When Defiance Turns into Violence: Status, Roles, and Killing Thy Enemy

Sebastian Harnisch

Introduction

In early August 2021, Vitaly Shishov failed to return from his regular morning run in Kyiv. Shishov directed the Belarussian House in Ukraine, a non-governmental organization helping those who fled their country after anti-government protests in the summer and fall of 2020. After a brief search, Shishov was found hanged in a public park near his apartment. The Ukrainian police investigated his death as a “murder masked as a suicide.”[1] Earlier in May 2021, Belarussian authorities forced a passenger plane from Athens to Vilnius to land in Minsk in order to detain Raman Pratasevich, a twenty-six year old Belarusian blogger and journalist, who had left Belarus in 2019 because he was on a terrorist watch list of the Belarussian State Security Committee, known as the KGB.[2]

Transjurisdictional authoritarian repression is on the rise. A recent report by Freedom House suggests that it is “becoming normal … [that] governments reach across national borders to silence dissent among their diaspora and exile communities.”[3] In 608 cases since 2014, the report lists thirty-one governments that operated in seventy-nine foreign countries to detain, assault, physically intimidate, use unlawful deportation or rendition, and suspected assassination to harm opponents.[4] To explain this phenomenon, which he terms “transnational authoritarianism,” Gerasimos Tsourapas argued that the rise of global migration flows has presented autocratic governments with an “illiberal paradox,” a situation in which authoritarian governments wish to encourage emigration for economic gains, while seeking to control transborder movements because of political and security concerns.[5] To address the paradox, autocratic governments engage in various strategies, ranging from legitimization and cooptation to transnational repression.[6]

For millennia, governments, both democratic and autocratic, have engaged in two prominent and violent forms of repression at home: Politically motivated murder of dissidents (politicide) and minorities (genocide), often on a massive scale, to establish, expand, or stabilize their rule.[7] Targeted killings, the use of intentional lethal force against a culpable person or group outside the (physical) custody of the targeting agent, became more prevalent and prominent in the 2000s as various governments started using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and stopped denying the fact that they engaged in such practices.[8]

This article focuses on a third form of violent transnational repression: Political murder as an act of defiant enmity. In such cases, I argue here, a political regime reacts to crosscutting legitimatory pressures from inside and outside its sovereign space, i.e., transnational/trans-jurisdictional, rather than focusing on internal repression alone, i.e., purges.[9] In this way, the regime deliberately kills or attempts to kill a political opponent by symbolic means, often using poisons and/or in public view, to demonstrate the regime’s defiance and power, to set an example for both domestic and international audiences. Domestically, the ruler thereby asserts their position as the final arbiter of life and death; internationally, the ruler superimposes their own interpretation of their role as a sovereign equal upon other governments. Taking the life of one’s own citizens abroad is therefore a reaffirmation of the regime’s status as an equal (great) power to be reckoned with, despite the interference of a liberal international society. Defiant political murder abroad is an act of both transnational repression and expression.

My approach to this topic is built on literature from several distinct fields. Taking cues from recent advances in social psychology and international relations about the effects of emotions on state behavior,[10] this article interprets defiant political murders as relational and emotional phenomena. This approach is justified because the occurrence of such murders is tied to a constellation of affective relationships between the fearsome autocratic leaderships that symbolically kill an opponent to superimpose their “greatness” and domestic and international others they deem as threatening the legitimacy of their rule.[11]

Drawing on symbolic interactionist role theory and psychological studies on defiance, this article explains defiant political murder as a violent act of transnational role superimposition by which an offended ruler lashes out to reinstate self-pride through killing those who inflict fear and humiliation upon them and/or their regime. Symbolic political murder, and possibly other forms of transnational repression, are thus not simply causal outcomes of the presence or absence of certain material or immaterial factors, such as migration,[12] norm transformation,[13] regime type,[14] power differentials,[15] cultural dispositions,[16] or individual attributes, such as personal pathologies.[17] As such, defiant political murders are not primarily used to reduce the risk of a coup or an imminent (physical) threat to the regime. Rather, I argue here that defiant political murders are embedded in “feeling rules” that specify which emotions are considered appropriate and expected in specific situations. These feelings rules extend to international relations.[18] By openly killing its own citizens on foreign territory, an autocratic regime brazenly defies the feeling rules of the current liberal international order, which prioritizes human dignity over state sovereignty.[19] In the Russian case, as Gulnaz Sharafutdinova has so aptly shown, President Vladimir Putin has been able to transform emotions of shame and humilitation about the loss of the Soviet Union and troublesome transition of the 1990s into pride and patriotism by drawing on two central pillars of Soviet collective identity: Soviet exceptionalism and a keen sense of extreme foreign threat to the state and its people by the “West.”[20]

