NPR recently interviewed Luca Trenta, co-editor of the timely book, Killing in the Name of the State: State-Sponsored Assassination in International Politics, about the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the US’s shifting perspective on assassinations. For a long stretch of time (about 20 years, through the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations) they were considered taboo, but that started to change after 9/11. Trenta wraps up the piece with this startling point: “I think the Khamenei assassination is a major deal because democracies have killed a foreign head of state, because other countries might follow the same example, and there will be nothing that democracies will be able to say when that happens.” Listen to the discussion here.
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We were delighted to see John Clark’s edited collection, Political Identity and African Foreign Policies, featured in Democracy in Africa’s Book Club! In Clark’s article, he reflects on the central puzzle that inspired the volume: Although African states often share similar structural constraints in the international system, their foreign policy choices vary widely.
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