Law, Science, Liberalism and the American Way of Warfare

Carvin, Stephanie; Williams, Michael

doi:10.1017/cbo9781107589704

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…When critics of US practices employ the language of crime and punishment, such as by referring to killings as "extra-judicial executions" (see, e.g., Kretzmer, 2005) Again, IR scholars have attended to some aspects of this mechanism in existing work. Macro-historical research into the material foundations of international systems (Deudney, 2000) and into the complexification of war (Bousquet, 2008) are two such examples, while Carvin and Williams (2014), who take an explicitly practice-theoretical approach to look at the emergence of a liberal way of war, offer a third. A fourth lies in the IR-adjacent literature in political geography on materialism and war (Grayson, 2016;Holmqvist, 2013;Shaw, 2013).…”

Section: Norms and Targeted Killingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies into liberalism and its attendant mode of warfare explicitly trace the history of drones and targeted killing (Carvin and Williams, 2014; Grayson, 2016; Shaw, 2013), and consider the cultural implications of their use (Holmqvist, 2013; Wilcox, 2017). Carvin and Williams (2014) examine the broad historical transformation of warfare, and the others focus on the normative implications of technology rather than the causal origins of its evolution and institutionalization. My approach shares their sensitivities but operationalizes that normative dimension through a mechanism-based etiology applied to a specific case.…”

Section: Broader Implications For Theorizing Institutional and Normatmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Norm transformation and the institutionalization of targeted killing in the US

Pratt

2018

European Journal of International Relations

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This article explains the emergence and institutionalization of the US’s targeted killing practices as a case of norm transformation. I argue that international and domestic US prohibitions on assassination have not disappeared, but have changed as a result of practitioner-led changes in the conventions, technologies, and bureaucratic structures governing the use of force in counterterrorism activities. After discussing the limits of alternative explanations, and drawing inspiration from practice theory, pragmatist social theory, and relational sociology, I posit three causal mechanisms as responsible for the transformation: convention reorientation, which was the redefinition of targeted killing to distinguish it from assassination; technological revision, which was the development and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones”) to bypass normative and strategic concerns over precision; and network synthesis, which was the support of the Bush administration and especially of the Obama administration, overruling dissenters from within the Central Intelligence Agency (who were often very highly placed). I trace the processes by which these mechanisms operated and interacted in simultaneous and mutually reinforcing ways from the start of the millennium until now. Finally, I discuss some of the ways in which this contributes to institutional analysis and the study of norm change more generally, and, in particular, how it considers the role of technology and the reciprocity of means and ends.

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Section: Norms and Targeted Killingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Broader Implications For Theorizing Institutional and Normatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Norm transformation and the institutionalization of targeted killing in the US

Pratt

2018

European Journal of International Relations

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Blind Justice? The Role of Distinction in Electronic Attacks

McDonald

2016

Ethics and Policies for Cyber Operations

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Contesting the heavens: US antipreneurship and the regulation of space weapons

Bower

Lantis²

2023

Eur. j. of int. secur.

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The 1967 Outer Space Treaty reserved outer space for ‘peaceful purposes’, yet recent decades have witnessed growing competition and calls for new multilateral rules including a proposed ban on the deployment of weapons in space. These diplomatic initiatives have stalled in the face of concerted opposition from the United States. To explain this outcome, we characterise US diplomacy as a form of ‘antipreneurship’, a type of strategic norm-focused competition designed to preserve the prevailing normative status quo in the face of entrepreneurial efforts. We substantially refine and extend existing accounts of antipreneurship by theorising three dominant forms of antipreneurial agency – rhetorical, procedural, and behavioural – and describing the mechanisms and scope conditions though which they operate. We then trace the development of US resistance to proposed restraints on space weapons from 2000–present. Drawing on hundreds of official documents, we show how successive US administrations have employed a range of interlayered diplomatic strategies and tactics to preserve the permissive international legal framework governing outer space and protect US national security priorities. Our study illustrates the specific techniques and impacts of resistance in a domain of growing strategic importance, with implications for further refining understandings of norm competition in other issue areas.

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Law, Science, Liberalism and the American Way of Warfare

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Norm transformation and the institutionalization of targeted killing in the US

Norm transformation and the institutionalization of targeted killing in the US

Blind Justice? The Role of Distinction in Electronic Attacks

Contesting the heavens: US antipreneurship and the regulation of space weapons

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