This article makes three main contributions to the pertinent literature. First, it furthers the current debate in role theory research on how international and domestic role taking are linked and how this link may be conceptualized.[21] In this vein, the concept of defiant political murders clarifies the conditions under which autocratic regimes openly and symbolically kill their citizens abroad. Second, my approach contributes to the study of transnational repression by clarifying the role of open murder as an instrument of active defiance in an international order that is viewed by a particular autocratic government, personal rulers, as hostile and overbearing. This way, it adds a relational argument to the literature on transnational repression that has up until now foregrounded individual or regime type attributes as causal forces. Third, this article adds rich empirical evidence on the relational entanglements of state leaders and their emotional responses to role expectations in social hierarchies: when powerful rulers are denied recognition, i.e. deference, of their (superior) role status, both domestically and internationally, they experience emotional resentment and may engage in violent and defiant behavior to restore their pride and sense of self-worth. This article also contributes to questions arising from the concept of ambivalent enmity. First, by clarifying when and how plausible deniability is forfeited in state-sponsored killings of citizens abroad, it sheds light on how secrecy and its ostentatious rejection are used to express ambivalence. Second, the article problematizes the claim that defiant political murders simply imitate enemy behavior, e.g., by serving as effective means for ending dissent or as revenge. Instead, the essay foregrounds the symbolic functions of the killings, which are meant to demonstrate the superiority of the perpetrator and to reinstate the perpetrator as a great power, thus changing the international order.

My argument proceeds as follows: First, the paper theorizes how contrarian role assertion in a group that collectively expects commensurate role behavior, i.e., defiance, results in different forms of transnational repression, in this case political murder. Second, I describe how different forms of insulting/humiliating behavior bring about international hierarchies that result in defiant counter role taking. Third, I present two different case studies in which a governmental perpetrator covertly or openly killed an opponent, here focusing on the interplay of domestic and international treatments of misrecognition and disrespect towards the perpetrating regime. A brief conclusion summarizes the major findings and implications for future research and policy.

Role theory, disrespect, and defiance

International role theory has thus far been primarily concerned with the emergence of an international actor’s “self” and how that self is functionally positioned in international society.[22] Drawing on George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionist framework,[23] a relational strand of role theory has foregrounded the distinction between the median concepts of “I” and “me,” in which the former represents the individual capacity to generate spontaneous and creative impulses whereas the latter refers to the capacity to see its self through the eyes of others. This process is referred to as “self-identification,” whereas the relational positioning vis-à-vis others is described as “role taking.”[24]

If role taking is reciprocated by another actor through adoption of a commensurate role, a stable role pattern and social structure of matching functionally specified role expectations occurs. Moreover, the roles actors come to play not only stabilize external (inter)national structures, such as norms, they also stabilize and/or transform the self of an actor.[25] As role taking and making processes—the latter indicating a change of self-expectations towards the content of the functional role—are frequently contested, both domestically and internationally,[26] these contestations impact upon the stabilization of the self, i.e., the ontological security of an actor.[27] It follows that the role of role taking and role making is tied to both the re-establishment of ontological security and the management of emotions: If state leaders encounter others who confirm their role and respective identity claims, they are more likely to experience increased self-esteem and positive emotions, such as pride or joy; if state leaders feel that their roles are rejected or questioned, however, they may experience lowered self-esteem or humiliation and other negative emotions such as fear, shame, or anger.[28]

When adopting role identities within states, decision makers also embrace the expectations attached to their position and the state’s position in the world. By identifying with these international roles, they endorse the feelings that go along with the state’s international social position.[29] As Samuel A. Greene and Graeme Robertson have shown, rulers can enlist substantial additional emotional identification with the regime when taking up adversarial nationalist foreign policy roles, such as, in their case-study, the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia.[30] Notably, through this “Crimean moment,” Putin was able to reassert Russia’s claim on so-called historical Russian territory against international critique and sanctions, and to significantly bolster his status by raising citizen support rather than intra-elite consensus.[31] Hence, while self-identification between the state and ruler has changed over time, nationalism and other forms of self-identification with the state, such as honor cultures, also shape the emotions of rulers, state agents, and citizens.[32]

Being cast into an unappealing role by another actor—either explicitly when the other tries to socialize an actor into an inferior role (direct altercasting), or implicitly, when the other actor takes on a new role, repositioning the other into an inferior role (indirect altercasting), [33] lays the groundwork for defiant behavior.[34] From a role theory perspective, defiance, then, can be defined as a spontaneous or deliberate effort to shed (or avoid) an inferior counter role.[35] Structurally speaking, defiant role taking aims to resist some specific role altercasting behavior, thus leaving the overall relationship intact. As Russian President Dmitry Medvedev noted in 2008, when pushing back against the earlier US bombing of Serbia (1999) and NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders: Russia “will not tolerate any more humiliation and we are not joking.”[36] This role taking pattern then amounts to opposition in a given social order where only some norms or rules are contested.[37] In contrast, defiant role taking is geared towards violating central decision-making procedures or norms, thereby calling into question the order or central elements of it.[38] Thus, when addressing the Valdai Club in 2014, Putin claimed that NATO and Western nations had violated the sovereignty and dignity of Eastern European nations: “It is impossible to keep humiliating one’s partners forever in such a way. That kind of relationship eventually breaks down.”[39]

