29424 - Seminars (1) (LM) (G.A)

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, students are expected to: 1) Understand different conceptualizations of humanity in relation to contexts of war and political violence; 2) Comprehend various legal and political mechanisms through which violence is criticized or legitimized through the mobilization of humanity; 3) Compare different contexts and demonstrate how the mobilization of the category of humanity allows different political actors to make sense of violence; 4) Reflect on the implications of the phenomenon at stake both as scholars and citizens; 5) Contribute to discussions about how polities and citizens may respond to the driving question of the course on the paradox of humanity.

Course contents

Begin date: 11th of May 2020

End date: 5th of June 2020

The course will examine the relationship between law, violence, and humanity. The main idea it aims at exploring is that the category of humanity, while expanding and universalizing the idea of shared human belonging, has been historically utilised as a political and legal weapon of exclusion and injustice.We will thus deal with one of the most complex and challenging phenomena in contemporary global politics: the mobilisation of the category of humanity in a way that ultimately enables and legalise violence—often along gender and racial lines—rather than restraining it. We will approach the question of the category of humanity in war and legal-political debates from four different directions which will match the four key sections of the course: (1) conceptually, we will survey and assess various theorisations of the paradox at stake; (2) analytically, we will explore arguments in support and against the mobilisation of humanity to restrain violence; (3) comparatively, we will examine various regional and historical contexts—such as colonial and decolonial wars, humanitarian wars, and the “War on Terror”—in which state and non-state actors have deployed the category of humanity and the legal arguments related to it to make sense of the use of violence (4) critically, we will probe the causes for the paradox at stake and interrogate the implications of the global politics for/against humanity.

 

Exploring a multidisciplinary literature (international relations, political theory, international law, anthropology, human rights/humanitarian studies), the course will focus on the history of the construction and use of legal, humanitarian and human rights arguments in different contexts of conflict and political violence (from the birth of international humanitarian law, its use in imperial and colonial wars and intra-Western conflicts, and the birth of the international human rights movement); the analysis of the networks of state and non-state actors involved in the deployment of the category of human in contexts of war and political violence (with case studies in which both state actors and prominent non-state organisations invoked the category of humanity to make sense of violence); the understanding of the similarities and differences between these different actors in their mobilisation of humanity as a legal-political category; and the global political challenges of this paradoxical process through which as the result of the interaction between actors which formally have different political aims, humanity has often become a tool for enabling rather than restraining inequality, violence, and domination.

 

The course is based on study cases and will draw from research carried out by Professor Perugini’s for his forthcoming book Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire, which looks at the relationship between law, violence, and humanity following the history of the legal figure of the human shield.

Readings/Bibliography

Day 1: Intro: Law, Violence, and Humanity

This class will provide an overview of the course and start delineating the critical trajectories through which we will approach the nexus law-violence-humanity. It will explore the relationship between law, violence, and humanity by interrogating how the modern-liberal-Western-universalist idea of humanity has emerged as a tool for both contesting and legitimising violence.

Feldman, Ilana and Ticktin, Miriam (2010), “Government and humanity,” in Feldman, Ilana and Ticktin, Miriam (eds.) In the Name of Humanity (Durham: Duke University Press), pp. 1-26.

Asad, Talal (2015), “Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarianism,” Critical Inquiry, Vol.41(2), pp. 390-427.

Ayca Cubucku (2017), “Thinking Against Humanity,” London Review of International Law, Volume 5, Issue 2, pp. 251–267.

Day 2: Humane Violence

Using the American Civil War and the Lieber Code as point of departure for the discussion, then moving through the birth and development of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the first international legal conventions, we will develop the questions raised in the first week. In particular, we will deal with the emergence of the “ethics of humane violence”—namely the idea that violence can be humanized, and that this humanization can happen by humanizing the laws of war.

Barnett (2011), “Saving Soldier and Civilians during War” in Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), Ch. 3, pp. 76-94.

Cooker, Cristopher (2001), “Humanising war,” in Humane Warfare (London: Routledge), pp. 7-23.

Meron, Theodor (1998), “Francis Lieber's code and principles of humanity. Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 36(Issues 1&2), pp. 269-282.

Moyn, Samuel (2018), “A War Without Civilian Deaths? What arguments for a more humane approach to war conceal [https://newrepublic.com/article/151560/damage-control-book-review-nick-mcdonell-bodies-person],” The New Republic (short online article).

Day 3: Colonial War

Through the case of the 1935 Italian colonial aggression against Ethiopia and the analysis of the international legal-political debate which accompanied it at the League of Nations, this week will examine the multifaceted mobilisations of the ideas of humanity and in-humanity in contexts of colonialism.

Colby, Elbridge (1927), “How to Fight Savage Tribes,” The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 279-288.

Lindqvist, Sven (2001), “Bombing the Savages,” Transition, No. 87 (2001), pp. 48-64

Rose Parfitt, “Empire des Nègres Blancs: The Hybridity of International Personality and the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935–36,” Leiden Journal of International Law, Volume 24, pp. 849-872.

