Gender and Human Shielding

Abstract

Human shielding occurs through the use of the body—an individual or collective physical presence—which is not armed and does not rely on the use of force or fire. Understood as both a means (human shields) and a method (human shielding), shielding is the use of “civilians or other protected persons, whose presence or movement is aimed or used to render military targets immune from military operations.” Human shielding raises difficult doctrinal questions as to the interpretation and implementation of international humanitarian law that are not easily answered. This is in part because human shielding reanimates a series of queries that, as I argue elsewhere, are constitutive of international humanitarian law itself, namely: What and who is a combatant? What and who is a civilian? Who is to judge and according to which premises? Human shielding reanimates these questions because it is upon the definition of a civilian, in contradistinction to the combatant, that the power and efficacy of shielding depends. As I have shown, the distinction between civilian and combatant is partially constituted through discourses of gender which naturalize sex and sex difference. These discourses, as I sketch out below, are cited when theorizing the significance of human shields and reappear when evaluating the representation and meaning of the embodied movement of human shields.

Introduction to Symposium on Critical Perspectives on Human Shields

“…8 Helen Kinsella also provides a counterintuitive perspective, arguing that both the principle of distinction and the common conception of shields are gendered: the unspoken assumption is that shields denote mostly women and children. 9 For Kinsella, shields provide the chance for actors that are usually defined as passive by international law to become active agents in contemporary conflicts. The law constructs shields as mutable and unstable, she avers, thus producing a legal grey zone that can be mobilized for political ends.…”