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As such, this book will appeal to students and researchers working broadly on issues related to international relations theory, armed conflict, security studies, humanitarianism, human rights, international law, and global governance.
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It also discusses policy implications and avenues for future research. Chapter Five concludes by reconnecting the norm contestation model to the case studies and describing how it can be applied to norms other than those regulating armed conflict. Chapters Three and Four provide detailed case studies of the mechanisms of norm contestation as they apply to the civilian immunity and non-intervention norms. The first two chapters introduce the norm contestation model, explain how it contributes to the literature on norm violations, and discuss the reasons for the cases discussed. By using a norm contestation framework that highlights norm fluidity and actor agency, this book expands the discussion, providing insight into divergent interpretations of norm violation and compliance and the dynamic nature of norms. While most typical approaches to understanding norms view norms as stable structures and actor responses to them as unquestioned, in a global political climate where departures from expected behavior may occur, a more nuanced model is needed. This book uses the theory of norm contestation as a model for understanding variation in norm-related behavior in international relations. Their intertextuality and inherent contradictions can be leveraged by actors, both to transform and to stabilize meaning. They have a stabilizing function through the structuring force of the discourses embodied in them, but also allow leeway for agency. Metaphors offer a promising analytic pathway into this type of discursive transformation. By tracing the storied career of 'decapitation' - as a concept and a metaphor - in United States targeting strategies, I emphasize normative change as slow and incremental. The latter stabilizes the nation state as the sole relevant legal person, contributing to a conception of individuals as targets, but not legal subjects.
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It connected decapitation with the logic of preemption and its set of medicinal metaphors.
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This contributed to an individualization of threat that proved to be applicable beyond its origins in interstate warfare, spilling over into counterterrorism. Crucially, 'decapitation' and its set of 'body' metaphors established a new logic of enemies as organisms, detaching military targeting from the concept of the nation state. The concept has its origins in late Cold War nuclear deterrence theory and gained relevance in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an aerial warfare strategy. It anticipates a paralyzing effect on the groups the targeted individuals were 'heading'. The 'decapitation' paradigm assumes that any enemy organization - whether a state, insurgent group or terrorist organization - can be dismantled by cutting off its 'head'-by killing their leaders. In this paper, I argue that today's 'high value targeting' of individuals in the context of the 'War on Terror' is rooted in strategic debates about 'decapitation strikes' that predate September 11.