Extrajudicial Killing as Risk Management

Kessler, Oliver; Werner, W.G.

doi:10.1177/0967010608088779

Cited by 51 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…With the epistemology of pre-emption structuring problematizations of (in)security across political assemblages, these practices, what they are said to be preempting and their effects become difficult to counteract within the grammar of security discourses obsessed with managing risk (see Kessler and Werner, 2008;Massumi, 2007;De Goede, 2008;Muller, 2008).…”

Section: Assassination and Targeted Killing As Biopolitical Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence

Grayson

2012

Security Dialogue

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This article begins by presenting a biopolitical account of assassination and targeted killing events carried out by liberal regimes. It argues that forms of political violence are understood and made meaningful beyond the administrative frameworks and technical rationalizations often privileged in biopolitical analyses. Deploying Alan Feldman's (1991) argument that political violence is an 'emplotted action' alongside William Connolly's (2005) notion of resonance, it provides a genealogical account of how forms of assassination have been positioned within Western cultural understandings of political violence. The focal point of examination is the biblical heroine Judith, whose story has resonated as a preferred narrative structure for understanding and (de)legitimating acts of assassination among Western publics. Through its reading of the book of Judith, the article highlights the importance of ambivalence for understanding assassination as a form of political violence. The legacy of the moral problematique enabled by Judith is then illustrated in relation to US President Barak Obama's May 2011 speech announcing the killing of Osama Bin Laden. The article concludes by suggesting that although the story of Judith may underpin contemporary assassination practices, it also offers a means of critically engaging with them.

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Section: Assassination and Targeted Killing As Biopolitical Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence

Grayson

2012

Security Dialogue

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“…The result is that police is taken as not only self‐evident, but somehow a more “legitimate” and hence less politically problematic form of organized violence than the terror of war and drones. For example, in their discussion on “extrajudicial killings as risk management”, Oliver Kessler and Wouter Werner (:305) describe how targeted killings abroad are often justified in the language of crime and punishment, explaining how “states borrow the language and moral force of the law enforcement paradigm (‘crime and punishment’)”. Yet they go on to add that the security state does this “without accepting all the responsibilities that normally come with it”, implying that when architects of the drone war justify targeted killings with a lexicon of “crime and punishment” this amounts to a perversion of the “law enforcement” paradigm or even suspension of the “rule of law” since warfare's “extrajudicial killing” in practice eschews the legal rules governing the police collection of evidence and presentation of this evidence to judges and juries.…”

Section: Drone War/police Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Ordinary Emergency: Drones, Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror

Wall

2016

Antipode

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This paper brings into conversation two ostensibly disparate geographies of state violence: the routine police surveillance and killing of members of the “dangerous classes” in the United States, an issue that is in no way new but nevertheless has gained increased attention over the last year with the Black Lives Matter movement; and the targeted drone strikes against “terrorist suspects” in the “war on terror”. By laying side by side the “war drone” and domestic police power, it becomes readily apparent that despite ostensible differences—foreign vs. domestic, war vs. peace, exceptional vs. normal, military vs. police, legal vs. extralegal—the unmanning of state violence gains much of its political and legal force from the language and categories that have long animated the routine policing of domestic territory. The paper calls for taking the violence of police power more seriously than many drone commentators have.

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“…In this sense, counterterrorism is less about “a ‘traditional’ form of prevention in the sense of an objectifiable and knowable risk, [and more] about [addressing] potentially disastrous harm” (Borgers and van Sliedregt :187–188). The orientation to the future in relation to ancillary and preparatory criminal acts is less one of prediction and more one of potentiality : possible future violence and potential end stages of ancillary acts are mobilized in trial proceedings or through the media in ways that are not strictly predictive and probabilistic, but that incorporate “a logic of radical uncertainty in legal reasoning” (De Goede ; Kessler and Werner :290; Amoore ).…”

Section: Precaution and Criminal Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentencing Risk: Temporality and Precaution in Terrorism Trials

Goede

Graaf

2013

Int Polit Sociol

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In debates on the preemptive measures of the war on terror, criminal law is often regarded as the antithesis to exception-a conventional mode of response that acts on the basis of past harm. Since September 11, 2001, however, significant new terrorism laws have been adopted in most countries in order to make possible the disruption and prosecution of potential terrorists engaged in preparatory activities. Thus, ancillary acts undertaken increasingly in advance of actual violence are brought within the remit of criminal law. This paper engages the question of the precautionary turn in criminal law itself, and how it plays out in actual courtrooms. We examine the terrorist trial as a performative space where potential future terror is imagined, invoked, contested, and made real. By focusing on the cases of the Hofstad group in the Netherlands, and the Rhyme trials in the UK, the paper examines how present criminal offenses involving terrorist aims and intent are constituted through the appeal to potential future violence. In conclusion, the paper teases out the political dynamic of secondary risk management that-frequently-underlies contemporary terrorism prosecutions.In November 2011, a man named Jose Pimentel was arrested in New York on charges of criminal possession of a weapon and conspiracy to build a bomb, with the aim of committing a terrorist attack. At the time of his arrest, Pimentel was in the process of assembling a homemade bomb that was, in the words of police, "about an hour away" from being functional (quoted in Goldstein and Rashbaum 2011). Coinciding with the suspect's appearance in court, New York police and the District Attorney convened a press conference to provide more information on the plot and the suspect. What was remarkable at this press conference was that police brought and demonstrated a model of the bomb that Pimentel 1 Many thanks to two anonymous reviewers of IPS for their very helpful comments and suggestions. We are grateful to the participants of the COST workshop "Uncertain Futures" at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in January 2012, especially Claudia Aradau, Susanne Krasmann, Rens van Munster, Sven Opitz, and Wouter Werner for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks to Gavin Sullivan and Liesbeth van der Heide for research assistance.

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Extrajudicial Killing as Risk Management

Cited by 51 publications

References 26 publications

The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence

The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence

Ordinary Emergency: Drones, Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror

Sentencing Risk: Temporality and Precaution in Terrorism Trials

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