The European Union and Israel’s Occupation: Using Technical Customs Rules as Instruments of Foreign Policy

This article describes the rules of origin dispute between the European Union and Israel, and argues that these technical customs rules are also instruments of foreign policy. Although the rules have had no direct impact on Israel’s industry in the Occupied Territories, they have bolstered the European Union’s self-identification as a “normative power” while constituting an important legal precedent that has served to legitimize other actions against Israel’s occupation

Medical lawfare:The Nakba and Israel’s attacks on Palestinian healthcare

In this article, the authors coin the phrase medical lawfare to describe how Israel has been justifying its systematic attacks on healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip during its five military assaults on the besieged enclave between 2008 and 2023. They show how Israel mobilizes the laws of armed conflict dealing with human shields and “hospital shields” to securitize lifesaving and sustaining infrastructures and legitimize their destruction. They describe how medical lawfare works as a racialized form of necropolitical governance that intensifies the Nakba’s settler-colonial logic of elimination while casting Palestinians as guilty of bringing disaster upon themselves

From Human Rights to A Politics of Care

Responding to claims that human rights have for too long dominated the imaginative space of emancipation, in this paper we aim to center stage the politics of care. After demonstrating the inadequacy of the so-called "subject of human rights" which has been construed in binary terms as either independent or dependent, we highlight the contribution of feminist ethics of care scholars in underscoring interdependency as an essential component of the human condition. We then draw on the work of Audre Lorde and Judith Butler to offer a new conceptualization of interdependency, one unmoored from the liberal subject. By way of conclusion, we interweave this new understanding of interdependency with insights drawn from The Care Manifesto and abolitionist care scholars to offer an alternative political framework, one that offers a collaborative utopian counter-narrative for the 21st century

Ethnic Cleansing and the Formation of Settler Colonial Geographies

Taking into account that ethnic cleansing not only undoes the legal and spatial formations within a given territory but also is a productive force aimed at securing and normalizing a new political order within a contested territory, we examine its impact on settler colonial geographies. We show that the relative completeness or incompleteness of ethnic cleansing helps shape the specific configuration of two intricately tied sites of social management – spatial reproduction and legal governance – within settler colonial regimes. We claim that complete ethnic cleansing produces a ‘refined’ form of settler colonialism resembling the colonial geographies of North America and Australia and is more readily normalized, while incomplete ethnic cleansing produces an ‘intermediate’ form of settler colonialism similar to the colonial regime in Rhodesia before the settlers lost power and is impossible to normalize due to a series of contradictions stemming from the presence of the ‘indigenous other’. To uncover this less acknowledged feature of ethnic cleansing we compare two territories that were colonized by Israel during the 1967 War: the Syrian Golan Heights and the Palestinian West Bank

The Politics of Human Shielding:On the Resignification of Space and the constitution of civilians as shields in liberal wars

In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the IDF on social media. Exposing the connection between the re-signification of space and the constitution of a civilian as a shield, we maintain that the infographics are part of a broader apparatus of discrimination deployed by Israel to frame its violence post hoc in order to claim that this violence was utilized in accordance with international law. We conclude by arguing that the relatively recent appearance of human shields highlights the manifestation of a contemporary political antinomy: human shields have to continue to be considered protected civilians, but since they are considered an integral part of the hostilities they are transformed into killable subjects. </jats:p

Human Shields, Sovereign Power, and the Evisceration of the Civilian

Human shields were prominent in the 2016 military campaign seeking to recapture Mosul from the hands of ISIS militants. On October 24, 2016, Pope Francis expressed his concern over the use of over two hundred boys and men as human shields in the Iraqi city. In an election rally the following day, Donald Trump decried the enemy's use of “human shields all over the place,” while the New York Times reported that the Islamic State is driving hundreds of civilians into Mosul, using them as human shields. A few days later, the United Nations disseminated a press release, warning that ISIS militants are using “tens of thousands” as human shields, thus casting massive numbers of Iraqi civilians as weapons of war.</jats:p

State Crime, Structural Violence and COVID-19

Non