Killing in the name of the state: An empirical and critical reflection
Introduction
State-sponsored assassination occupies an uncomfortable place in contemporary security discourse. It is practised widely, acknowledged selectively, and theorised inadequately (Thomas, Citation2000). Killing in the Name of the State, edited by Luca Trenta and Kiril Avramov, enters this space with considerable empirical ambition. Drawing on case studies spanning multiple continents and decades, the volume seeks to map the institutional and political logics through which democratic and authoritarian states alike have come to treat the deliberate killing of named individuals as a legitimate instrument of statecraft. The contribution is real. Yet the book also exposes, sometimes unintentionally, a deeper problem in how the field of intelligence studies approaches state violence: it remains far more attentive to the perspectives of those who order killings than to those who bear their consequences.
This reflection contends that while Trenta and Avramov have produced a methodologically rigorous and historically grounded volume, its analytical framework is structurally incapable of accounting for the populations most affected by targeted killing. This is not simply a gap in coverage. It is symptomatic of a broader epistemological orientation within intelligence studies that privileges state-centred narratives and, in doing so, quietly reproduces the legitimating logic it purports to interrogate. Writing from a human security perspective, one that locates the individual, rather than the state, as the primary referent of security, this reflection situates the volume's limitations within the broader epistemological conditions of the field, drawing also on postcolonial and feminist security frameworks to develop that critique.
Contextualisation and significance
The significance of this book lies in its timing and scope. Targeted killing has undergone a profound transformation in the post-9/11 era. What was once a politically exceptional and legally contested measure has become, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, a routine feature of counterterrorism policy (Wiebe, Citation2003). The expansion of drone warfare, the development of kill lists, and the increasing integration of intelligence and military functions have collectively normalised lethal targeting in ways that earlier generations of security scholars would have found startling (Weber, Citation2016). Trenta and Avramov are right to treat this normalisation as requiring sustained analytical attention.
Within intelligence studies, this book fills a genuine lacuna. Scholars such as Richard Aldrich and Mark Phythian have examined the institutional reach of intelligence agencies in considerable depth, yet targeted killing as a discrete phenomenon has received comparatively limited book-length treatment. By tracing the historical evolution of assassination policies and demonstrating their continuity with contemporary drone programmes and special operations, the editors make a compelling case that state-sponsored killing is not a post-9/11 aberration but part of a longer, largely uninterrupted trajectory of covert state behaviour (Yoo, Citation2011). This reframing is analytically important and constitutes one of the volume's most valuable contributions.
The book also speaks meaningfully to debates in international law and ethics. Michael Walzer's framework for the moral limits of state violence, alongside Nils Melzer's legal analysis of targeted killing, provides a backdrop against which the volume's case studies can be read productively. The editors do not always engage directly with these normative debates, but the empirical material they assemble makes such engagement possible for the reader.
Overview of the volume
The central argument advanced across the volume is that contemporary targeted killing practices represent a continuation, rather than a rupture, from earlier forms of covert state violence. What has changed is not the fundamental practice but its institutional embedding: killing has been legalised, bureaucratised, and rendered publicly justifiable through the expansion of self-defence doctrines and executive legal frameworks (Leverick, Citation2006). The editors develop this argument through a series of country-specific chapters covering the United States, Russia, Israel, Iran, India, and Mexico, among others.
The comparative structure is one of the volume's genuine strengths. By juxtaposing cases across regime type, geographic region, and historical period, Trenta and Avramov resist the temptation to treat targeted killing as a distinctly Western or American phenomenon. The inclusion of chapters on Russia's assassination typology, Iran's use of proxy networks, and India's intelligence agencies broadens the analytical frame considerably. Technologically, the volume pays sustained attention to the role of drones in transforming the political economy of assassination. The authors demonstrate persuasively that drone technology has made targeted killing more feasible, more scalable, and more politically palatable by reducing immediate risk to the state's own personnel while increasing the spatial and temporal distance between decision and consequence.
