Targeted Killing and Its Law: On a Mutually Constitutive Relationship

Although initially perceived as illegal and illegitimate, targeted killing has gained legal approval and greater acceptance as a tactic in the US fight against terrorism. Rather than being accomplished extra-legally or gradually normalized as an exception to the rule, as critics proclaim, targeted killing becomes inscribed into a law that was, and is, prepared to accept it as a practice. Conceiving of law as a practice renders the mutually constitutive relationship between targeted killing and the law visible. As a practice, law is indissoluble from the forms of knowledge both that enact it and that its enactment invokes. Targeted killing could assert itself as a security dispositif that displaces and relocates political notions underlying and defining international law.