 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this seminar in the war crimes research group seminar series. Today we are joined by to the authors of a new book on human shields a history of people in the line of fire. I'll just introduce myself I'm Rachel Kerr and professor of war and society in the department of war studies and also co convene the war crimes research group. So it's really great to welcome you today and to welcome our speakers to this to this seminar as well and say thank you very much for joining us and talking about your book. In the series those of you who've been coming along to the series so far will know a bit about it we've got a couple more coming up this term or just flag up next week's event which is on the cost of a specialist chambers. So that's next Monday, 29th of March, I think at one o'clock as well. So do sign up for that too. But for today, I'm really pleased to introduce our speakers, who are going to talk to us about their excellent new book on human shields a history of people in learning fire. Professor, we've got Dr. Nicola Perugini and Duchianti Pillai. So I just say a little bit about each of them. I know that you'll be able to access their bios on the, you will have read them on the announcement for the event today. But Neve Gordon is a professor in the School of Law at Queen Mary University, Queen Mary University of London, and his work focuses on international humanitarian law, human rights, ethics of violence, and the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I'm also joined by Dr. Nicola Perugini, who is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Edinburgh. So Nicola's research focuses mainly on international law, human rights and violence as well. And he's the author with Neve Gordon of the human right to dominate, and obviously of human shields, a history of the people in the line of fire. He's been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, and also a Marie Curie fellow. And his current research project is exploring the global history of the University of Edinburgh and its entanglement in imperialism in the Middle East. And I was also very interested to see that you're working on humanitarianism's visual cultures. So I don't know if you'll have a chance to get any of that into the talk today. Really interesting. Finally, we have Dushyanti Pillai, who is a PhD candidate in the Department of Wall Streeties and a member of the war crimes research group. So Dushyanti Pillai is going to offer some discussant comments on the book once Nicola has presented about it. She holds an MA in human rights from UCL. And before coming to Kings to embark on a PhD, she had worked for over 20 years in international development in Asia and Africa in post conflict settings. So she brings considerable practitioner experience to our discussion. So the way we're going to proceed is said, Dr Peragini is going to speak first for about 20, 25 minutes, I think, about the book and then we'll hear from Dushy with some discussant comments and then from Professor Gordon as well. And then we'll open up to Q&A. So please do put your questions in the Q&A box as we go if you'd like to, or there'll be an opportunity at the end to ask your question verbally as well. That's at the end if you do want to ask a question, two ways of doing that. So I'm going to hand over now to Dr Peragini, who I think is going to pull up a PowerPoint to present. Yes. Thank you very much. Over to you. Thank you, Rachel. Are you able to see the PowerPoint just to make sure that yes, the same page. Great. Dushy and Rachel for the very kind invitation and thank I would like also to thank the other participants to this event for taking the time to be with us. So since I have 20 minutes, let me go straight to the core of the book and let me provide a definition of human shields. What are human shields? Human shields are both human and weapon and this duality, this weaponization of humanity, this transformation of the human body into a weapon is what makes human shields ethically, legally and politically problematic, disturbing, but also extremely fascinating to investigate and think through. Human shields are civilians or other people who the law protects, like prisoners of war, who are either forced or volunteer to shield and legitimate military target in order to deter the enemy from attacking it. So human shields in a broad sense are human weapons of deterrence. The 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 additional protocols were key moments in the process of legal codification of human shields. The 1977 additional protocol defines human shields in the following way. As you can see from the slide, the presence or movement of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield favor or impede military operations. So many things can be said about this definition and we can discuss it further, but I will limit myself to one crucial issue. The law here operates through an avowal and disavowal of the protected status of the people who become human shields. It avows the protected status of human shields by rendering it illegal to use civilians or prisoners of war as shields, but it also disavows their protected status by asserting that human shields will not render an area immune from attack, thus suggesting that human shields can be killed. In other words, while outlawing the use of human shields, the law allows in certain circumstances to kill them. This paradox is what generates a series of legal, ethical and political dilemmas, some of which I hope to discuss today with you. I will limit myself to context of international armed conflict, then we might expand to other contexts of human shielding in the Q&A. The book begins with the American Civil War in which we trace the first debates about the ethical implications of the use of prisoners of war as human shields. In the following decades, human shields