Frontier justice: international law and ‘lawless’ spaces in the “War on Terror”

Abstract

How does the discourse of international law facilitate extraterritorial state violence? This paper synthesizes insights from International Relations, comparative politics, and legal studies in order to explore how the sovereign foundations of international law may render “frontier territories” exceptionally vulnerable to external military intervention. I argue that international law’s focus on sovereignty constitutes frontier territories as “ambiguous,” which leads to discursive conflicts over how to define these spaces, what is considered “legal” and “illegal” action within them, and who gets to define their status. All of this creates a conducive environment for powerful international governments to denigrate frontier territories as “lawless,” by rhetorically constructing them as exceptional legal spaces that do not deserve the same protections as areas ordered by sovereign ideals. To illuminate this empirically, I conduct a discourse analysis of 16 distinct legal documents from the Obama White House, including internal memorandums and public speeches on the legal standing of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Keywords

Critical security studies international humanitarian law human rights War on Terror discourse foreign policy

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