On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel killed the Supreme Leader of Iran. Eighty-six years earlier, a Soviet agent killed Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City. Between those two events lies a practice that has never had a settled name, a stable legal test, or an agreed measure of success.Targeted Killings: Law, Ethics, and Strategy in the Age of Drones and Artificial Intelligence treats that practice whole. It moves from the legal architecture governing a cross-border strike — the law on resort to force, the law of armed conflict, human rights law, and domestic authorization, any of which may apply to a single operation at the same time — through the ethics of transferring risk from soldiers to the civilians beneath the aircraft, to the contested strategic record of leadership decapitation, where the empirical literature divides sharply on whether removing a commander weakens an organization or hardens it.The book then turns to the technologies reshaping how targets are chosen: armed uncrewed systems now fielded by at least forty-eight states, and algorithmic systems that rank human beings for lethal attention faster than any analyst can review the result.It is deliberately comparative. Alongside United States practice it examines Israel, Russia, Türkiye, European states, and the widening circle of governments that have adopted individualized lethal force without adopting the legal reasoning that once accompanied it. A consolidated chronology of thirty-two documented cases, from Trotsky in 1940 to Khamenei in 2026, grades each on attribution confidence rather than asserting responsibility flatly, and a companion table sets those cases against the forums that examined them.Written for classroom as well as professional use, each of the fifteen chapters carries learning objectives and outcomes, discussion questions, and a case-analysis exercise, supported by a book-wide glossary, a table of authorities, and a full reference apparatus.The question is no longer whether states will kill named individuals. It is whether anything still constrains them. Read more