Critical evaluation
The empirical depth of this volume is its most significant achievement. The case study methodology, supported by archival research, allows the contributors to move beyond theoretical abstraction and engage with the concrete mechanics of how states identify, authorise, and execute targeted killings. The historical framing, in particular, is valuable: it challenges the tendency to periodise state violence around 9/11 and encourages a more structurally grounded account of how lethal covert capacity develops over time (Crawford, Citation2013).
Nevertheless, the volume's analytical framework is overwhelmingly state-centric, and this limitation is both intellectual and political. The book excels at reconstructing the decision-making processes of governments and intelligence agencies, but it has remarkably little to say about what targeted killing looks like from the perspective of those on the receiving end. Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other contexts in which American drone strikes have produced significant civilian casualties appear primarily as operational theatres rather than as sites of distinct political and social experience (Lewis & Vavrichek, Citation2016).
The empirical record here is substantial and largely absent from the volume's analysis. In Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (Citation2019) documented over 400 drone strikes between 2004 and 2018, with credible estimates of civilian deaths running into the hundreds. Research conducted by the Stanford and NYU law schools found that the constant presence of drones produced severe psychological trauma among civilian populations, described by residents as living under permanent surveillance, unable to attend community gatherings or funerals for fear of secondary strikes (Stanford/NYU, Citation2012). In Yemen, the deaths of civilians in documented strikes, including in Al Majalah in 2009 and Rada'a in 2013, drew international condemnation that never translated into policy accountability (Downes, Citation2004). These are not incidental data points. They reflect entire communities whose political subjectivity, governance structures, and patterns of resistance are partly constituted by their experience of violence from above.
This absence reflects what critical security scholars identify as the epistemological consequence of producing security knowledge through state power. When the primary interlocutors are official archives, policy documents, and interviews with current or former officials, the resulting knowledge is inevitably shaped by what states choose to disclose, and which experiences they regard as analytically relevant. In chapters addressing the United States and Israel, the authors are rigorous in tracing legal justifications and institutional procedures, but less attentive to the contested legitimacy of those justifications in the eyes of affected populations or international civil society.
Feminist and postcolonial dimensions: What the framework lacks
Two theoretical traditions could have substantially deepened the volume's analysis, and their absence is notable. The first is feminist security studies. Scholars such as Cynthia Enloe (Citation2000) and Carol Cohn (Citation1987) have long argued that security analysis is not only state-centric but gendered: it privileges the experiences and concerns of those who hold institutional power, overwhelmingly male, institutional, and elite, while rendering the invisible impacts of violence on women, children, and other marginalised subjects. Targeted killing is no exception. The secondary effects of drone strikes, displacement, the collapse of community economies, the psychological burden borne disproportionately by women who lose male household members to strikes, the disruption of social and familial structures, are precisely the kind of diffuse, non-institutional harms that a feminist security lens would foreground. The volume's silence on these dimensions is not simply an oversight; it reflects the field's broader failure to integrate gendered analysis into the study of covert state violence.
The second tradition is postcolonial critique. The geography of targeted killing is not accidental. The populations most subjected to drone warfare, in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan, are located in the Global South, in states whose sovereignty is treated as conditional and whose civilian casualties are routinely classified, minimised, or contested by the states conducting strikes (Dowd, Citation2013). Fanon et al. (Citation1963) analysis of how colonial power structures take violence as governance and more recent postcolonial scholarship by Mbembe (Citation2020)/ on necropolitics, the sovereign power to dictate who may live and who must die, provides precisely the conceptual vocabulary this volume needs but does not deploy. Mbembe's (Citation2020) framing of the colony as a space where the exception is permanent, and where lives are governed through the threat of deaths, describes a logic structurally continuous with the normalised drone assassination Trenta and Avramov document. That the editors do not make this connection is symptomatic of how intelligence studies has historically marginalised postcolonial frameworks despite the field's deep entanglement with imperial and post-imperial power.
