Inter-state terrorism in the 21st Century: Mapping the Evolution of the Global Rendition System

This paper seeks to explain the development and operation of a now global system of rendition and secret detention in the ‘War on Terror’. The paper offers two corrections to current understandings of rendition. Firstly, while existing scholarship has emphasised the use of rendition as a counter-terrorism tool during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, there has been no analysis of the role played by rendition in the much longer history of the efforts at the heart of US foreign policy to insulate US hegemony. The paper will show that rendition is the most recent in a long line of tools that have been developed by US intelligence and defence officials to carve out extra-legal spaces to deal with perceived threats. Secondly, the paper seeks to show that the global rendition system is a system in flux. Various pressures beyond the US government’s control have forced the US Executive and intelligence and defence services to make major changes to the global rendition system in desperate attempts to maintain that extra-legal space that it believes it needs to thwart threats to its interests.