were discussed in relation to also the Franco-German War where some of the greatest legal minds of the day argued that tying French dignitaries to trains was legal because it was a state practice in reaction to attacks against the trains carried out by non-state irregulars. These debates of the end of the 19th century have a lot to do with railways and trains since trains are used to transport troops, ammunition and provisions. Trains are attacked by guerrillas and insurgents and in turn used by state armies to shield. So, enemy civilians and prisoners of war were taken for shielding tours on trains, like in the Second Anglo-Boer War of which you can see an image in your slide. The context of the Anglo-Boer War was that of an imperial war, but an unusual one. It was an imperial setting, but the fighting parties were white. Consequently, the rules of engagement and the implementation of the laws of armed conflict, which in other colonial wars were deemed inapplicable because the enemies were non-whites, were regarded as pertinent and were closely scrutinized by the British press and debated in the House of Commons. So the Boers attacked trains transporting British troops and systematically captured soldiers and civilians, including Winston Churchill, who at the time was a war correspondent. So the Boers caused significant losses to the imperial troops. The royal forces responded by adopting a series of new country insurgency measures, among them the use of human shields. This triggered a heated debate within the UK parliament and among journalists, legal experts and humanitarians, some of whom denounced the practice of using human shields as inhumane. British Liberals were outraged, but not because they rejected imperial violence, which they thought was, at times, a necessary tool for extending universal humanity across the empire. Their criticism against their government of using Boers settlers as human shields was that the violence was directed at whites, thus revealing the racial underpinnings of their conception of humanity. Human shielding would have probably passed unnoticed if, instead of the Boers, the people used as shields had been black. Just to illustrate this point a little bit further on the relationship between race and human shields, 15 years later the British Empire used Palestinians as human shields in mandatory Palestine, but in this case the human shields were not white Boers, they were brown Arabs, and there was neither scrutiny by the British press nor debates at the House of Commons. Four decades after the Franco-German war, human shields were once again deployed on European soil, this time during the First World War. In August 2014, Germany invaded Belgium and was faced with armed partisan resistance. In response, the German troops did not hesitate to bomb densely populated areas, burn houses and villages, execute civilian hostages and use human shields. Across the English Channel, the British government used testimonies about German atrocities to galvanize public support for entering the war. A series of governmental reports were produced by Belgium and the UK, which focused extensively on the inhumane warfare methods adopted by the Germans. The figure of the human shield became a key lens through which these governments debated the use of violence, advanced their legal and ethical arguments and forged a distinction between civilized and uncivilized violence. For Britain, these reports about German barbarism also constituted a tool for justifying its military intervention in the First World War. So let's move to another context. When, two decades later, in 1936, Italy invaded Ethiopia, the Fascist regime did not hesitate to bomb quite systematically the medical facilities of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Ethiopian government denounced the Italian bombardment as inhumane and as a violation of the legal prohibition to target medical facilities. In response, the Italians claimed that the Ethiopians were duplicitous, using field hospitals marked by the emblem to shield combatants and military supplies. Therefore, they argued bombing the hospitals was legitimate reprisal for the enemy's legal use of the emblem to shield legitimate military targets. Thus, it was during the Italo-Ethiopian War that the accusation of illegal human shielding was extended from human beings to medical facilities. So let's move to another context of war that can help us to understand the political implications of the mobilization of the human shield in the international arena. Let's move to the Vietnam War, which took place 15 years after the first codification of the legal figure of the human shield in the Geneva Conventions. So in Vietnam, the Viet Cong followed Mao Zedong's teachings and organized a People's War in which civilians and combatants worked together as a people in order to liberate themselves from colonialism and imperialism. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Mao Zedong's doctrine of People's War, according to which the revolutionary forces and the guerrilla forces have to blend with the people, with the civilian population, in order to win the People's War against imperialism. Infiltrating the social body, the Viet Cong promoted cooperation between soldiers and civilians, and in this way involved the masses in the anti-imperial war effort. The Viet Cong understood that their forces' success depended on the guerrillas' capacity to work together with the people, and so they also intermingled with the rural population, like a fish in the water, to use a famous Maoist expression that I'm sure you are familiar with. That doctrine was embraced by many anti-colonial movements around the world and transformed the international political order, leading formerly colonized societies to the creation of new independent states and expanding the family of nations and expanding also the idea of humanity, we