From a temporal point of view, role taking may amount to preemptive defiance, if a hierarchical social order has not yet been (re)established, with the defiant actor trying to preserve or regain the status quo of his or her (former) functional position in the current social order. Emancipatory defiance occurs if and when a subaltern actor in a hierarchical role setting rejects the subordinate role, thereby attempting to change the status quo.[40] Whereas preemptive defiance tends to be conservative in nature, an attempt to preserve a given order and the stable self-identification based on the respective roles taken in that order, emancipatory defiance is revisionist and voluntaristic in nature because it aims to retrofit an existing order with a given (ego-based) role expectation.[41]

Emotions, resentments, and deadly enmity

In hierarchical social orders, struggles over role status are especially prone to violence because disrespect and misrecognition by others deny the role holder the opportunity to establish a positive and stable self-identification, i.e., ontological security.[42] Either a superior role holder violates certain basic rights, such as sovereignty or territorial integrity in an inter-state setting, thereby denying ontological security of a subaltern role holder who cannot yield anymore and engage in stable deferent role patterns; or a superior role holder denies one of his peers the constitutive respect of being treated as equally superior, thus lowering the position of the other nation among worthy nations as well as exposing the leadership of that nation as weak and inferior.[43]

There is a difference between humiliation and degradation/dishonoring practices and the respective social orders in which they are situated.[44] The former, humiliation, has been referred to as “enforced lowering of any person or group by a process of subjugation that damages their dignity … and to humiliate is to transgress the rightful expectations of every human being and of all humanity that basic human rights will be respected.”[45] Dignity is embedded in a social order in which (human) actors display an inalienable worth, regardless of social status, gender, race, age, political opinion, property, or nationality.[46] Thus, as Josiah Ober has highlighted, dignity cannot be lost or gained and there can be no competition over it.[47]

Table 1: Disrespect and defiant behavior: cognitive, somatic, and action-oriented indicators

Degradation may refer to the implicit or explicit violation “of a kind of status attached to physical bravery and the unwillingness to be dominated by anyone.”[48] As such, it is based on internal quality but requires constant recognition by others to exist.[49] Hence, honor cultures infuse an obsession with respect and a readiness to violently respond when an actor’s honor is offended.[50] By insulting an actor, through word or practice, a role holder takes on a dominating position, as the position of the insulted actor is based on their reputation of being able to guard one’s honor at all times.[51] It follows that by engaging in reciprocal violent and insulting action towards an other, i.e., through vengeance, honor and ontological security may be restored as bravery is displayed.[52]

Resentment is a corresponding emotional attitude that endorses a negative stereotype about another actor’s moral character.[53] In contemporary political theory, resentment denotes a legitimate sense of anger and desire for justice in the face of an injury,[54] whereas “ressentiment” indicates the self-defeating inward turn of this emotion onto the self. As such, ressentiment may be understood as “suspended, delayed, or botched revenge.”[55] Thus, when resentment turns onto the self, self-victimization and ressentiments may turn into violence as a traumatized self searches for and finds an external culprit. Eliminating that culprit, oftentimes identified as an alleged “fifth column” of members of one’s own society deemed to conspire with external enemies,[56] temporarily, or in our case, permanently, is intended to free the self from its perceived impotence. Yet, in effect it merely returns the self to its former state rather than providing genuine self-affirmation.

Disrespect for an actor’s domestic or international role and respective status may thus trigger intense responses that feature cognitive, somatic, and action-oriented reactions. On a cognitive level, these responses refer to the relative position of the aggrieved party’s role vis-à-vis the other and the social order in which both are positioned. On the somatic level, the actor may spontaneously report on the emotional state he or she is in, either by reflecting on (strong and disproportionate) bodily effects or comparisons to experiences of others, especially the perpetrator. On the action level, anger is related to resentment or hatred, and results in negative biased perceptions of the other, a reduction in interaction, an increase in risk acceptance, and aggressive behavior.[57]

To account for various distinct types of defiant political murder, this article argues that the motives for this act lie at the intersection of decision makers’ domestic and international ontological security seeking, resulting from conflicts over hierarchical role relations and repeated experience of subjugative altercasting behavior by (significant) others. As such, defiant political murders, emanating from both domestic and/or subjugating international role interaction, typically have the following characteristics:

1. Function: Defiant political murders do not (exclusively) serve the prevention of domestic regime change as they are deemed to restore a long history of humiliating or degrading behavior by the targeted actor (and third parties). Therefore, gloating behavior, the enjoyment of someone else’s discomfort, is often part of defiant political murders.[58]

2. Context: The murder is preceded by a long series of speech acts or practices of ressentiment and defiance vis-à-vis the targeted actor and/or domestic and (liberal) international others.[59] This contextualization may involve the claim that a cultural context, i.e., espionage culture, requires the murder to restore honor.

