In the late 1960s, a spotlight cast upon some of the CIA’s more questionable activities in the subcontinent had a profound and enduring impact on Indian perceptions of the United States’ government and its external intelligence service. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy a prominent place in mainstream Indo–U.S. cultural and political discourse. For the remainder of the twentieth-century, and beyond, anti-American elements in India drew repeatedly upon the spectre of CIA subversion as a means of undermining New Delhi’s relationship with Washington. The blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified by the international media circus surrounding Congressional probes into the U.S. intelligence community, made a deep psychological impression in South Asia. This chapter traces the socio-political impact of Indira Gandhi’s assertions that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay behind India’s problems, foreign and domestic. It recovers South Asian agency in intelligence terms by interrogating the utility of Gandhi’s policy of exploiting the CIA’s reputation as a socio-political malefactor to court popular legitimacy.

This chapter discusses the crises Alexander faced leading up to his succession to his father, Philip II: his dispute with Attalus at Philip’s wedding to Cleopatra, its causes, significance and aftermath; and the Pixodarus affair. It then turns to the crisis of the succession itself: the circumstances of Philip’s assassination at the hands of Pausanias, Alexander’s movements at the time of it, and the steps by which he secured the throne himself and legitimated himself as Philip’s successor.

In Chapter 2, we address the ethics of raids, those daring, made-for-Hollywood missions like Operation Neptune Spear, the raid to capture/kill Osama bin Laden. Often characterized as ’high risk, high reward’ missions, we consider the moral challenges that that phrase implies. Do big payoffs justify rule-bending or rule-breaking? And who shoulders the high risk? The operators themselves, of course. But do promises of a big payoff justify placing non-combatants at additional risk? And what if that big payoff is a specific person as was the case in the bin Laden raid? As a discipline, military ethics has focused its attention primarily on contests between nameless combatants. It has paid scant attention, relatively speaking, to state-sponsored operations to hunt down and kill a specific person. Is this ever morally permissible? If so, under what conditions? What are the crimes that warrant a death sentence pronounced by a foreign government? Must a state first exhaust reasonable attempts to capture the named target? Does the method of execution matter ethically?

This chapter provides a cultural history of the wicked advocate from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection reflect deep-rooted problems in the history of local administration. It starts with monasteries’ miracle stories about advocates suffering in death as punishment for their crimes in this life. It then turns to the Swiss legend of William Tell and analyzes the earliest versions of the legend in order to demonstrate that Tell’s rival, the wicked advocate Gessler, abused his position in ways similar to those of other advocates. This chapter then discusses Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell to show that concerns about corrupt practices of justice and protection extended into the early nineteenth century. Local legends about bad advocates, some of them preserved today on the Internet, provide additional evidence for the enduring value of stories about wicked advocates who are punished for their bad deeds.

This chapter offers a case study of a single dispute over a church advocacy. In 1225, members of the entourage of Count Frederick of Isenberg attacked and killed Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne. Sources written at the time all agree that the reason for this assassination was a dispute between the count and the archbishop over the advocacy for the convent of Essen. Count Frederick had inherited the advocacy and considered it an important source of income and prestige, but Archbishop Engelbert – in whose archdiocese Essen was located – also sought control of the advocacy. The conflict between them ties together many of the themes of the preceding four chapters, including the issues of advocatial violence, forgery, royal and papal intervention in disputes and the importance of the profits accrued from holding an advocacy.

Chapter 3 analyzes President Obama’s announcement on the killing of bin Laden to reveal the way discounting life is authorized and legitimized through extrajudicial, extraterritorial killing. Specifically, Obama’s celebratory narrative of the killing as a nation-healing, nation-securing achievement codes vengeance as “justice,” normalizes US imperialism, implicitly justifies “collateral damage,” and remakes the parameters of legitimate state conduct in relation to terrorism. Attending to how Obama’s announcement used image, narrative, political myth, and sound to manufacture necropolitical law’s authority, legitimacy, norms, and community, Chapter 3 argues that we are interpellated by the official announcement, not as liberal legality’s empowered citizenry but as docile spectator-subjects. Chapter 3 also shows how the announcement, in avoiding the category “law,” enables a lawyer-president-commander-in-chief to invest the category “justice” with a range of meanings that contradict liberal legality, in that they invite us, as subjects, to acquiesce in state secrecy and in necropolitical law’s extraterritorial, extrajudicial violence.

Most of the textual sources concerning the imperial court are relatively short; many recount anecdotes illuminating a single moment, a memorable saying, or a specific practice. The surviving works of history and biography do, however, contain a few longer narratives of connected sequences of events at court. Such narratives most commonly occur when historians and biographers describe crises, when events at court had wider implications for the political history of the Principate. Prompted by this observation, this chapter presents a selection of the richest crisis narratives. The narratives presented relate to: the fall of Claudius’ wife, Messalina; the loss of position at court suffered by Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, and her ensuing murder by her son; and the assassinations of the emperors Domitian and Commodus.

