2025/11/03 by Nicola Perugini · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #Social Movements and Cultural Identity
paper · doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214
In an article completed while Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups were attacking the ‘Gaza envelope’ in October 2023, and Israel was launching the most violent war of annihilation of this century, I argued for what I called ‘decolonizing the civilian’. By this phrase, I meant a political and legal theory of the civilian viewed from the perspective of the colonised. My idea was that such a theory was missing because international humanitarian law, until the 1977 Additional Protocols, excluded anticolonial wars from its purview, and even when it belatedly recognised them, it did so in ways that constrained and diluted their radical force and methods of combat. Within this state-centric framework, the civilian is imagined only as a passive victim in need of protection. This conception erases the practices and ethos of liberation that anticolonial struggles have long embodied. In these struggles, civilians are not passive but active participants in the collective effort to violently dismantle colonial domination. By challenging the principle of distinction itself, anticolonial movements built on Mao’s notion of people’s war as the intermingling of combatants and civilians – like ‘fish (combatants) and water (civilians)’ – in the liberation effort. Through this framework, they articulated a mode of political being that constituted itself in antithesis to the international law principle of distinction between civilians and combatants.