The Lure of Novelty: 'Targeted Killing' and Its Older Terminological Siblings

The concept ‘targeted killing’ has been increasingly adopted in scholarship, policy and media discourses, particularly in the context of US armed drone attacks. While ‘targeted killing’ is often understood as something new, there are strong historical continuities with more traditional concepts such as ‘assassination’ and ‘extra-judicial execution’, as well as with the colonial concept ‘police bombing’. This paper builds on an analysis of over 900 Security Council debates, Human Rights Council reports, legal papers and policy documents. Tracing the conceptual continuities, I argue that the peculiar novelty of ‘targeted killing’ does not mainly stem from the novelty of the practices and claims it describes but from the contradictory modes in which the term has been used, which has problematic repercussions for recent counterterrorism discourses. Posed as a new category which reacts to a new situation, the adoption of the concept ‘targeted killing’ has, I argue, played an important role in the promotion of claims which were long considered unlawful and illegitimate. Demonstrating the importance of language in setting political struggles up in a particular way, the paper contributes to a growing body of critical work on counterterrorism use of force.