3. Confirmability: The factual circumstances (location, weapon, approach) allow direct inferences about the perpetrator(s) without damning criminal evidence (open and deliberate norm violation) resulting in a successful criminal procedure and sentence.

4. Symbolism: The publicity and disproportionality of the murder, i.e., using rare and dangerous weapons in public spaces, clearly prioritizes revenge and vengeance for past humiliations rather than aiming for the prevention of future acts of degradation.[60]

Research design

This definition of defiant political murder is new. The classical definition by Franklin L. Ford holds that political murder in general is homicide related to the body politic and governance, including both targeted assassinations and random killings designed to intimidate opponents, while calling attention to a given cause.[61] Defiant political murder adds two important additional dimensions: these murders are symbolic in the way that the public method is intended to subjugate the victim for malfeasance by using particularly dangerous and painful means, i.e., nuclear substances. They are also relational in the way that the site of crime is chosen to address a transnational audience and the act itself is meant to brazenly break international legal norms and openly violate transnational feeling rules. It follows that defiant political murders are related to both domestic and international politics, as the perpetrator signals that he/she will not succumb to international norms that protect the physical integrity of individuals against governmental actions.[62]

As such, defiant political murder should be systematically distinguished from violent political purges, i.e., forceful removal of individuals from a polity (politicide) or from elite positions to prevent regime change (coups),[63] and more regular forms of (transnational) repression of oppositional groups and individuals to ensure efficient ruling through reducing costs for repression.[64] Defiant political murder should also be differentiated from targeted killing, a violent use of force against foreign non-state agents rather than citizens targeted by their “own government.”

Building upon the recent literature on defiance in international politics,[65] defiant political murders are embedded in overlapping national and transnational feeling rules that trigger an (unintended) emotional response on the national level to a transnational behavioral expectation. To demonstrate the critical role of defiant behavior in recent international political murders, the article uses two case studies to present different types of defiant transnational political killings. It investigates one great power (Russia) and a lesser power (North Korea) to illustrate the plausibility of the theoretical argument.[66]

I use data from two data sets on political murder in the Soviet Union and Russia (1924–2020), collected by Peter C. Oleson,[67] and North Korea, prepared by Taekbin Kim,[68] to contextualize the case studies on defiant political killings. I use process-tracing and leverage some original data and secondary sources to analyze these case studies: Video footage of the public killing of Kim Jong-nam and the (public) suffering by Alexander Litvinenko;[69] forensic reporting by various government reports and international investigative networks, such as Bellingcat;[70] (local) media coverage[71] as well as extensive secondary sources.[72]

To better understand how and when defiant murders occur, this article asks “how something became possible” rather than “why something happened.”[73] To do so, one needs to establish the conditions in which an action or process occurs,[74] and these facilitating conditions need to be broken down further into political configurations—relational factors indicating the (mal)distribution of authority and social and emotional capital among the actors involved—and the ideational dependences, i.e., historically specific dispositions and institutional memories in the discourse.[75]

While the political configurations that create or allow for defiant murders are fairly well established in the secondary literature on both Russia and North Korea, the ideational dependences are not. This article therefore focuses on a thick historical description of the specific ideational dispositions of the respective regime to trace the interactions between the original role taking and the killing to re-establish recognition as a great power (Russia) or a nuclear power to be reckoned with (North Korea).

Russia

There is no dearth of studies of purges and political murders in Soviet or Russian history.[76] Neither is there a lack of analyses arguing that the Russian government has pursued an “aggressive foreign policy,”[77] has sought to be recognized as a “great power,”[78] a “true European state,”[79] acted as “deviant power,”[80] or played the role of a “defiant actor.”[81] However, there has thus far been no systematic attempt to bring these distant literatures together to further explain the nexus between great power status seeking, deviant and defiant behavior, and symbolic acts of murder. Rather, as David V. Gioe et al. and Adrian Hänni and Miguel Grossmann have suggested,[82] the recent public killings of Alexander Litvinenko (2006) and Sergei Skripal (2018) should be interpreted as part of “vengeance operations” of Russian intelligence agencies, which do not match an older pattern of Soviet intelligence agencies killing defectors.[83]

Although it seems that the symbolic murders of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal broke new ground when compared to historical patterns of killing defectors during the Cold War, recent defiant political murders are neither restricted to intelligence defectors—as the case of Alexei Navalny suggests—nor are they initiated by Russia only, as the cases of Kim Jong-nam (North Korea), Jamal Khashoggi (Saudi Arabia), Vitaly Shishov (Belarus), and other victims indicate.[84] Defiant political murders are not a plausible instrument to attain international prestige or status as a great power, because these types of killing one’s citizens beyond the nation’s borders are regularly followed by sanctions and other acts of status deprivation. Rather, defiant and symbolic political murders originate from a deep sense of role derogation of an autocratic ruler by a domestic and/or foreign other so that the murder is meant to restore superiority in one of two (or both) role relationships with domestic and international opponents.

