ISP Faculty in the Field: ISP Fellow Dr. Kiril Avramov Publishes New Book — Killing in the Name of the State: State-Sponsored Assassination in International Politics  

In December 2025, Dr. Kiril Avramov, Non-Resident Fellow at the Clements-Strauss Intelligence Studies Project (ISP) and Assistant Professor at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, co-edited, Killing in the Name of the State: State-Sponsored Assassination in International Politics (Lynne Reiner Publishers) with Dr. Luca Trenta.  

At its core, the book asks how governments approach, understand, and even justify assassination. Its chapters focus on critical topics in the domain of international relations, security, and intelligence studies that are centered on the phenomenon of state-sponsored assassinations. 

Killing in the Name of the State’s authors engage these aforementioned subjects by exploring the following questions: What methods have been used historically, and how do they differ from current practice? What are the consequences of assassination for international politics, diplomacy, and international law? These are the fundamental questions animating this ground-breaking exploration of the adoption and deployment of assassination as an instrument of statecraft.  

Interested members of the ISP community are encouraged to read the book’s introduction here or purchase a copy of the book via Amazon or Lynne Rienne Publishers.  

The Clements-Strauss Intelligence Studies Project remains proud of its faculty members’ dedication to ISP’s mission of not only developing the skills of tomorrow’s intelligence professionals inside of the classroom but contributing to scholarly discourse within the intelligence studies community beyond the Forty Acres.    

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