Political Assassination

WITH A LONG LEGACY throughout history, political assassination has more recently come under the study of crime, and has been delineated between assassinations of a specific individual person or group, or assassinations of persons targeted by chance but with a political agenda. These two main groups may be distinguished by a dozen typologies, which overlap often or describe escalating phases of a conflict.

Assassinations to get rid of a ruling politician and to destabilize the political situation within a country are widely known in democratic and nondemocratic societies. The best known examples are the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States during the 1960s, or the shooting of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Although the moral and sometimes ...