A fascinating study of the sharp edge of international diplomacy
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Photo credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images
Author Simon Ball | Price £25 | Released Out now
The term assassination in a historical context immediately brings to mind high-profile, sometimes still hotly debated, cases. Today, assassination, being the premeditated killing of an individual for ideological or political reasons, is prohibited under international law.
Even so, as Simon Ball’s new examination of assassination through the 20th century makes clear, that doesn’t appear to have stopped it from being important. From Archduke Ferdinand to John F Kennedy, the killing of prominent political figures had a massive impact on the shaping of the 20th century.
Ball is a professor at the University of Leeds specialising in the history of international politics, secret intelligence, the Cold War and the use of assassination. He brings all of that knowledge to bear here. If war is the failure of diplomacy, what does assassination represent and what does it tell us about the assassins and their targets?
Ball’s in-depth analysis of different periods and segments of history offers masses of insight into these sorts of questions. Each chapter covers a different era in various regions of the world, revealing overlapping trends and temperaments along the way.
While breaking down the specifics of some of the century’s most impactful political killings from across different regions of the world, Death To Order also widens the focus a little. Rather than being solely concerned with the spectacle and intrigue of these murders, Ball takes a longer view and reviews their individual impacts as well as the broader changes that longer-term use and expectation of assassination can have on a political sphere of influence.
Ball does make a distinction between political killings carried out at the behest or in the interests of a state versus those taken on by individuals or unelected groups. Even so, those events, such as the murder of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, are still examined in terms of the reverberations that they had, in that case in the United States.
Assassinations are a very narrow lens through which to view the 20th century, but that is greatly to this book’s benefit as it brings immense clarity to the narrative of a complex and fast-moving century. Ball’s extensive research and archival access means that this is every bit as comprehensive and exhaustive as you could wish.
Thankfully, he writes in an accessible way while also deftly filling in any historical knowledge gaps that readers might have. The distances travelled and methodologies used across the decades are not the only things that changed.
The use, impact and reaction to assassinations through the century shifted too as the world adjusted to its more interconnected state. A concluding chapter on the 21st century and the use of assassination in the War on Terror and its offshoots brings everything into focus for the modern world too and poses some important questions for us today.
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