Day 4: Against Humanity

This class deals with the expansion of the notion of humanity as a result of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles. This expansion translated—as we will see with the cases of the Algerian and Vietnamese wars of liberation, and the legal debates which accompanied and followed them—also into the transformation of the international legal order and the laws of war.

Eslava, Nesiah, Fakhri, “The Spirit of Bandung,” in Eslava, Luis ; Fakhri, Michael ; Nesiah, Vasuki (2017), In Eslava, Luis ; Fakhri, Michael ; Nesiah, Vasuki (eds) Bandung, global history, and international law : critical pasts and pending futures (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press), pp. 3-32.

Kinsella, Helen, “The Algerian Civil War and the 1977 Protocols Additional,” in The image before the weapon. A critical history of the distinction between combatant and civilian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), Chapter 6, pp. 128-154.

Klose, Fabian (2011), “The Colonial Testing Ground: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Violent End of Empire,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Volume 2, Number 1, pp. 107-126.

Day 5: Humanitarian War

This week we explore one of the clearest and most significant manifestations of the law-violence-humanity nexus: humanitarian war. We will analyse the concept of humanitarian war also through the lenses of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Barnett, Michael (2011), “Armed for Humanity” in Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), Ch. 9, pp 171-194.

Douzinas, Costas (2003), “Humanity, military humanism and the new moral

Order,” Economy and Society, 32:2, pp.159-183.

Zehfuss, Maja (2012), “Contemporary Western war and the idea of humanity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 30, pp. 861-876.

 

Day 6: Humanitarian Siege

The increasing overlapping of humanitarianism, law, and war has produced unprecedented forms of violence. This week will examine the “humanitarian siege” of the Gaza Strip, in Palestine, and the ways in which the use of lethal violence against civilians is justified.

Bunghalia, Lisa (2010), “A liminal territory: Gaza, executive discretion, and sanctions turned humanitarian,” Volume 75, Issue 4, pp 347–357.

Chamayou, Gregoire (2015), "A Humanitarian Weapon" in A Theory of the Drone (New York: The New Press), 135-139.

Kotef, Hagar (2011), “Objects of Security: Gendered Violence and Securitized Humanitarianism in Occupied Gaza,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol.30(2), pp.179-19.

Weizman, Eyal (2011), “The Best of All Possible Walls,” in Weizman, Eyal, The Least of All Possible Evils (London and New York: Verso), pp. 61-89.

Day 7: "Women and Children"

This week examines the promises and violent paradoxes of the expansion of legal humanity through the feminist struggles to recognize women’s rights as human rights and the racial component of the emergence of the category of "women and children" in international law.

Allida Black, “Are Women “Human”? The UN and the struggle to recognize Women’s Rights as Human Rights,” in Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, The Human Rights Revolution. An International History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 133-155.

Abu-Lughod, Lila (2013) “Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?” in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), Ch. 1, pp. 27-53.

Kinsella, Helen (2010), “Securing the civilian: sex and gender in the laws of war,” in by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (eds.), Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 249-272.

Wilcox, Lauren, “Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race, and the posthuman in drone warfare,” Security Dialogue, Vol.48(1), pp.11-28.

 

Day 8: War on Terror

This week will examine the tension between law, violence, and humanity in the era of the so-called War on Terror. We will discuss how the idea of humanity was mobilised both to justify and resist the War on Terror.

Çubukçu, Ayça (2018), For the Love of Humanity. The World Tribunal on Iraq (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), Introduction and Chapter 1 “Constituting Multitude: Founding a World Tribunal,” pp. 1-43.

Perugini, Nicola and Gordon, Neve (2019), “‘Hospital shields’ and the Limits of International Law,” European Journal of International Law, Volume 30, Issue 2, pp. 439–463.

Day 9: Epilogue

This week will recapitulate the main trajectories of exploration of the law-violence-humanity nexus we have developed in the course.

Teaching methods

The purpose of lectures is to introduce, inform and stimulate: they set out the general framework of the course, outline competing analyses of central questions, provide guidance to more complex texts and ideas, and try to engage your intellectual interest. They are a supplement to, not a substitute for, reading. Given the Covid-19 pandemic and the instructor's caring responsibilities at home, classes will not be held synchronically. Students will have access week by week to recorded lectures (3 each week) and will be given the opportunity to arrange individual Skype calls with the instructor to discuss more in depth the weekly readings.

Assessment methods

Students will submit a final report (3000 words maximum, the report can be written in Italian or English) on the main topics, arguments, and reflections developed throughout the course. Alternatively, they can submit a reflection on how the law-violence-humanity nexus can help to shed light on the current Covid-19 pandemic. How do different parts of humanity experience the pandemic? Can the legal measures being taken in order to counter the pandemic and protect humanity result into social marginalisation and violent exclusion and oppression? Can the humanitarian impetus of preserving life create new hierarchies of life and new forms of power? The deadline for submitting the final report is the 19th of July 2020.

Teaching tools

Visual resources. instructor's manuscript passages.

Office hours

See the website of Nicola Perugini