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The U.S.‐led drone program has severe and wide‐ranging psychosocial and political effects on people in targeted areas. This article draws upon the author's interviews with people living under drones in Afghanistan to argue that drone surveillance and bombardment causes social isolation and self‐objectification. Interviewees reported that social gatherings, and any activities that involve nighttime travel, are shortened or avoided out of fear that drone surveillance will spot so‐called "nefarious activity" and bombardment will follow. Drawing upon feminist and postcolonial scholarship, the article contends that drone surveillance constitutes a form of psychological colonization. Civilians are frequently made to think of how they look to drone operators and change their behaviors accordingly—therein "self‐objectifying." Narratives of "precision" warfare allow citizens of Western liberal democracies leading/supporting the drone program to avoid psychologically confronting these effects, while people living under drones face relentless psychological insecurities.

Unusually for a political documentary, The Act of Killing provides its audiences with little information, no overarching argument, nor a call-to-action. Instead, director Joshua Oppenheimer uses two unconventional investigative strategies—reenactment and an examination of media affect—to uncover the 1965 Indonesian genocide and the shadow it casts over present-day Indonesia. Although these techniques have been used previously in documentary cinema, Oppenheimer employs them in innovative ways to dig under Indonesia's social unconscious and expose the artifice of the 'official' history of the genocide. This article provides a close analyses of The Act of Killing's use of these strategies. It argues that they are not only integral to the documentary's political success in the Indonesian context, but can also be used by political documentarists and committed journalists to mobilise otherwise disengaged audiences in our 'non-ideological' and 'post-political' age.

In this commentary, from our positionality as members of the LGBTQA Caucus executive committee, we consider the academic and embodied barriers that stand in the way of a more inclusive IR from the perspective of queer and trans scholars in the discipline. We offer our reflections from our positionalities as queer scholars applying queer theory in IR, including our work in the Caucus to support LGBTQ + scholars in the discipline as a means of confronting what continues to be a very narrowly accessible space – geographically, financially, socially and linguistically. Relatedly, we consider the embodied experience of not belonging to the discipline of IR; an experience that many LGBTQ + scholars will recognise.