovaz/posts/3619543244769032
[36] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, October 10) “Atəşkəs rejimini pozmaq məqsədilə düşmənin atəş…” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/wwwmodgovaz/posts/3620287921361231
[37] Armenia: Unlawful Rocket, Missile Strikes on Azerbaijan. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/11/armenia-unlawful-rocket-missile-strikes-azerbaijan
[38] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, October 17) “Düşmənə məxsus növbəti zirehli texnikalar məhv edilib” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/1085101198213262/videos/1222294858143367
[39] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, October 17) “Cəbhənin müxtəlif istiqamətlərində düşmənin xeyli…” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/1085101198213262/videos/3046211435480371
[40] Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: US-brokered ceasefire frays soon after starting. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54686284
[41] Armenia: Cluster Munitions Kill Civilians in Azerbaijan. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/30/armenia-cluster-munitions-kill-civilians-azerbaijan
[42] Armenia: Cluster Munitions Used in Multiple Attacks on Azerbaijan. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/15/armenia-cluster-munitions-used-multiple-attacks-azerbaijan; Armenia/Azerbaijan: First confirmed use of cluster munitions by Armenia ‘cruel and reckless’. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/10/armenia-azerbaijan-first-confirmed-use-of-cluster-munitions-by-armenia-cruel-and-reckless/
[43] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, October 28) “Bölmələrimiz şəhər və rayonlarımıza atəş açan düşməni…” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/wwwmodgovaz/posts/3672876436102379
[44] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, October 30) “Bərdəni atəşə tutan “Smerç” məhv edilib” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/wwwmodgovaz/posts/3677494778973878
[45] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, October 29) “Mülki infrastruktur və dinc əhalimizi atəşə tutan düşmən…” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/wwwmodgovaz/posts/3675994229123933
[46] What happened in the Karabakh conflict zone on November 1 – overview. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://jam-news.net/karabakh-war-news-battles-what-is-happening-azerbaijan-armenia-turkey-pashinyan-aliyev/
[47] Azərbaycan Respublikası Müdafiə Nazirliyi (2020, November 1) “Düşmənin hərbi avtomobil korteji məhv edilib” [Facebook post] Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/wwwmodgovaz/posts/3684884621568227
[48] Rob Lee @RALee85 (2020, November 2) “Azerbaijan published a TB2 video showing strikes on an Armenian/NKR convoy yesterday at 17:00 near Khojavend. Some sources are claiming that NKR’s leader Arayik Harutyunyan was killed in the strike, though this hasn’t been confirmed.” Retrieved from https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1323042451976802311
[49] Azerbaijan captures strategic city in Nagorno-Karabakh. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://www.ft.com/content/c9dab829-3b4a-4464-a0c3-4d5c51aa1b0e
[50] Archambault and Veilleux-Lepage, Drone imagery in Islamic State propaganda: flying like a state, p. 969
[51] Ibid p. 962
[52] Kindervater, Drone strikes, ephemeral sovereignty, and changing conceptions of territory, p. 215
[53] Neocleous, M. Air Power as Police Power p. 580
[54] http://www.science.gov.az/news/open/14561
[55] Hambling, D. (2020). The ‘Magic Bullet’ Drones Behind Azerbaijan’s Victory Over Armenia. Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/11/10/the-magic-bullet-drones-behind–azerbaijans-victory-over-armenia/?sh=433d92ed5e57
[56] Robyn Dixon (2020). Azerbaijan’s drones owned the battlefield in Nagorno-Karabakh and showed future of warfare. Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.postguam.com/the_globe/world/azerbaijans-drones-owned-the-battlefield-in-nagorno-karabakh-and-showed-future-of-warfare/article_4088c46a-2497-11eb-8d99-7f14a8e00fc8.html
[57] Michael Kofman (2020) A Look at the Military Lessons of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict | Russia Matters. Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://russiamatters.org/analysis/look-military-lessons-nagorno-karabakh-conflict
[58] Another Azeri drone shot down over Artsakh. (2020). Retrieved 23 December 2020, from https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1032996.html
[59] Shushan Stepanyan @ShStepanyan (2020, October 11) “Another enemy UAV destroyed” video post, Retrieved from https://twitter.com/shstepanyan/status/1315311040004055041?lang=en
[60] Shushan Stepanyan @ShStepanyan (2020, October 12) “On October 12, an enemy AN-2 aircraft used as a drone was hit in the eastern direction by the air defense of the Defense Army.” video post, Retrieved from https://twitter.com/shstepanyan/status/1315581714446643200?lang=en
[61] Hambling, D. (2020). The ‘Magic Bullet’ Drones Behind Azerbaijan’s Victory Over Armenia. Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/11/10/the-magic-bullet-drones-behind–azerbaijans-victory-over-armenia/?sh=433d92ed5e57
[62] Synovitz, R. Technology, Tactics, And Turkish Advice Lead Azerbaijan To Victory In Nagorno-Karabakh. (2020). Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.rferl.org/a/technology-tactics-and-turkish-advice-lead-azerbaijan-to-victory-in-nagorno-karabakh/30949158.html
[63] Eckel, M. Drone Wars: In Nagorno-Karabakh, The Future Of Warfare Is Now. (2020). Retrieved 17 December 2020, from https://www.rferl.org/a/drone-wars-in-nagorno-karabakh-the-future-of-warfare-is-now/30885007.html
