Unsettling Effects of the Human Shield Concept

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields is arranged as a composition of twenty two tableaux. Each vividly explores distinctive practices of human shielding by excavating diverse types of archival sources—official documents, personal correspondence, memoirs, news media, scholarly works, novels, videogames, and more. The succession of these tableaux occurs mostly in chronological order beginning with the American Civil War, and its Continue reading →

History of People in the Line of Fire

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. My first encounter with the concept of human shielding was in an interview I conducted with Majdi Abed Rabbo in Jabaliya, a neighborhood in Gaza City in February 2009. I was a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild fact-finding mission to Gaza following Israel’s first large scale offensive against the tiny coastal enclave—also known as “Operation Cast Lead.” Atop a pile Continue reading →

Human Shields and Distributions of Killability

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire starts with the story of student Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to prevent the demolition of houses in the West Bank by putting herself in the way. Corrie, a civilian, was killed in a manner that many of us will find difficult Continue reading →

Human Shields, Progress, and Agency on the Roof

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, is a detailed and effective mapping exercise introducing the reader to a growing field of legal and political interactions that center on the unstable dichotomy between killing and protecting civilians in war. Each of its 22 short chapters meticulously contextualizes a particular incident, a set of stories or an interface Continue reading →

Human Shields and the Politics of Humanity

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is a real pleasure to comment on this excellent book on the history, law, and politics of human shields. Throughout the book, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini argue that the human shield brings into relief many of the political and social dynamics of our societies. The book throws light on a humanity that is always internally-riven and hierarchically-ordered. Humans, the Continue reading →

A Commentary on Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. A few minutes before midnight on May 1, 2011, President Barak Obama went on television to announce that the nation’s most wanted man was dead. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that killed almost three thousand people, now lay in a watery grave in an undisclosed location. “Justice has been done,” Obama said. Continue reading →

Responding to the Symposium

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. We are honoured by Noura Erakat’s, Lisa Hajjar’s, Pablo Kalmanovitz’s, Karin Loevy’s, Jessica Whyte’s, and Maja Zehfuss’s engagement with our book. We would like to begin by thanking them all for taking the time to read the manuscript and for offering really insightful criticism which has, in many respects, helped us to further articulate the book’s arguments. Noura Erakat asks why Continue reading →

The Contradictions of Sovereignty: Development, Family Planning, and the Struggle for Population Control in Postcolonial Morocco

Abstract: This essay examines the origins of family planning programs in postcolonial Morocco and demonstrates a dynamic relationship between the Moroccan leadership, population experts, and global health programs. While introducing the initiative in Morocco, King Hassan II and the Population Council, the chief architect and supporter of population control efforts in the 1960s, negotiated, adapted, and balanced competing agendas in order to achieve their respective goals. The Moroccan case reveals innovative methods of state building but it also highlights how population control created contradictions of Continue reading → Continue reading →

Making Human Rights Effective? Amnesty International, “Aid and Trade,” and the Shaping of Professional Human Rights Activism, 1961–1983

Abstract: This article takes Amnesty International’s “Aid and Trade” debate during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a window onto the ways that human rights activists thought about their work and how they understood their organization. It examines the way they grappled with their relationship in to expanding governmental action on human rights, and the meaning of the concepts “effectiveness” and “impartiality,” which were central to Amnesty’s founding. Continue reading →

Earwitnesses and Transparent Conduits of Voice: On the Labor of Field Interpreters for UN Missions

Abstract: This essay considers the labor of field interpreters who worked for the UN during two critical missions in Nepal—the UN High Commission of Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) during and after the Maoist civil war. Interpreters negotiate two different ethical stances that resonate with contrasting ethical approaches in human rights and humanitarian work. As conduits of voice, an interpreter seeks to be neutral and impartial, a non-autonomous figure of mediation within the work of human rights. Field interpreters Continue reading → Continue reading →