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Ntina Tzouvala, Markus Gunneflo, Targeted Killing: A Legal and Political History, Journal of Conflict and Security Law, Volume 22, Issue 3, Winter 2017, Pages 559–563, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcsl/krx011
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Extract
In August 2015, the UK launched a drone strike in Syria, which resulted in the deaths of two of its nationals, Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin. This was noteworthy to the extent that the UK had condemned what are now known as ‘targeted killings’ as unlawful under international law on multiple occasions, including in the United Nations Security Council debate and subsequent resolution about the assassination of Khalid el-Wazir in Tunisia by Israeli forces and on further occasions.1 Two years later, Trump’s administration announced its intention to rescind many of the rules relating to targeted killings outside war zones that the Obama administration had put in place.2 Published between these two occasions, Markus Gunneflo’s book interrogates the relationship between sovereignty, protection, lethal force and international law. It does so by constructing a legal and political history of targeted killing that departs from current legalist debates about the questionable legality of the practice and the purported need to submit it to the imperatives of the rule of law.3 Rather, Gunneflo points out that that ‘both the concept and the practice of targeted killing depend entirely on the ability to distinguish between legal “targeted killing” and extra-legal “political assassination” ’ (p 1). The saturation of ‘targeted killing’ with legal language is documented through the detailed and insightful analysis of legal theory and practice in Israel and the USA, the two states that pioneered the practice and, more importantly, were willing to put forward (semi-) public legal justifications for such acts.