The campaign songs of Abraham Lincoln help to carry a working-class hero into the White House, while no songs are sung about his background as a wealthy corporate lawyer. Lincoln’s love of opera is only one further dimension to the music of the Civil War era; the sides are drawn in the popular music of the Union and the Confederacy, while the songs of the newly emancipated Black soldiers herald the turn of the tide toward Union victory. The Irish contribution is also charted musically, as are such contentious subjects as the New York Draft Riots and the fate of the war’s prisoners and its disabled veterans. The hope of emancipated Black Americans in the wake of Sherman’s March through Georgia is sung to the skies, before the assassination of Lincoln paves the way for Andrew Johnson and the betrayal of Reconstruction.

investigates the troubled last years of tenth Imam ʿAlī al-Hādī and his son al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī. Hādī faced challenges from esoterist bābs claiming authority, most notably the renegade agent Fāris b. Ḥātim, who posed such a threat that Hādī ordered his assassination. Such challenges were compounded by a bitter succession dispute catalyzed by the unexpected death of Hādī’s designated heir, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad. This created confusion in the community, and doubt about the next Imam, al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī. Ḥasan was accused by his opponents of lacking the requisite knowledge to be an Imam, dogged by his infertility, and opposed by another brother, Jaʿfar. This dispute over Imamic succession generated a feud which was to continue after Ḥasan’s death and create a fundamental flaw between pro-Jaʿfar and anti-Jaʿfar camps that split both the family of the Imams itself, as well as their followers, and defined the development of the Twelver Occultation.

In Chapter 4, I investigate the emergence and evolution of the USA’s targeted killing programme, focusing mainly on its origins within the CIA and its transformation from a limited, ad hoc method to a systematic and institutionalised form of militarised counterterrorism. I question whether it represents the erosion of international and domestic prohibitions on assassination and find that it does not; those prohibitions continue to exist and play a normative role in shaping how force is used, but they have changed in content – they refer to something different than before. Central to this process were legal arguments and bureaucratic politics designed to adjust the delegation of authorities across the agencies of the US security apparatus, facilitated by the development of armed unmanned aerial vehicles, which supplied an essential means, and by pressure from the Bush and Obama administrations.

In this Introduction to the book, I raise the question of the possible erosion of prohibitions on assassination, torture, and mercenarism. I discuss the limits of ‘norm death’ as an explanation and propose instead that a ‘normative transformation’ has occurred. I outline how pragmatism, practice theory, and relational sociology will inform my perspective, how I will critique and build on theories of norm change in IR, and how I will analyse the three cases: the USA’s targeted killing programme, the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme, and the USA’s extensive employment of armed contractors in war zones.

Chapter 15 involves much of what has gone before; targeting both objects and human beings, core principles, individual status, and more. Artificial intelligence is described as applied to autonomous weapons, then as applied to LOAC’s core principles – difficult values for autonomous weapons to meet. To whom does criminal liability attach, should such weapons go awry? Designers? Builders? Users? These remain difficult LOAC issues that this chapter examines. Drones and their military use are discussed, including the American CIA’s use. Since CIA personnel are civilians, their involvement in targeting in armed conflict is unlawful, an issue discussed in this chapter. Targeted killing and its lawfulness are examined at length, as well as their relationship to assassination, an illegal act in US law. Targeted killing’s weak link, who decides which individuals should be killed, is also discussed. In the Cases and Materials section, the wrongful shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988, that killed 290, is examined – a case study of autonomous weapons gone bad.

Chapter 5 analyses the impact of the third macro-political factor in Rwanda’s path to genocide: the assassination of the president. The death of Habyarimana, who was by far the longest-serving sub-Saharan African head of state to have been killed-in-office, created a massive and sudden political opportunity. This chapter explains how and why the ensuing power vacuum and power struggles ultimately played out in favour of extremists at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels in Rwanda. As before, decisions taken by elite actors strategically interacted and the contestation escalated once more in the absence of constraints at the domestic or international levels. At the national level, extremists quickly prevailed over moderates to capture the state because they possessed superior coercive capabilities. At the local level, violence broke out at different moments in part because it took time for local power struggles to resolve in some communities. Extremists and opportunists eclipsed moderates once the centre fell and sometimes with the support of extra-local forces. However, in part, violence onset varied because it also took time to break social bonds in ethnically more cohesive communities. Once extremists captured the state at the local level, they built small groups of supporters, drawing on their social networks. These critical masses then mobilized the wider community using ingroup policing and peer pressure.

Chapter 1 focuses on the Cuban War for Independence in the 1890s. As Anderson noted, the war in Cuba itself was linked to global resistance in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and even Barcelona. But this chapter draws the focus to the particular roles of anarchists in Florida and the connections between them and their comrades in Havana. The side of the Florida Straits you were on could make a world of difference. While Havana’s anarchists faced severe repression by late 1896, anarchists in Florida operated in a climate of almost benign imperial neglect as Washington gave anarchists the space to support the war against Spain with supplies, men, and money. This trans-Strait symbiotic relationship gave birth to the Caribbean network which came to be centered mostly in Havana after the war but in which Tampa played an enormous role during the war and in the first years of Cuban political independence after 1902.