par Nicola Perugini, Senior Lecturer at University of Edinburgh, Professeur invité MSH

Le SMMAC et le REPI ont le plaisir d’accueillir M. Nicola Perugini, professeur invité de la MSH, pour une conférence autour de la figure du civil dans les conflits.

Within international humanitarian law the legal figure of the civilian is conceived as a passive victim of war in need of protection, while civilians who become actively involved in hostilities lose their protections. The distinction between civilians and combatants is accordingly a fundamental principle informing IHL and is considered a standard of civilisation and humane warfare. This paper interrogates what happens when this standard is applied to anticolonial wars, where entire civilian populations participated in self-emancipatory violence and actively blurred this distinction in order to advance their own liberation. Advancing a theory aimed at decolonising the legal figure of the civilian, I analyse the specific nature of anticolonial violence and the call of anticolonial thinkers to deliberately undermine the distinction between civilians and combatants. Building on the ethos of civilian participation articulated by different anticolonial thinkers and adopting a ‘revisionist’ approach, I argue that the passive conception of the civilian at the heart of the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols faces the risk of outlawing anticolonial violence and its political ethos of liberation.

Nicola Perugini is Senior Lecturer in international relations at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses mainly on the politics of international law, human rights, and violence. He is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015), Morbid Symptoms (Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017), and Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press 2020). Nicola has published articles on war and the ethics of violence; the politics of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law; humanitarianism's visual cultures; war and embedded anthropology; refugees and asylum seekers; law, space and colonialism; settler-colonialism. Nicola is currently working on three research projects. The first, "Decolonising the Civilian," examines decolonisation and national liberation wars, international law, and the status of civilians in armed conflicts. The second is an exploration of the global history of the University of Edinburgh during the mandate of one of his imperial chancellors, Arthur James Balfour. The third is focused on the fascist institution of youth summer colonies and their relationship with the history of race and Italian colonialism. Nicola has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2012/2013), a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University (2014-2016), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2017-2019), and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow (2022/2023). He has taught at the American University of Rome, the Al Quds Bard College in Jerusalem where he also directed the Human Rights Program, Brown University, and the University of Bologna. He has served as consultant for UNESCO and UN Women. His opinion pieces have appeared in Al Jazeera English, London Review of Books, Newsweek, Internazionale, The Nation, the Huffington Post, The Conversation, Just Security, Open Democracy, Counterpunch, The Herald, The National, Jadaliyya, +972 Magazine, e-flux.

The Seminar will be held in English

Thursday 25th April 2024 12pm-2pm

Salle Kant
Institut d'Études Européennes
Avenue F. Roosevelt 39
1000 Bruxelles

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