Exploring the Dual Nature of Colonial Recognition of Humanity

Today on Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by Frédéric Mégret, Neve Gordon, and Nicola Perugini. As the devastation of Gaza is permitted to continue to unfold, and colonial violence also intensifies in the West Bank, we discuss the role and responsibility of international law in enabling and structuring mass violence, the enduring importance of colonial histories in shaping the colonial present of international law.

In the face of the refusal or failure of domestic state law regimes and governments to confront even extreme instances of violence we often turn to international law as a panacea or at least a site of salvation and hope. And yet we know that international law not only prohibits certain forms of violence, but actually enables others, including shaped in part by its own colonial histories, perhaps no longer articulated explicitly in terms of standards of civilization, the language of savages and barbarians, but encoding a colonial and racial line in maybe more subtle, and less obvious ways.

Frédéric Mégret is a Professor of Law and the holder of the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law. Previously he was a William Dawson Scholar from 2015 to 2023, and the holder of the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2006 to 2015.

Neve Gordon is a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London and the Vice President of the British Society for Middle East Studies. His first book, Israel’s Occupation , provided a structural history of Israel’s mechanisms of control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His second book, The Human Right to Dominate was written with Nicola Perugini and examines how human rights, which are generally conceived as tools for advancing emancipation, can also be used to enhance subjugation and dispossession. Most recently, he wrote with Perugini the first book on the legal and political history of human shielding. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire follows the marginal and controversial figure of the human shield over a period of 150 years in order to interrogate the laws of war and how the ethics of humane violence is produced. Gordon writes regularly for the popular press and his articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The London Review of Books.

Nicola Perugini's 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.