Norm transformation and the institutionalization of targeted killing in the US
| Author | Simon Frankel Pratt |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066118812178 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118812178
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(3) 723 –747
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066118812178
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JR
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Norm transformation and
the institutionalization of
targeted killing in the US
Simon Frankel Pratt
Georgetown University, USA
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Historical sociology, norms, pragmatism, security, targeted killing, War on Terror
Corresponding author:
Simon Frankel Pratt, Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University, 3600 N Street NW,
Washington, District of Columbia 20007-2670, USA.
Email: simon.pratt@mail.utoronto.ca
812178EJT0010.1177/1354066118812178European Journal of International RelationsPratt
research-article2018
Article
724 European Journal of International Relations 25(3)
Introduction
The institutionalization of targeted killing in the US suggests a significant transformation
in its interpretation of, and adherence to, norms of war-fighting and security-seeking. For
two decades, the US has used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — “drones” — as plat-
forms for small-scale airstrikes on specific individuals, increasingly relying upon this
method of counterterrorism and counter-insurgency, with numbers of strikes and casual-
ties now in the thousands. The evolution of targeted killing in the US is already the
subject of a number of recent examinations (see, among others, Carvin, 2015; Fuller,
2017; Grayson, 2012, 2016; Zenko, 2013), and these establish key ways in which chang-
ing legal discourse and re-conceptualizations of the geography of counterterrorism were
facilitating factors.1 This concerns the particular definition of assassination under inter-
national law (Beres, 1991; Pickard, 2001; Thomas, 2001), questions of imminence and
pre-emption (Gordon, 2006; Kasher and Yadlin, 2005), the space in which a formal
armed conflict is occurring, and the status of combatants (Blum and Heymann, 2010).
Mostly unexamined, however, is a normative dimension linking all of these, distinct
from — though certainly entangled with — formal or legal rules, and extending through-
out the practices and institutions composing the US’s counterterrorism apparatus.2
Significant actors involved in that apparatus articulated concerns over what was right
or proper, making reference not just to laws, but to embedded institutional norms, organi-
zational history, and experience with scandal, professionalism, and other dynamics war-
ranting focused sociological investigation. In particular, their concerns pertain to the
salience and nature of international and domestic prohibitions on assassination as inter-
preted by ranking figures in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and in the Bush and
Obama administrations. This establishes prima facie the value of examining this case
through an approach oriented around the origins and effects of norms and normativity. If
so, the case may be a puzzle of norm “death” or “disappearance” — a subject that has
garnered recent attention from International Relations (IR) scholars (D’Ambruoso, 2015;
McKeown, 2009; Panke and Petersohn, 2011). Did prior “norms” cease to guide or regu-
late practice?
I address two parts of this puzzle. First, I show that in the US’s counterterrorism appa-
ratus, targeted killings do represent a normative change. However, this is not the demise
of a single norm against assassination, but a transformation of its contents and referents,
reaching across a range of interacting formal and informal structures and standards. It
indicates not a sweeping change of norms at an international level, but rather the ways in
which one major power has arranged its military and security practices. Second, I explain
how that change came about, identifying three interacting causal mechanisms as the driv-
ers of a process of institutional evolution, in which new normative and strategic logics
became embedded in new bureaucratic structures, most notably, in the CIA. This again
diverges from existing scholarship on this subject not only by focusing on normative
factors, but also by employing a more formal approach to distinguishing causal mecha-
nisms by type and by placing them within a process-tracing framework.
In the first section of the article, I lay out the empirical puzzle, offering a brief history
of the US’s use of targeted killing. I state three possible explanations: the prohibition on
assassination has either eroded or disappeared (“norm death”), never meaningfully
existed in the first place for the actors in question (“norm dissociation”), or still exists but
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