In the case of Russia, Reinhard Wolf has identified three major episodes in Russian foreign policy practices of defiance: the disposition of Russian paratroopers at Pristina airport to face off Western troops in 1999, the invasion of Georgian territory in 2008, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and hybrid warfare in Eastern Ukraine thereafter.[85] In all three episodes, Russian government officials propagated a traditional conception of state sovereignty that stands in contradiction to the Western conception of sovereignty as a responsibility towards the people rather than a right of the government vis-à-vis the people and other states.[86]

It comes as no surprise that the Russian foreign policy elite regarded the color revolutions, starting in the mid-2000s, as a direct threat to Russian sovereignty. As Putin famously complained in 2007 at the Munich Security conference: The United States was talking and acting like a “strict uncle” who has “overstepped its national border in every way … imposing all kinds of policies on other nations.”[87] More than a decade later, Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Russian Security Council, decried how the United States misused international law by replacing it with the “doctrine of a rules-based order” that gives the United States the prerogative to “intervene militarily and introduce sanctions against unwanted states [sic] and meddle in their internal affairs.”[88] Rather than being a “liberal world order,” Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Federation Council’s Foreign Committee, seconded, that order constituted a “global dictate of liberal states.”[89]

What irked Putin the most during this period, according to various sources, was the Western and US disrespect in their attempts to tell Russia how to behave: “attempts are made to weaken us from within, make us more acquiescent, make us toe the line … we don’t need [the US] constantly getting mixed up in our affairs.”[90] It is also possible, if not probable, that personal grievances of Putin or his close confidants also played a role in the targets or time period of some murders. As Amy Knight reports in her authoritative history of political murder in Russia under Putin, Litvinenko, shortly before his forceful death in July 2006, wrote an article in the Chechen Press reporting on rumors that Putin was a pedophile after the President had greeted a group of tourists outside the Kremlin and lifted a young boy’s t-shirt to kiss him on the stomach.[91]

The Soviet KGB had long held a policy of targeting political opponents and intelligence defectors throughout the Cold War.[92] The KGB preferred a pattern of public executions for opponents, or discreet, camouflaged killings by entrusted surrogates to prevent the victim from revealing further secrets and maintain credible deterrence against further defections from the KGB.[93] In contrast to the vast number of political killings and the new type of defiant political murders under Putin,[94] these earlier KGB-directed killings were geared towards domestic sovereignty and organizational resilience in the face of the mishandling of state and intelligence secrets. The means and circumstances of these killings were functional rather than symbolic and while they were moderately effective when compared to their deterrence aims, they were highly effective in killing the victims (see Table 2).[95]

In a rare public interview in December 2017, the then-Director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexandr Bortnikov, described how the Soviet/Russian security apparatus viewed the figure of the “traitor”:

One must take historical conditions into account. On repeated occasions our Fatherland was the object of hostile incursions by foreign powers. The adversary tried to defeat us either in open battle, or by relying on traitors inside the country, using their help to sow trouble, divide the nation, paralyze the state’s ability to react to emerging threats in a timely and efficient manner. For some, the destruction of Russia to this day remains an idée fixe.[96]

Table 2: Public Political murder in the Soviet Union (Politburo only) and Russia (opposition / secret service) (1934–2020): Attempts and implementation ratio

* Sergei Tretyakov: Died, probably of natural causes.

** Aleksandr Poteyev: Death declared, possibly disinformation to cover defection.

When compared to the Soviet cases, the (attempted) public murders of Litvinenko, S. Skripal, and Alexei Navalny with rare and dangerous nuclear and chemical substances clearly stand out.[97] In all cases, the perpetrators had the chance to assassinate the victim quietly and effectively, given that subsequent investigations revealed that the victims had been observed for months. In contrast to the other two attempted killings, the Litvinenko murder stands out. Before the highly publicized press conference in November 1998, where former FSB agent Litvinenko and some of his colleagues explained to a global audience how and why the FSB had been involved in corruption, conspiracy, and extrajudicial (attempted) killings, no other FSB agent had exposed so many and wide-reaching operational secrets of the FSB. As a consequence, Litvenenko not only lost his job at the FSB but also was convicted (on fabricated charges) to a year in prison before fleeing to London.[98]

