Society and space

The following essay is a supplement to The Politics of human shielding: On the resignification of space and the constitution of civilians as shields in liberal wars, by Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini. The article now appears Online First at the journal’s Sage homepage and will appear in a future issue of the journal. It is free to access for a limited time.

An Israel Defense Forces infographic.

Urban areas, as Stephen Graham once put it, “have become the lightning conductors for our planet’s political violence’, while ‘warfare strongly shapes quotidian urban life”. [1] As cities are increasingly becoming primary theatres of warfare, they are not simply the site in which contemporary conflicts take place, but are also, as Eyal Weizman cogently observes, a medium of violence.[2] Accordingly, it is not only true that within urban warfare civilians inevitably occupy the front lines of the fighting and that noncombatants and combatants as well as civilian and military edifices overlap, but also that civilians are progressively becoming a technology of warfare. This is clearly seen through the mounting news reports about human shields coming from Lugansk in East Ukraine, Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq, Kobane in Syria, Gombe in Nigeria to Gaza City, cities where civilians are increasingly being used as an instrument of protection, coercion or deterrence.

International humanitarian law (IHL) prohibits the use of civilians “to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favor or impede military operations”. Accordingly, parties to a conflict are not allowed to “direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations”.[3] By couching human shielding in this way, IHL effectively does two things: on the one hand, it prohibits the transformation of civilians into human shields, while, on the other, it allows military forces to attack targets that are protected by human shields (provided they abide by the principle of proportionality), thus combining the prohibition of using human shields with the legality of killing them.

Continue here.