How does the discourse of international law facilitate extraterritorial state violence? This paper synthesizes insights from International Relations, comparative politics, and legal studies in order to explore how the sovereign foundations of international law may render “frontier territories” exceptionally vulnerable to external military intervention. I argue that international law’s focus on sovereignty constitutes frontier territories as “ambiguous,” which leads to discursive conflicts over how to define these spaces, what is considered “legal” and “illegal” action within them, and who gets to define their status. All of this creates a conducive environment for powerful international governments to denigrate frontier territories as “lawless,” by rhetorically constructing them as exceptional legal spaces that do not deserve the same protections as areas ordered by sovereign ideals. To illuminate this empirically, I conduct a discourse analysis of 16 distinct legal documents from the Obama White House, including internal memorandums and public speeches on the legal standing of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

中文翻译：

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边疆司法：“反恐战争”中的国际法和“非法”空间

国际法的话语如何促进域外国家暴力？本文综合了来自国际关系，比较政治和法律研究的见解，以探讨国际法的主权基础如何使“边疆”特别容易受到外部军事干预。我认为，国际法对主权的关注将边境领土构成为“模棱两可”，这导致在如何定义这些空间，在其中被认为是“合法”和“非法”行动以及由谁来定义其地位的问题上引发了争论。所有这些都为强大的国际政府创造了有利的环境，让他们将边境地区ter毁为“非法，夸夸其谈地将其构造为特殊的法律空间，不应该得到与主权理想所命令的地区相同的保护。为了从经验上阐明这一点，我对奥巴马白宫的16份不同法律文件进行了话语分析，包括内部备忘录和关于巴基斯坦，也门和索马里无人机罢工的法律地位的公开演讲。