Complex Adaptive Systems Theory and the Rise in Targeted Killing

[Jonathan]

If You Can’t Beat Them, Kill Them:
Complex Adaptive Systems Theory and the Rise in
Targeted Killing

excerpts

Examining the connection between the government’s detention
and targeted killing policies, this Article argues that
attempts to remove the “stain” of Guantánamo Bay
have created what might be an even greater crisis.

Specifically, while civil libertarians have claimed success
in executive and judicial efforts to grant detainees
greater protections, this success has produced
an unintended incentive for the government to kill
rather than capture individuals involved in the
war on terror. This perverse outcome has occurred
not as a result of a foreseeable linear process
whereby one phenomenon caused the other, but rather
as an unanticipated reaction to changes thrust
into the nonlinear dynamic systems of warfare
and national security law.
http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&context=shlr