Together, these two traditions illuminate what the volume's state-centric framework structurally cannot: the racialised, gendered, and spatially unequal distribution of the costs of targeted killing. To ignore them is not a neutral analytical choice. It is to reproduce, within the academic register, the same hierarchies that make those costs invisible in official policy.
Normative limits and the question of legitimacy
There is also a subtle but consequential tendency throughout the volume to treat the normalisation of targeted killing as a descriptive rather than normatively troubling fact. The authors acknowledge that such practices raise serious ethical and legal questions, but the dominant register of the analysis is explanatory rather than critical. This is a legitimate scholarly choice, but it means the volume is better at telling us how targeted killing has been institutionalised than at asking whether the terms of that institutionalisation should be accepted.
From a human security perspective, the shift, this volume documents, is more troubling than its analytical framework allows it to acknowledge. Pre-emptive, intelligence-driven killing conducted at a distance, justified through secret legal opinions, and evaluated primarily by the states that carry it out, represents a form of violence that is structurally resistant to accountability. The individual, whose security frameworks place him/her at the centre of analysis, is reduced, in the volume's dominant logic, to a target, a casualty figure, or an operational variable. This is not simply a gap in the scholarship. It reflects a broader failure to ask whose security is being protected, and at whose expense.
Research impact and broader implications
Despite these limitations, the research impact of this volume is likely to be substantial. By providing a comparative empirical record of state-sponsored assassination across regime type and region, Trenta and Avramov have produced a reference work that scholars of intelligence, international relations, and international law will return to, repeatedly. The book advances the field's understanding of how institutions develop and sustain lethal capacity, and it makes a strong case for treating assassination as a mainstream rather than peripheral concern within security studies.
The implications extend beyond academic debate. By documenting how targeted killing has become embedded within routine legal and bureaucratic frameworks, the volume raises urgent questions about democratic accountability and oversight. If killing is normalised, the question is no longer whether it should be permitted, but how it should be governed, and from a human security standpoint, governed in whose interests. Without incorporating the perspectives and experiences of affected populations, such policy discussions can be at risk to remain structurally incomplete and politically partial.
Analytical reflection
What this volume ultimately illuminates, perhaps despite itself, is the extent to which intelligence studies remains organised around state knowledge and state perspectives. This matters not simply as a question of coverage or balance, but because the populations most affected by targeted killing are precisely those least represented in official records and academic literature. When security is defined primarily in terms of state survival and institutional capacity, the insecurities of communities living under permanent aerial threat are rendered analytically invisible, not by accident, but as a structural consequence of the field's dominant epistemological commitments.
A field that takes its claims seriously to understanding security, must eventually confront the question of whose security is being studied, from whose vantage point, and with what political consequences. The absence of affected voices from both policy and academic discussions is not incidental. It reflects and reinforces a system in which security is defined narrowly in terms of state interests, and in which the costs of that definition fall disproportionately on communities that lack the institutional power to contest it. Feminist and postcolonial scholarship offers not a supplementary corrective but a fundamental reorientation: one that begins with those most harmed and asks what security would need to look like if their experiences were treated as epistemologically central.
Conclusion
Killing in the Name of the State is a serious and important contribution to the empirical study of state violence and intelligence practice. Its historical depth, methodological rigour, and comparative scope make it essential reading for scholars working in intelligence studies, security studies, and international relations. The editors have assembled a volume that will shape debates in the field for years to come.
At the same time, the book's analytical framework ultimately constrains what it is able to see. By remaining within the orbit of state-centric knowledge, it reproduces the epistemological conditions that allow targeted killing to appear as a governance problem rather than a human rights crisis, and that render the racialised, gendered, and geographically unequal consequences of that killing analytically marginal. Scholarship that takes the next step, centring the perspectives and experiences of those most affected, and drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and human security frameworks to do so, remains urgently needed. Trenta and Avramov's volume is a compelling point of departure for that work. It is not, however, its destination.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.