In London, Litvinenko positioned himself as a dissident to the Russian regime. Not only did he associate with Boris Berezovsky as a security advisor, he also collaborated with Spanish and British intelligence agencies. Moreover, in 2001, Litvinenko co-authored a book, Blowing up Russia,[99] in which he accused the FSB as responsible for the terrorist bombings of several apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999, thereby directly implicating Putin and his close friend Nicolai Patrushev (head of FSB) in one of the worst terrorist attacks on Russian soil.[100]

In early November 2006, Litvinenko met with two Russian businessmen, Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, in a hotel bar in London for tea. A British public inquiry under the former Foreign Minister Sir Robert Owen found that on this occasion, these two individuals poisoned Litvinenko with Polonium-201, a rare and dangerous nuclear substance, leaving traces of the poison all over London and beyond. Litvinenko was hospitalized for poisoning and died following a torturous three-week period.[101]

The Litvinenko murder established a pattern of defiant political murder in the Russian Federation under President Putin: The perpetrators used a rare and weapons-grade nuclear or (highly restricted) chemical substance that leads to a prolonged, painful, and visible death to achieve maximum and extended attention, thereby creating a phase of public humiliation for those who had allegedly betrayed Russia. The significance of this phase of humiliation is supported by Putin’s gloating behavior, stating about Litvinenko in 2010: “Traitors will kick the bucket. … Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”[102]

We see this pattern repeated in further attacks. Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and two unrelated British citizens were poisoned with Novichok, a rare military-grade nerve agent, in the fall of 2018. Again, Putin derided the victim, calling Skripal a “traitor” and “scumbag” following the attack.[103] There is also substantial evidence that Navalny, after several earlier attempts on his life, was observed for several weeks by an FSB team in 2020 and then also poisoned with Novichok, surviving only, as an involved FSB agent later revealed, because of the prompt intervention by paramedics.[104]

In this pattern, the perpetrators leave behind extensive and visible evidence of their operation such that subsequent investigations can pinpoint specific perpetrators by name, travel itineraries, implications in earlier murders, etc. In the case of Skripal, for example, the two agents dropped a perfume bottle containing the military-grade poison in a garbage can, which resulted in an unrelated British couple becoming contaminated with the woman dying a few days later. Given the professionalism in other covert (domestic) killings, this apparent sloppiness suggests that the operators either saw no need to conceal their actions or deliberately chose to leave visible evidence for the investigators to find. It is thus plausible to suggest that the operatives wished to maximize the power gap between the victim and the perpetrator by strengthening the confirmability of the offence while keeping their impunity.

The confirmability and symbolism of the act thus provides further evidence that the murders of Litvinenko and Skripal, and the attempted murder of Navalny,[105] should be treated as instances of defiant political murder because the perpetrating governments did not try to conceal their nefarious actions.[106] In addition, the Russian Duma passed a new law in 2006 that explicitly gave the President the authority to use the Armed Forces and Intelligence services to kill so-called enemies of the Russian state on foreign soil.[107] Thanks to this law, when deliberately killing the enemies of the Russian state, perpetrators merely implemented national legislation, superimposing Russia’s law upon the legal order of the target state.[108] It follows that these defiant killings may be characterized as preemptive defiant acts of murder, as they were geared towards preserving Russia’s status as a great sovereign power capable of imposing its will upon international society and key political players, such as the United Kingdom (Litvinenko, Skripal) or Germany (Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a legal resident, was shot in Berlin in August 2020 by a Russian agent).

North Korea

Political murders and purges have been regular features of the North Korean regime since its inception, but defiant political murders have been rare. The database by Taekbin Kim accounts for 367 purges between 1948–2019.[109] There is also plenty of evidence for high-profile (attempted) political killings, including a 1968 raid by special commandoes to murder the South Korean President Park Chung-hee, the (successful) bombing of a South Korean ministerial delegation in Rangoon (1983), and the shooting of Yi Han-young, a cousin on Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother, who defected to South Korea in 1997.[110] The public dismissal (and eventual killing) of Kim Jong-un’s uncle, Chang Song-teak, in 2013 and the prominent murder of his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, in 2017, are often interpreted as similar purges among the North Korean elite, meant to solidify Kim Jong-un’s rule by executing potential rivals.[111] However, there is plausible evidence to suggest that at least the state-sponsored assassination of Kim Jong-nam should be interpreted as a defiant political murder.

