Rethinking human shields

RACE.ED’s Nicola Perugini, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, recently appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed to discuss his new co-authored book, Human Shields. A history of People in the Line of Fire.

The book details how 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.

Indeed, 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, Nicola and his co-author Neve Gordon demonstrate how the increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theatres of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable.

They show how the law facilitates the use of lethal violence against vulnerable people along racial and gender lines 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. In his interview with BBC 4 Thinking Allowed, Nicola argued that:

‘The human is not only a biological but also a political category and it is precisely this political aspect of the idea of humanity that we are interested in. We understood early on that to be a human shield one has first to be considered as having human value, thus suggesting that the history of human shields is also the history of who is considered human. For instance, during the 1871 Franco-German War the Germans tied French dignitaries to trains to deter French fighters from attacking them. The Germans did not use men from the proletariat, women, and children as human shields since they did not believe the value of such people was sufficient to deter the enemy from attacking the trains. Historically, people of color in the American Civil War or in colonial wars could not be used as human shields since they were not considered fully human – they were conceived as racially inferior and thus not having sufficient value to serve as shields. The history we reconstruct in the book is precisely this history of the shifting value of the human, and the figure of the human shield reveals it with extraordinary clarity’.