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A chilling global history of the human shield phenomenon. From
Syrian civilians locked in iron cages to veterans joining peaceful
indigenous water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation,
from Sri Lanka to Iraq and from Yemen to the United States, human
beings have been used as shields for protection, coercion, or
deterrence. Over the past decade, human shields have also appeared
with increasing frequency in antinuclear struggles, civil and
environmental protests, and even computer games. The phenomenon,
however, is by no means a new one. Describing the use of human
shields in key historical and contemporary moments across the
globe, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini demonstrate how the
increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of
civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their
lives more expendable. They show how the law facilitates the use of
lethal violence against vulnerable people while portraying it as
humane, but they also reveal how people can and do use their own
vulnerability to resist violence and denounce forms of
dehumanization. Ultimately, Human Shields unsettles our common
ethical assumptions about violence and the law and urges us to
imagine entirely new forms of humane politics.
At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged:
conservatives, who just decades before had rejected the expanding
human rights culture, began to embrace human rights in order to
advance their political goals. In this book, Nicola Perugini and
Neve Gordon account for how human rights - generally conceived as a
counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices -
are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize
domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The
Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs
that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians
and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by
invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing
convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler
organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how
political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of
human rights and mirror each other's political strategies. Indeed,
Perugini and Gordon demonstrate the multifaceted role that this
discourse is currently playing in the international arena: on the
one hand, human rights have become the lingua franca of global
moral speak, while on the other, they have become reconstrued as a
tool for enhancing domination.
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