could say. During the war the US administration and the media attempted to flatten the complex notion of Mao's People's War, where for example the civilian population participates in the war effort by feeding the fighters, caring for the wounded and sick, providing the fighters with intelligence, by casting the civilian population as hostages in the hands of the Viet Cong. So what happened here is that a complex political doctrine, like the People's War, was reduced to an act of human shielding, to an act of perfidy and inhumanity carried out by the communist enemies, who were accused of not understanding the ethics of war and of deliberately putting their civilians at risk by using them to screen legitimate military targets. I need a sip of herbal tea. The legal figure of the human shield was mobilized also after Vietnam. In Bosnia at the beginning of the 1990s, Milosevic forces captured UN troops and chained them to military installations and depot. This prevented NATO forces from bombing this military site. It was the first time that the United Nations personnel was used as a weapons of deterrence in a war. Serbian commanders were later condemned for the use of United Nations human shields by the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavian. Few years later, in Kosovo, unlike in Bosnia, NATO forces bombed areas protected by Serbian forces through the deployment of human shields. This time the shields were not valuable UN personnel, but rather Kosovo refugees, and NATO forces killed scores of civilian refugees in the village of Koreshya as a result of its bombardments. Under NATO political pressure, the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia suspended its investigation on the killing of these Kosovo human shields. As you know, humanitarian wars are portrayed as clean wars and then investigation for war crimes against NATO's humanitarian warriors for the killing of refugees would have made the idea of humanitarian war as a clean war less tenable. Let's now move to the post 9-11 context in which the figure of the human shield has become even more prominent and we can discuss this why after 9-11 this is more prominent during the Q&A. During its recent wars on Gaza, the Israeli military repeatedly disseminated on its social media and official websites a series of infographics legitimizing its killing of civilians by using the human shielding argument. As you can see from the slide that I'm projecting on your screens, Israel's argument was straightforward. Since Palestinian armed resistance groups in particular Hamas deployed civilians as human shields placing them in front of legitimate military targets, Israel is not responsible for civilian casualties. We realize that this line of reasoning was common in other theaters of political violence of the last couple of decades. The civil war in Sri Lanka, the military campaign against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, the wars in Yemen and Syria, the war in Afghanistan. The human shield has become a sort of legal political epitome of the so-called war on terror declared by George Bush after 9-11. One of its most invoked legal figures by different political regimes of different political colors and driven by different and often opposing political agendas. So Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia just to mention a few of them. That element, that political transversality across ideologically different state actors of the accusation which has allowed to legitimize the massive use of lethal violence against so many civilian populations was worth to be investigated. And this is what made us feel that our project was somehow urgent. So we started asking ourselves, who are human shields? Who are those civilians? The example of the war on ISIS or more precisely the war on Daesh in Iraq is particularly illuminating. People may recall that Mosul in Iraq was captured by ISIS in 2014 and then recaptured by the US-backed Iraqi military in 2016. In 2016 everyone from President Trump to Amnesty International blamed ISIS for using human shields. And ultimately the United Nations came out with a press release accusing the extreme Islamist group for forcing 100,000 Iraqi civilians to become human shields. Even though evidence of ISIS' brutal use of human shields is overwhelming the suggestion that a few hundred militants deployed ten of thousands of Iraqis as shields appears to be a blatant exaggeration. We initially thought that most of those labeled as shields by the United Nations were categorized in this way due to their proximity to the fighting. The fact that the city's inhabitants remained in Mosul when the fighting commenced, namely they did not actively flee, was enough to brand them as potential weapons, thereby stripping them of some of the protection international humanitarian law provides civilians with. We realized that civilians trapped in areas where non-state actors are fighting are the ones categorized as human shields. We called these kinds of shields which constitute the majority of those who are framed as shields in contemporary wars, proximate shields, proximate due to their proximity to irregularities, to non-state armed groups. By contrast, those caught in similar circumstances but surrounded by states' military are not categorized as human shields and do not lose the protections offered to them by international law. People become proximate shields only when they are trapped near non-state fighters. So, for instance, to go back to the context discussed in my previous slide, Israeli citizens in Tel Aviv are not classified as shields when Hamas launches rockets towards the Israeli Defense Forces military command headquarters located in the city center. By sharp contrast, Palestinian civilians are cast as human shields when Israel launches its rockets towards Hamas command centers and military infrastructures in the Gaza Strip. In