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The Status Of State And Nonstate Actors In Postwar Hostilities: Restoring The Rule Of Law To Us Targeted Killing Operations, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

All Faculty Scholarship

With the killing of Iranian general Qassim Soleimani, the United States crossed a new frontier in the use of extrajudicial lethal operations outside of armed conflict. As a state actor, Soleimani once would have been entirely off-limits as a target outside the context of a formal armed conflict between the United States and Iran. The Trump administration’s choice to conduct a one-off strike on a state military leader indicates that conflicts among state adversaries are increasingly fought using the hybridized tools of the war on terror. This Article will argue that the increasing use of such techniques and the perceived …