Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and US Foreign Policy. By Ethan B. Kapstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 316p. $88.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Abstract

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 SinoJapanese 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.