other words, if Hamas kills Israeli civilians it is to blame for killing innocent lives and if Israel kills Palestinian civilians then Hamas is also to blame since according to the existing logic it is Hamas that has deployed these civilians as human shields. So, I could continue with many other examples but I think I can stop here on some of the crucial questions of our book. So, the question of the identity of the actors in the battlefield, so who is the humane and inhumane actor? Those who are framed as human shields, the question of who is shielding and the proximity to which kind of military targets, so state or non-state targets. And ultimately the question of how human shielding based on these questions allows to legitimize and delegitimize the use of lethal violence against civilians in contemporary wars. So, thank you for your attention and looking forward to the Q&A. Thank you very much. It's absolutely fascinating and as you say you know you've raised some really big questions there I think that I hope that we'll be able to get into in discussion and identity legitimacy responsibility and there's sort of shifting hands of that depending on how they identify issues around kind of agency and duets that are really, really, really significant and really interesting. I'm going to go over to Tushy now to give us your commentary and response to the book. And then we'll hand over, then we'll go back to Neve and then open up for questions. So as I said before, please do put your questions in the Q&A or be prepared to pop your hand up if you want to ask your question in person. So, Tushy, over to you. Thank you Rachel and many thanks Nicola for that really interesting presentation on the book. I know the book is very multi-dimensional and multi-layered in terms of how it looks at human shield and it's a lot to try and fit into a 25 minutes. I think my, I've read the book and I think what I found really interesting was that how human shields are deployed in different settings. And what was really interesting is how human shields are created not just by how they are used but also how they are framed through the discourse and who they are and who is using them as shield but it's also who was kind of attacking the human shield as well. And then the definition seems to shift around that which I thought was really quite worrying particularly since more and more of the conflicts do tend to happen in urban environments and therefore, as you said, this sort of discourse of human shield is being mobilized by the more powerful state actors to exonerate themselves. So, I think one of the things that I thought was quite worrying is that the threshold for proving that civilians are actually being used as human shield is quite low, especially if proximity then becomes, you know, enough to classify people as human shields. And so the ability of state actors to frame people in their vicinity of conflicts as human shields even retrospectively or even before the fighting begins seems to kind of set things up in their favor. I thought maybe I could use the Sri Lankan sort of chapter in your book to kind of look at this a bit more closely. You know, according to human estimates up to 40,000 people have died in the last few months of the Sri Lankan conflict. And we know that LTT had prevented civilians from leaving the no fires on where they were killed when the government was bombing that area quite indiscriminately. And so the government framed LTT is using human shields and it's their fault for resulting deaths. And as you said, it's, it's usually them, the sort of non state actor who, who, who becomes responsible for the deaths in this kind of context. I was just kind of kind of looking behind that a bit more we know that LTT usually, you know, historically have always kept the people they've sort of had in their territory from leaving, partly as a way of showing they got legitimate support from the communities that they are allegedly fighting for. So it's not surprising that in the last few months they did the same thing and prevented the civilians from from leaving. So I was just wondering, you know, if, if we kind of look at the people who were held under LTT is not as human shields but perhaps as hostages or as prisoners of war or if there are some other framing how does that, you know, how does that play out in the idea of human So I was just kind of thinking about that and the second one was something that you touched on early on which is perhaps looking at the international humanitarian law through a decolonising lens, how this law seems to be mobilised particularly by colonial group, you know, countries such as US UK to justify potentially a high death toll when they, you know, work in places like Iraq and Afghanistan which results in sort of drawn attacks leading to high level of casualties but then they kind of reframe it as human shield and how it seems to be the most wonderful people who seems to be perhaps disproportionately affected by by this sort of argument. So yeah, I think I'll just stop there and get some comments on that. Thank you very much. Before I ask Neve. So if you could respond and give us a few comments I wonder if I can just add a quick little question to that. The question I had as you were starting out is why, why did you choose the US Civil War? Why did you choose the timeframe that you chose to look at? Is it to do with the sort of thinking about it in the context of the development of international humanitarian law? Did you look further back and are there examples that you might have wanted to draw on more historically to that. So Neve, if I could ask you to come in and I can see that some questions coming in the chat which is great. Okay, so can you hear me? Yes. So let me begin with your question Rachel and then go to Dushy and then maybe Nicola can add a few things on what I say if that's okay. Basically our decision to