Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini deliver a fascinating account of civilians who have been coerced into acting as human shields or who have voluntarily put themselves in danger to protect others from attack. Their book provides a detailed overview of the laws governing the use of human shields, cases where civilians have been forced to serve as human shields, and various instances where people have willingly put their lives on the line. We learn about the Belgian civilians forced to march in front of advancing German troops during World War I, the Dutch settlers forced onto British trains during the Second Boer War and the UN Peacekeepers handcuffed to arms depots during the Yugoslav Wars. The book also covers the antiwar activists who traveled to Baghdad on double-decker buses before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the protestors who stand in front of Israeli bulldozers to defend Palestinian homes, and the veterans at Standing Rock seeking to protect Indigenous groups from police brutality. Moreover, the authors take us on some unexpected detours, including chapters on infographics, videogames, and environmental activism.

Although Human Shields is rich with historical texture, it does more than simply document instances where these shields have been deployed. The book makes an important contribution to debates about how international humanitarian law works to enable the violence inflicted on the battlefield by legitimizing the harm caused to civilians. It shows how legal ambiguities about who should be held responsible when human shields are killed and whether serving as a shield counts as a form of direct participation in armed conflict leave the civilian population profoundly vulnerable. It traces how belligerents have taken advantage of these ambiguities to rationalize their own violence while simultaneously trying to discredit the violence used by others, noting that “human shields have emerged as one of the key legal figures marshalled to legitimize the use of lethal force against innocent people” (p. 10). The book pays particular attention to how the presence of human shields has been “mobilized by one side or the other in order to manipulate proportionality calculations” (p. 147). Despite claiming to protect civilians from the ravages of war, these rules are often used as “a tool for humanizing the use of lethal force against entities that the law… purports to protect” (p. 158).

Gordon and Perugini make a number of important contributions to these debates and several are worth discussing in more detail. First, their book demonstrates how human shielding is animated by a series of gendered and racialized assumptions about the people serving as shields, which reveal that not all lives are valued equally. They note that the human body is an unlikely choice for a shield, given that flesh and bone offer little protection against bombs and bullets. What makes human shields effective is the value that is ascribed to these bodies; that is, whether they are considered valuable enough to deter an attack or generate sufficient outrage if they are harmed (p. 5). During the American Civil War, for example, Gordon and Perugini argue that only imprisoned officers were considered important enough to serve as shields because enlisted soldiers and ordinary civilians were thought of eminently disposable (p. 25). During the recent war against ISIS, they argue that coalition officials were able to rationalize the killing of innocent civilians because their lives were not valued quite so emphatically as the lives of those dropping the bombs (p. 168). Gordon and Perugini conclude that although “international law does not make overt racial distinctions… its formulation today enables state actors to deploy the human shield clause to legitimize the killing of racialized civilians in wars waged against nonstate actors” (p. 169).

Second, the book demonstrates how human shielding is connected to broader struggles about the legitimacy of certain targets and certain forms of violence. Gordon and Perugini note that human shields are often viewed as a weapon used by the weak, a desperate tactic used by those who are unable to win wars legitimately. Although there is certainly an element of truth to this characterization, they argue that human shields are increasingly a weapon used by the strong, as a legal construct that can be deployed to legitimize or delegitimize specific acts of violence (p. 136). They trace how the United States sought to redefine the rules on human shields in ways that would legitimize greater levels of civilian harm. This included removing or discounting human shields from proportionality calculations so that attacks could proceed, as well as attempts to “shift responsibility for civilian deaths onto the shoulders of those who deploy them, rendering the attacking party legally immune from violating the principle of distinction” (p. 137). As conflicts move into urban areas, Gordon and Perugini argue that belligerents are starting to classify all civilians as human shields, regardless of whether they are actually serving as shields, either voluntarily or involuntarily (pp. 160–61). This enables belligerents to further erode the protections given to civilians during times of war, transforming them into potentially “killable subjects” (p. 164).

Finally, the book challenges the idea that human shields are passive victims, showing how these representations deny them both agency and voice. One of the most interesting and informative chapters in Human Shields focuses on Anges Maude Royden, a feminist peace activist who tried to raise an army of pacifists during the Sino-Japanese war. Although Royden was unsuccessful in her endeavor, Gordon and Perugini argue that her activism represents a “radical departure from the conception of civilians as passive agents, [underscoring] the ability of civilians to become politically engaged actors who can use their own vulnerability as a form of spiritual power aimed at ending the fighting” (p. 57). More recent examples show how activists have sought to use their privileged position within the hierarchy of human lives to expose the racist logic that renders certain populations less worthy of protection. Gordon and Perugini argue that the activists who traveled to Iraq and Palestine did so knowing that their presence was more likely to alter military calculations about the legality of an attack than the presence of local civilians (pp. 111–13). As well as helping deter specific acts of violence, their presence on the battlefield exposed the gendered and racialized assumptions that inform these calculations, emphasizing the fact that “not all humans are valuable enough to become shields” (p. 23).

Like most great books, Human Shields provokes more questions than it resolves. Although Gordon and Perugini emphasize the importance of the body in their introduction, arguing that “the history of human shields is also a history of the human body,” the book presents a strangely disembodied account of human shielding. We do catch a brief glimpse of the horrors inflicted on those forced into serving as shields—on the command of others or the dictates of their own conscience—but more could have been said about the pain and suffering experienced by those in the line of fire. At the same time, the voices of those who have served as shields are noticeably absent from much of the book. Even though Gordon and Perugini emphasize the importance of recognizing the agency of civilians, we hear relatively little from those who have put their bodies on the line.

Nevertheless, these concerns are only intelligible because of the extraordinary work that has gone into Human Shields. Gordon and Perugini have succeeded in creating sufficient space for a meaningful dialogue about how the law works to constitute civilians as killable in certain circumstances, how belligerents have sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the law to justify these deaths, and how activists have sought to contest the exclusionary logic that renders certain populations so vulnerable to death and injury.