The North Korean regime has a long history of defiant behavior geared towards preserving its sovereignty and state autonomy (Juche ideology) with a political leadership cult that does not tolerate any sign of disloyalty by citizens or foreigners.[112] For a long time, the country has been the paradigmatic “rogue state” of the international community.[113] This label assumes an adversarial relationship that includes recourse to preemptive use of force including alleged weapons of mass destruction. Such stigmatization may lead the accused state to associate with other deviant actors—including behaviors such as coalition building or behavioral reversal—but it also regularly results in spirals of mutual demonization.[114]

A typically defiant statement by the North Korean propaganda operation during the reign of Kim Jong-il blends the country’s renunciatory position with its adherence to the leadership cult:

The U.S.-led imperialist forces and international reactionaries are fabricating nuclear, missile, and other issues to strangle the North militarily and economically. We neither want nor will avoid a war. If a war is imposed, we will never miss the opportunity.[115]

The statement closes with the threat of a catastrophic war, setting the North Korean people in direct contradistinction with the United States and its alleged aggressive politics:

The respected Marshal [Kim Jong-il] has created an army-centered politics for the first time in the political history of world and brilliantly materialized it. It is the unshakable faith and character of the Korean people and army to meet a challenge with a thousand-fold annihilating strike and a war of aggression with a liberation war of justice. If the United States misjudges the quality of the Korean people rallied around the great brilliant commander in one mind in the spirit of human bombs and unleashes a war of aggression, the Korean people will not miss the opportunity to rise up as one.[116]

Under Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s domestic propaganda has taken an additional defiant turn, associating US sanctions as signs of enmity directed against the “self-revival” (charyŏk kaengsaeng) of the North Korean people. In this view, the reign of Kim Jong-un is identified with a “New Dawn” (Ryŏmyŏng) that elevates North Korea to the international space.[117]

Despite the persistent military pressure and vicious economic blockade of the monstrous US imperialists, through shortages of food and fuel brought on by untimely natural disasters, our army and people followed the Great General’s will to build a strong nation, devoting their bodies and their lives. If it would ease their suffering, Comrade Kim Jong Un would willingly burn his body to ash and become their fire and foundation.[118]

Defiant speeches and behavior have been particularly strong in North Korea’s nonproliferation policies.[119] The North Korean government regularly criticizes the current nonproliferation order, particularly the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as discriminatory and asymmetric and uses (defiant) norm-transgressive behavior to elicit concessions by great powers,[120] especially the United States.[121] However, North Korea rarely itself engages in norm entrepreneurship, allies with like-minded states, or takes responsibility for its own actions, i.e., its self-proclaimed nuclear weapon status.[122]

Notably, when announcing its intention to establish a nuclear deterrent force in June 2003, the North Korean regime argued that building nuclear weapons was a necessary and legitimate response to the “hostile policy” of the US and the need to “reduce conventional weapons … and channel manpower resources and funds into economic construction and the betterment of people’s living.”[123] Rather than addressing the whole international society and regularly disparaging international institutions, such as the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), North Korean statements display a strong desire to receive recognition by the United States as a formally equal interlocutor and respected partner, thereby ending a “century of humiliation” for Koreans, characterized by Japanese occupation and US domination.[124]

When gauging the immediate context of the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, it becomes obvious that the interaction between the United States and North Korea took a potentially decisive adversarial turn in the early days of the Trump administration: To begin with, during the interregnum, the North Korean Foreign Ministry issued a Memorandum (November 21, 2016), claiming that the US had “aimed at political suffocation and system collapse” under President Obama, listing nineteen specific instances, which resulted “in defaming the supreme dignity of the DPRK—the gravest of all sins.”[125] Then on December 1, 2016, former US General of the Eighth Army, General Walter Sharp, stated that the United States ought to launch a preemptive strike on North Korean sites should North Korea put an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on a launch pad and the US was uncertain whether or not it carried a nuclear warhead.[126] In his traditional New Year’s address, Kim Jung-un primarily discussed North Korea’s economy, but also praised recent advances of its nuclear weapons program, most notably a “first H-bomb test, test-firing of various means of strike and nuclear-warhead[s] … and enter[ing] the final stage of preparation for the test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile” capable of reaching the continental United States.[127] In an immediate response, President-Elect Trump sent a tweet, reprimanding Kim Jong-un directly: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!”[128] thereby implying that the United States would act preemptively against the ICBM missile test Kim Jong-un had announced during his earlier New Year’s address.

In sum, the defiant political murder of Kim Jong-nam is preceded by a string of practices that show North Korean defiance concerning weapons of mass destruction and its struggle for recognition as an equal partner with the United States. The ensuing interaction pattern with the incoming Trump administration, however, is characterized by both partners seeking first-mover advantages and domination. In particular, as various US actors, including the President-elect, signal a willingness to strike, North Korea presents their missile capabilities to challenge the Trump administration to recognize their equal status.[129]

It was in this political context that two women from Indonesia and Vietnam, guided by eight North Korean agents, used the powerful nerve agent Venomous Agent X (VX) to attack Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13, 2017. After suffering painful convulsions, the victim died on the way to the hospital, with security cameras capturing the attack in great detail.[130] In the aftermath, a brief diplomatic crisis ensued between Malaysia and North Korea over the causes and the investigation of the death. Most of the culprits fled the country immediately after the attack. Only the two women were arrested and tried, and after serving truncated sentences released because the prosecution dropped or lowered the charges.[131]

