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Assassin: Theory and Practice of Political Violence by

J. Bowyer Bell; Irving Louis Horowitz

Article  in  International Social Science Review · January 2006

DOI: 10.2307/41887284

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 INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW 173

BOOK REVIEWS
Bell, J. Bowyer (with a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz). Assassin: Theory
and Practice ofPotitical Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005.
xiii + 310 pages. Paper, $24.95.

On the first night ofthe traq War in March 2003, President George W. Bush ordered a
decapitation strike on Saddam Hussein and his sons Qusai and Odai. According to intel-
ligence from someone close to the Iraqi strongman, the attack may have wounded Saddam
but it did not kill him. By the time American forces captured Saddam and killed Qusai and
Odai, much of Iraq had collapsed into crime, political violence, and insurgency.
It is tempting to imagine how history might have changed if Saddam had been killed
that night. On the one hand, the elimination of the Husseins could have ended the con-
frontation with the United States and Britain, allowed Iraq to start a new era free of the
Coalition, and lifted the burden of war and nation-building from the United States and its
allies. On the other hand, it could have unleashed the same bloody struggle for power that
we see today. In that event, decapitation would have changed little — except, perhaps, the
need for American intervention and responsibility for the new Iraq.
It is precisely this inconclusive world of counterfactual speculation that drives J.
Bowyer Bell's Assassin: Theory and Practice of Political Violence. Originally published in
1979, Assassin recounts notable strikes on heads of state, politicians, and public officials
across the globe, from Henry IV of France in 1610 to Aldo Moro of Italy in 1978.
Relying on history and interviews with militants across Europe, Bell argues that assas-
sination most likely occurs where nationalism or revolution has reached a fever pitch and
spawned young people willing to kill and die for a cause. In medieval times, assassination
was a common method of removing tyrants from power. But to change events on a large
scale, the assassin must target someone who is irreplaceable by virtue of office or status.
Such great men and women are rare in modern Western democracies. In crumbling
empires, newly independent countries, and even relatively disorganized entities like Italy,
Bell argues, it may be easier to eliminate public officials but harder to change the direc-
tion of a state that will founder no matter who leads it. He thus concludes that assassina-
tion rarely changes history writ large. Nevertheless, the temptation to strike the enemy or
pursue summary justice will prove irresistible for the state and delusional loners, radicals,
fringe groups trying to stay relevant, and operatives who care little about the grand sweep
of history.
Despite its provocative subject matter. Assassin will frustrate advocates of strict
methodology. When Bell wrote this book, many of his contemporaries had turned to polit-
ical psychology or datasets to explain many ofthe same phenomena. Yet Bell offers little
in the way of literature review, explanation of method, or comparative statistics.
Unfortunately, Bell could not update Assassin before he died in 2003. It would have
been worthwhile to study his analyses of the killing of Lord Louis Mountbatten by Irish
nationalists in 1979; the murder of opposition leader Benigno Aquino in 1983, a miscal-
culation that led to the People Power overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines;
the execution of Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceau§escu in 1989; or, the shooting of Pirn
Fortuyn ofthe Netherlands in 2002, among others.
These shortcomings aside. Assassin should find a contemporary audience. Bell's
vignettes create a tapestry of murder, bombing, and kidnapping that makes the events of
174 VOLUME 82, NUMBERS 3 & 4

September 11, 2001 seem more comprehensible. In many ways Assassin resembles the
work of sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, another scholar who interviews zealots.' Bell is
also a master storyteller of social science noir. In this way, the book's literary flair for the
moment of death complements the work of Robert Young Pelton, whose ensemble reports
on world hotspots often provide keener insight into developing countries than more for-
mal scholarship.^
As noted above. Assassin provides context to current policies. Bell reviews several of
the cases that inspired the United States to ban assassinations and other dirty foreign pol-
icy tricks in the 1970s. These laws became subject to a vigorous debate even before
September 11, 2001, and the current situation in Iraq has ftirther emboldened critics who
propose eliminating the leadership of hostile states as an alternative to war.' Seeking to
wash their hands ofthe carnage so vividly described by Bell, many in the West would for
ethical reasons prefer that assassination never be an option. Yet historian Michael
Ignatieff's controversial theory of the necessary evil argues that violations of liberal
norms, including state-sponsored killing, may, under certain conditions, be legitimate in
the fight against terrorism."
Ignatieff is not the conservative that some pundits would have us believe. Rather, his
argument indicates how far Western liberalism has come since the murder of Henry IV. As
Bell explains, in that era violence was a normal part of politics, and many progressives
believed that tyrannicide was legitimate if not obligatory. By contrast, 400 years later the
cutting edge of ethics and morality claims that any violation of individual dignity, includ-
ing selective wartime killings by the state, must always be considered evil regardless of
the circumstance. Ignatieff tweaks this simply by claiming that some evils may be neces-
sary. Bell, for one, would not have been surprised that the pressures of war and conflict
would tempt a liberal democracy to resuscitate assassination as a viable policy option.
Overall, Assassin makes a positive contribution to our understanding of political vio-
lence and current policy debates. Anyone interested in these problems would do well to
read it.

NOTES
'Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Clobal Rise of Religious
Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
^Robert Young Pelton, The World's Most Dangerous Places, 5th ed. (New York: Harper
Collins, 2003).
'Terrence Henry, "The Covert Option: Can sabotage and assassination stop Iran from
going nuclear?" The Atlantic, December 2005, 54-56.
"Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004).
John Linantud, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of Houston - Downtown
Houston, Texas
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