begin with the Civil War had to do with a few issues. First of all, it was a civil war in the sense that it was the same, it was people from the same country fighting each other. And therefore they recognized each other as humans, which is very important because in colonial wars you don't, the imperial or the colonial militaries often consider their enemies as subhumans. And so the assumption of human shield is that the other is human. You have to be a human shield enough to be, you have to be human in order to be a human shield. In a sense our book is also, and I think Nicola intimated this, our book is also a history of the human, the history of human shields is also a history of who is considered human because a humanity we know is not a biological fact, but it is actually a political construction of who belongs and who is excluded from humanity. One of the reasons is we took a civil war is that both sides recognized each other as human. I think the most important reason has to do with the Lieber Code. The Lieber Code was published in the midst of the war in 1863. It later became in many ways a blueprint for international law for the Hague conventions, and so forth. So the legal debates about human shields and all the arguments in the codification begin there at that moment. And that is the moment that human shields becomes a topic of discussion and not only use. So you're absolutely right that you can go back in history and find many instances of the use of human shields. Prior to the American Civil War, but they were not a flashpoint of discussion previously. Starting the, the, the, yeah, your comments to she thank you very much for them first. Yes, in the mainstream commentators about human shields. They always look at and understand human shields as the weapon of the week against high tech states right they don't have the high tech that these state militaries have, and therefore they use human shields as their kind of weapon of last resort. And while we turn this on its head and show yes maybe sometimes that's the case, but most often, and particularly as Nikola said, after the war on terror was launched, human shields has actually become the weapon of the strong a weapon of framing the weapons that it had killed in order to blame its enemies for their deaths. So, so it's, it's whether it's an weapon of the week or weapon of the strong is very important in how you understand and how you a frame the events that you're looking at. So the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan war, we think the, the, we found what happened in Sri Lanka as fascinating for many, many reasons, one of them, which you didn't mention but I think is important to mention is how human rights lawyers prominent human rights lawyers prominent humanitarian lawyers are hired by the state to defend its war crimes in the sense and and we see people that are considered like major human rights practitioners and lawyers. And out there defending the most horrendous war crimes where, as you say, maybe 40,000 civilians were killed in a number of months. What is fascinating is to read the raffa davids and to look at the acrobats that they use and how human shield become the major figure to defend the Sri Lankan state from war crimes. What, what you're asking is if we can understand what happened in the, in the, in the safe zones, the coastal so called safe zones that became the killing fields of Sri Lanka, whether we can understand them as hostages or prisoners of war. I don't think so for a number of reasons. One is, first of all, they were not understood as hostages or prisoners of war by anyone. The whole discourse around it both on all sides had to do with human shields and that's important we have to take that discourse seriously. But what and then there are, or at least according to the human rights reports, there were incidents of Tamil Tiger militants that either threatened or fired toward civilians that tried to leave the, the, the safe zones. And yet, towards in those months by the by the end of the conflict. Again, we have a few hundred militants we have 330,000 people in these safe zones. A few hundred militants cannot keep these people hostages cannot keep them as prisoners of war. It becomes a kind of use of use of an exception in order to suggest that there was a rule there there was no rule there. There was no rule there. I'll only add and then allow, we can maybe turn to other questions is that there are three kinds of human shields. One is the the human shield that someone grabs and uses in front of them in order to shield them or to check it if if something is booby trapped. It's the coercive use of to during the first and second Gulf Wars, and a lot of people in Greenpeace that use it not in wars but in environmental struggles where they put their body on the line in order to protect something behind them voluntarily. Now in these two kinds of shields there's agency involved in the first one the coercive is the person that's holding them as shield. In the second one it's the volunteer that that that volunteers to be a human shield, and the shielding the act of shielding exists so long as the agency isn't at play. What is interesting about the proximate shield is that no agency is really involved. So we look in the book at the location of agency. And the fact that no agency is involved that it's only due to their proximity to irregulars to non state militaries means that they are human shields for as long as the fighting happens. As many of them can be called human shield so it changes the spatiality of human shields the temporality of the human shields and the numeric amount of people that can be framed as being used as human shields. And that is, and then you can justify the killing of masses amount of civilians through the human shields argument. So I'm going to stop there and this and maybe Nikola do you want to add something or should we go