There had been various previous attempts on Kim Jong-nam’s life, dating back to the early 2000s.[132] In addition, there is ample evidence that Kim Jong-un ordered at least several dozens of purges and assassinations during the early years of his reign, most notably the murder of his uncle and mentor, Chang Song-taek, to consolidate his grip on power.[133] However, the timing, circumstances, and modus operandi of Kim Jong-nam’s assassination suggest that deterrence vis-à-vis domestic rivals was a secondary concern in this murder. Given the earlier attempts on his life and that he carried antidotes against various poisons, including VX, with him at the time, and given that the two women were recruited and used in a similar situation several months before, it is noteworthy that Kim Jong-nam was killed during a period of heightened tensions with the United States. The timing is all the more suspicious when one considers that Kim Jong-nam reportedly met with an CIA agent just days before the attack and was carrying a large sum of cash (US $120,000) in a backpack when he was assaulted.[134] Most important, however, is the use of a prohibited and dangerous nerve agent in a highly-visible and public setting. Due to these factors, it is more than plausible to suggest that this murder was meant to signal at least two things: first, that North Korea possessed weapons of mass destruction, a fact it had not acknowledged before; and, secondly, that the regime was also willing and able to use them to strengthen its deterrence against external threats, particularly those with relations to the US.[135] In this view, the defiant political murder of Kim Jong-nam, an alleged CIA informant, becomes an act of emancipatory defiance because the regime imposed its own new status role as a nuclear weapon state upon the United States at a time when the US President suggested preemptive military action to deny North Korea and its leader that status role.

Conclusion

Fortunately, defiant political murders are rare. The number of instances and perpetrating countries has grown notably over the past fifteen years, however, which indicates changing dynamics in the international community. These defiant political murders signal that some members of the international community live in a state of enmity with the broader liberal, Western-dominated, international order as they seek to reassert their (status) position as either great powers or nuclear powers to be reckoned with, thereby contesting the current rules-based order. The article has developed a theoretical explanation based on international role theory and the concept of defiance to integrate norm-violating behavior with resentment in a feeling structure to explain this particular type of violent transnational repression.

Conceptually, defiant political murders are interpreted in this paper as more than a reaction to increasing norm compliance pressure by the liberal international community to protect an individual’s physical integrity. Rather, they are conceptualized as relational phenomena that occur when opponents question the superior domestic and international role of an autocratic ruler. This questioning triggers resentments that may originate from violations of functional cultures, i.e., the moral code of intelligence services, or international diplomatic rules and attached feeling structures. Many discreet political murders may be explained in this way. However, defiant transnational political murders are committed publicly and use attention grabbing means so that the perpetrating state can display its (often illegal) capacities and willingness to use weapons or other means that potentially endanger the broader public. This is to say, defiant political murders are intended to hurt more than the victim: They superimpose the perpetrator’s self-claimed role in international relations upon a specific significant other, e.g., the United Kingdom, and the international community as a whole to roll back liberal advances in the protection of citizens of autocratic states living abroad.

Theoretically, the superimposition of a perpetrator’s self-claimed role may be geared towards re-establishing or stabilizing a superior role. This might be a great power role, as in the case of Russia, that is deemed to be under threat. In the case of North Korea, the regime has used various means to gain recognition for its self-claimed role as a nuclear weapon state and equal interlocutor to the United States, but it has used the defiant political murder of Kim Jong-nam to showcase its willingness to use weapons of mass destruction. Defiant political murders are expressions of the desire for superior domestic and international role assertions, and their increasing numbers indicate that more and more perpetrating regimes deem it necessary to assassinate opponents on foreign territory with highly dangerous weapons to send a message to a third actor or the international society.

Empirically, the two case studies revealed important insights about the roots of enmity in international politics. Extant studies on political murders tend to assume that the opponent or their potential capacity to challenge the perpetrating regime were important causes for the respective murder. While all victims may have had a degree of this capacity, most lacked the potential to seriously threaten the regime at the time they were killed. Furthermore, when breaking international norms on the production, transport, and use of chemical or nuclear agents, the perpetrators gave no indication that their intention was to openly contest these norms in general. Rather, they violated these norms in order to seize the attention of the international community.

To clarify, this article did not intend to present a systematic paper on all cases of defiant political murder, nor does it in any way condone the practices described. Rather, it is concerned with the meaning of transnational public assassinations, with an eye to improving our ability to limit them. The findings suggest that defiant political murders may be prevented by better protecting potential victims, by paying more attention to the words and deeds of both great and subaltern powers, and by seeking to preserve or expand the status in international society of those have developed a particularly strong sense of mistrust and emotional insecurity.

Data appendix