Collectiveillance and the sociotechnical politics of protest drones

This article examines how protest drones reconfigure relations of visibility and power within mass demonstrations. Drawing on 69 interviews conducted during Israel’s 2023–2025 anti-government protests, we analyze how a self-organized collective of drone operators produced aerial footage that became central to the movement’s visual identity. Rather than approaching protest drones through veillance typologies that presume external targets, we build on atmospheric politics (Kaplan, 2020) and sociotechnical approaches to drone vision (Klauser and Pedrozo, 2015) to examine how drones operate within ambiguous airspace and produce inward-oriented forms of collective visibility. We introduce collectiveillance to capture configurations in which aerial visibility is oriented toward the protesting collective itself and stabilized through attribution and alignment among operators, protesters, and audiences. Participants rarely understood protest drones as surveillance tools or as a means of sousveillance aimed at reversing the state’s gaze. Instead, the drone’s gaze was largely experienced as inward-looking and legitimizing. At the same time, protest drone practices reproduced asymmetries of technical expertise, editorial authority, and gendered divisions of labor, reflecting the continued influence of militaristic and surveillant legacies. Across four analytical dimensions, the findings show how collectiveillance emerges from specific sociotechnical conditions. Concentrated military and technological backgrounds shaped representational authority, while vertical mobility and horizontal networking expanded protest space and reconfigured collective presence. Collectiveillance thus names a sociotechnical arrangement characterized by collaborative visibility production alongside persistent power asymmetries. The article extends scholarship on civic drone use by moving beyond surveillance-reversal narratives and foregrounding how aerial technologies mediate collective political subjectivity through contested practices of seeing and being seen.