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The Human Right To Kill

Sat, November 8, 2:00 to 3:45pm, Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Level 1, San Gabriel C (L1)

Abstract

According to Harvard human rights professor David Kennedy, "the American military is by far the world’s largest human-rights training institution. Across the globe, engagement with the U.S. military—purchasing our weapons, participating in joint exercises with our forces—comes with training in international norms and regulatory practices of humanitarian law and human rights." In this paper, we interrogate the fundamental and recurrent convergence of human rights and violent forms of domination, arguing that human rights are frequently used by the state and even human rights organizations themselves to “civilize” the ways of killing and to attribute rational objectives to the very act of killing. A unified culture of ethical violence is, in other words, coalescing; one in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand if human rights and humanitarianism are regulating violence or whether violence is determining the parameters of human rights. Exploring this convergence through a critical examination of the use of "human shields" in Iraq and Israel/Palestine we offer three observations: 1) humanitarian and human rights law are used to render violence legitimate; 2) these two bodies of law can make violence more effective; and finally 3) the framing of killing as “legal” serves to transform violence into a source of national pride for supporters of the state’s military activities.

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