The objective of HPHS was to provide the first historical account of human shielding, to analyse the different types of shields, to use this marginal and controversial legal figure to interrogate the development of the international laws of war and through this analysis to discuss the ethics of humane violence. I was particularly interested in the people who were forced to serve as shields, who they were, why they were chosen rather than others, as well as the different types of shielding practices that have been adopted over the years, how they were portrayed by different political actors as well as in the media, and the kind of political and legal work human shields do.
The project’s significance to society is that it not only provides a plethora of evidence about the use of human shields in an array of situations over the past 150 years and analyses the different uses of human shielding, but also reveals how human shields serve to produce the ethics of humane violence.
One of the significant findings is that the accusation of human shielding is intricately connected to the erosion of the civilian in conflict zones, since once a person is framed as a human shield, then the protections bestowed upon him or her by international law are relaxed. Another interesting finding is that the human shielding practice also reflect social relations. The dual connotation whereby human shields create a buffer to protect a target and simultaneously expose structures of power sustaining a particular social reality is captured by the phrase “human screens,” which is the name given to human shields during the First World War. In the literal sense, human shields serve as a screen to protect a target, but they can also serve as a screen in the sense of projecting and rendering something visible. They help uncover, in other words, social relations of power and violence. Finally, the analysis of the history of human shielding helped me expose certain operations of power and ideology within the law. Accordingly, an interrogation of human shields can, for instance, help us trace the changing status of civilians—namely, those who can become shields—both in war and within the laws of armed conflict. In certain periods non-whites simply could not be deployed as human shields because they were not considered civilians, while in other periods almost all the people who were forced to become shields were non-whites. The changes in the political significance of “the human” who can serve as a shields are as intriguing and disturbing as the ethical implications of these changes.