very very briefly yeah. Rachel's question was also a methodological question right. So we started asking ourselves where when is the origins and that question about the origins was very tricky so basically for us human shielding is becomes human shielding as we conceive it in the moment in which there is an ethical and legal contentiousness right. And that's what we witness immediately after the civil war when the liberal code also is is adopted in Europe, you know, as a lens to understand also European war so that's the kind of the kind of key moment of this ethical and legal debates. One final very brief comment to do she's response. Sometimes the language of hostages is used, but it's always complimentary to it in which they remain crucial so it's sometimes prisoners of war out there. But the key cat there, these categories are constantly and systematically subsumed under the category of shields and that that's what happened in in Sri Lanka, but in many other contexts. Great. Thank you. Thank you for asking those and thank you for the setting out that typology me but think is really really helpful and thinking about in teasing out what what it is that we're looking at here and these questions of agency and then you know how they relate. And also to responsibility and justifications. I've got some questions in the Q&A so the first question is from Gabriel on radar, and I can see you've put another question in as well so I'm going to just ask both of your questions together. The concept of human shields apply to information warfare. Does the concept extend to non physical domains of warfare, ie cognitive social information domains. And if so then how do actors engaged in disinformation and influence operations to use human shields in the context of information warfare, and then Gabriel just followed that up as well. Perhaps by controlling the information domain. Actors can use human shields to protect themselves from criticism, provide scapegoats for their own failures in case of governments and maintain assessments of legitimacy and mass support. So I don't know who wants to take that one. Maybe I'll begin and then Nicola. So, I mean, what we see what what we did when we began writing the book around 2014 15 we did a Google alert for human shields. So every time human shields is mentioned in the news article we we we get the daily alerts. So first we saw there was this kind of exponential growth during this period. But then we noticed that in many in some not many but in some of these cases human shields was used as a metaphor for for different. Like a boss that puts the blame on his or her assistant and uses the assistant as a human shield in order not to get blamed for something. If I understand the question correctly I'm not sure and maybe Gabriel Gabriel will cook can correct me if not. It seems to me what you're talking about is an act of perfidy in the sense of putting correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe you can intervene where I kind of impersonate someone or something during an information war in order to get data or in order to I don't know, enter into new domains that I'm not allowed to enter. In a sense, I'm not sure I would, if that is indeed what you mean, I'm not sure it is, then I'm not sure I would call it human shields, because the problem is that we lose a certain kind of an analytic ability when a concept becomes too wide for use. It's explanatory power, I think is reduced. So we need to kind of maintain but maybe that's not what you mean. Do you want to intervene Gabriel. Gabriel if you want to. If you want to clarify if you just put your hand up then we can put the spotlight on you like and we can hear you. Oh great yes wonderful thank you. Hello everybody. Hello. Everything's clear now. So, what I was thinking was, how does the concept of information, or sorry, human shields applied to information warfare or in today's climate of disinformation as I can see I can somehow relate this to the coven 19 pandemic and the response to countries for example US under Trump Brazil under Bolsonaro, or the Philippines under the 30 in the sense that civilians normal citizens take the brunt of the take the brunt of the, or are being blamed for the shortcomings of the are being blamed for the shortcomings of their own governments in, in turn, they become a sort of shield against criticisms for human rights, for example, in the Philippines, the 30 government keeps on blaming the Filipino people for not observing health protocols, etc, etc, even if external actors are bombarding the government with criticisms that hey you're not doing your job. Something something of that sort. We also see the case in Brazil, when, when President Bolsonaro said in some cases, oh just suck it up, you can cry all day about the losses of from coven 19 suck it up. In fact, using his own population as human shields against what external criticism from other states that hey your policies are inhumane, or using his population as a shield from internal figures for the opposition. And that seems to will reserve power or run for office so that's what I'm thinking I'm also drawing on what Miss Pillai said about maintaining legitimacy. If you keep bombarding your people with such a propaganda by controlling the information domain, you use them as human shields in some way to maintain a semblance of your legitimacy. I'm trying to maintain the information domain because I mean I'm quite shooting from from my hip, so to speak because when I hear your comments I'm trying to also connect it with. What is this, China's activities in the maritime domain using civilian status as a shield for its maritime militia you can just shoot maritime militia they're fishermen, at least in theory, but then they're crude by PLA auxiliaries. And on top of my head that I want to answer and to sum it all up I do think that can this concept of human shields extend