by Nicola Perguini, University of Edinburgh & Invited Professor MSH

In collaboration with REPI

This event will be held in english and is open to the public.

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 a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses 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). 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 and e-flux.

Thursday 25 April 2024, from 12pm until 2pm

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

Free entrance