We have covered on these pages the legal and moral issues surrounding the use of human shields in contemporary armed conflict situations. The American Society of International Law, in a new partnership with Cambridge Press, released yesterday its first symposium edition of the American Journal of International Law Unbound, which provides stereoscopic perspectives on this phenomenon, which has become “endemic” in modern warfare. The Symposium includes the following submissions:
- Neve Gordon & Nicola Perugini’s discussion, building upon their post here, of the “Evisceration of the Civilian,” which uses the situation in Mosul to argue that deploying the term “human shields” (as a “perlocutionary speech act”—speech meant to have a persuasive effect on the listener) preemptively relaxes the conditions under which Iraqi forces and their allies could deploy violence.
- Banu Barga’s essay situates truly voluntary human shields within the venerable tradition of civil disobedience—individuals exercising their agency in a performative act to protest an armed conflict in the service of peace.
Read the full post at Just Security.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:01/13/2017