to the information domain. Thank you. Just just a quick comment. Yeah, we use the notion of info war, but in a slightly different way. So we focus, especially in the last on the relation to the last two decades on the use of social media and new media in order to produce this kind of narrative and this kind of disco so this is something we deal with. Just a note of caution. Yeah, the control of the media is important. But I think that what we try to do in the book is to try to demonstrate that it's not just about the powerful controlling the media and so influencing how people think violence in war. What was fascinating and what is fascinating is that there are people ready to understand that reading to buy it and to and to reproduce it. So I was always fascinated to find in Curso Malaparte and Italian novelist, a clear description of how Arabs and Muslims are more inclined towards human shielding in a novel of the 1950s something. So, there is, there is a popular readiness also to understand the ethics of violence in that way and that has to do also with existing and pre existing to the info wars to the pre existing conditions under which we understand violence the meaning of violence along identity lines and along understood. Thank you. And, okay we've got a question about distinction from David Bicknell, which I'll read out so I think part of this has been answered by needs comments about the different types of shields but David's asking about the distinction between voluntary and involuntary human shields, which they may then lead to a legal distinction between those who directly participate in hostilities, either voluntary shield and those who don't, which may lead to different rules of distinction and proportionality applying. Do you use that distinction. Could you elaborate on that a little bit if you do between the different sorts of human shields and the implications of that for rules of distinction and proportionality. Nicola I don't know if you want to take that one. Maybe we'll take the beginning of the legal question and then I will follow. I made a distinction before about where the location of agency between the voluntary and involuntary shield I'd like to make it another distinction. And that is that the involuntary shield is part of the economy of violence of war. It does not disrupt the economy of violence of war, while the involuntary shield which uses non violence to act against tries to undermine a certain economy of war it's to prevent war to prevent violence, something of this sort. The involuntary shield cannot be captured by the laws of war. And that that's a very interesting and I think important observation. I showed you before the definition of what human shields is, and it talks about using civilians it talks about an external act of agency using civilians. And the reason is that civilians, as they are imagined in the laws of war are passive there. It's a very gendered category. The civilian is feminized and considered as a passive the minute the civilian becomes active in war. It loses some of its protections. And, and the problem is that the the involuntary shield is not really participating in hostilities, according to what we think of as hostilities hostilities mean, usually we would think of them as meaning some kind of exertion or helping in the exertion of violence, while the voluntary shield is the anti militarist non violent person. Okay, so it is exactly the this figure of the of the voluntary shield that in many ways, exposes some of the operations of power within the laws of war and how the laws operate. And, and what we show in the book, and by this with this I'll end what we show in the book is how the principle of distinction is used time and again from the very first moment from the Civil War, all the way till today. As a distinction between this the civilized and uncivilized the civilized is the group, or is the actor that protects the notion of the principle of civil of distinction, while the the uncivilized is the one that supposedly undermines that distinction. And the print what we show is how the principle of distinction is constantly used to to frame the enemy as barbaric, and therefore as the one that is to blame for civilian death. And, and so this whole principle of distinction is problematized the minute you look at it through the lens of human shield, but Nikola maybe you want to add. Just something in relation to passivity, and passive civilian in relation to one of the cases that I was mentioning in my, in my presentation, which is Vietnam, Vietnam is a turning point in which what happens is that some civilians participate in the war effort, they abandon their condition of passivity because there is a foreign occupation, and they help the guerrilla and the insurgents to resist a foreign invasion. Now what we show in the book is that it's quite singular and quite interesting to notice that civilian participation in against foreign military occupations for instance in Italy, in France and in many other states were framed as partisan warfare legitimate partisan warfare that helped those countries to liberate themselves from foreign military occupation to such an extent that in Italy and France partisan warfare is inscribed within the constitution so it's really legally the foundation of a new political order. When that very form of activity of participation to the liberation effort is carried out by this anti-colonial movements, then a problem emerges that partisan warfare is not tolerated anymore and you have the kind of discussions that you have during the decolonization period in which the crux of the matter is precisely this to which kind of protection are these people who participate in the hostilities entitled so that the additional protocols provided anti-colonial movements with some protections but at the same time certain clauses continued to allow certain states to carry out