Targeted killing in international relations theory: Recursive politics of technology, law, and practice

ABSTRACT

As new technologies make possible new modes of war, they cause tension in the previously prevailing conceptual categories. This is evident, as the practice of targeted killing by governments has increased in frequency and prominence, largely due to the American use of armed drones around the world. The essays in this special issue explore how norms, rules, and laws that many people thought were settled have been roiled by new technologies of targeted killing. This includes rules on sovereignty, territory, due process, and the distinction between civilian and combatant. The essays sketch an implicit research program around the recursive relation between rules and practice. I draw these out into a more general model for scholarship at the boundaries between law and politics and between concepts and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Norms
• practices
• international rule of law
• targeted killing
• drones
• laws of war

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ian Hurd is an associate professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His work is on the politics and practice of international law and legalization and his new book is How to do things with international law (Princeton University Press 2017). In 2017, he is a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.

Notes

1. These processes are amplified in some international legal traditions, such as the New Haven school and critical legal realism, that see a specific need for international rules to follow the policy preferences of governments. This accommodation is treated as a good thing in the New Haven tradition and as either neutral or nefarious in the critical tradition.