violence against civilians when they're framed as human shields so that's the kind of conundrum unresolved conundrum of the additional protocols. Thank you. In our remaining five minutes we've got a couple of questions which I think I'll put together because they're around the same issue and it's it's quite a, I think a good question for us to end on some reflection on this. Nadine Iduak asks how can we prove and hold these governments accountable for using human shields and then G Leslie so I don't know your first name on here asks if you feel present day protections for civilians in time of war and inadequate does there need to be a rewriting of international law and international protections and if so what phrasing would you suggest what punishments to be used and how enforcement should take place so both pretty big questions I wonder if I can just address it first to do she to just say something briefly perhaps about the Sri Lankan context and accountability and then and then back to Neve and then Nicola before we round up so do she want to come in. Thanks Rachel. Yes, I think the the proximate shield as I mentioned before is a really worrying trend where I guess it goes to the heart of international humanitarian law in the sense they don't fit in very neatly into the civilian or the belligerent category and therefore they're open to being sort of used in different ways by the usually the powerful state, which can help to then exonerate them and that's me mentioned. There's an argument that's really been mobilized by the Sri Lankan government using very high profile lawyers to kind of really calculate how much casualty is deemed. You know, okay in this context. So I think yeah that really important question of how do we kind of close this gap in kind of updating the international humanitarian law to ensure that approximate shielding isn't a convenient way of getting out of very serious crime would be. I think really important and also just want to say thank you both for this really, really interesting presentation as well. Thank you do she for inviting us. Yeah. I mean these are very, very big and important questions, both of them. I think international law is a double edged sword and as we see it the powerful are the ones that interpret it. There is no law before interpretation. It's always subject to interpretation. The powerful are those that interpret it and they can interpret it in a way that advances their objectives and goals. And what Nikola and I, Nikola mentioned in the case of Ethiopia the bombing of hospitals and we've written an article for the European Journal of international law on it and what we show is yes hospitals for example are protected, according to international law, but the international law has numerous exceptions to the protection. And what we see is how the, the exception becomes the rule in the justification of bombing. And it's major it's not a minor issue because in the past, at least from 2016 till 2019, if I remember correctly those three years, every day and a half a hospital was bombed in the Middle East, every day and a half. And if you look at the responses of the bombing actors, it's always these exceptions they were hiding shielding combatants, they were shielding the weapons depot, they were near, again shielding the proximity argument. And so the law works through its exceptions and the exceptions are interpreted by the powerful. And yes, we can and we should make corrections to the law, but to think that that will be some kind of panacea that that will resolve the issue. I don't believe it, but yet I also think that it's important to do so. And I'll end with that. Oh, one minute. Yeah, on that question of the hospitals we tried to make the argument okay you want to keep the human shielding clauses, keep them. There are some limits that reveals an unbalance of power in which if the attacking party can say, you know, the word that hospital was shielding something. So put, put, try, let's try to put also some limitations on the attacking power and let's try to close the gap of the exceptions why there is an exception on attacking hospitals and there is no. There is a question of balance here we're not saying okay human shielding is completely rotten and it's what legitimizes constantly in the killing of civilians we're saying okay you want to protect civilians in that way protect them but let's try to expand the norms which are which can prevent the powerful from using some of the exceptions of the law so we don't know how that article is going to be received legal experts will agree with our argument. Okay, thank you. Look forward to reading it's in European Journal of International Law. Yes. Thank you. Unfortunately we're out of time and we've been very good at keeping to time we're bang on two o'clock so I'm very impressed. I just wanted to, you know, these issues of enforcement remind you of all about the event that we've got next week on 29 March, where Professor Eleni Chattidou is going to talk about the cost of those specialist chambers, and that issues are constantly in that kind of context. I think what you've both just been saying really points to this dilemma between what's necessary and what's sufficient obviously the law is necessary and we might need some improvements in the law but the law can never be sufficient to make the changes and ensure the enforcement so the kind of gap there as well. So just think about this has been such a fascinating discussion. I would urge everybody to go look up the book, go and buy yourself a coffee and read more into it there's a link to the book on the events page so you can follow that up there. And it just really reminds me to say thank you very much to tissue for organizing this event. It's been great and huge thanks to you, and me for coming along and talking to us about this really important talk. Thank you very much. Thank you both. Thanks guys bye.