Guest Lecture with Professor Noura Erakat: The Sovereign Right to Kill. A Critical Appraisal of Israel’s Shoot-to-Kill Policy in Gaza
Where/when: Wednesday 26 March 17h30-19h30 (Auditorium D – André Devreker, Hoveniersberg, Campus – Hoveniersberg 24)
Abstract: Professor Erakat will discuss how Israel’s military laws effectively shrink the category of “civilian” as applied to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Drawing on racialized tropes of the Palestinian body as a security threat, these laws are intended to expand the scope of violence that might be justified under the banner of “self-defense,” and to expand the scope of the Palestinian population that might be deemed “legitimate” military targets. Erakat historicizes Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy as merely one contemporary mode of displacing and dispossessing indigenous populations. At the same time, however, Israel’s legal practices introduce a novel technology into the arena of armed conflict—“the legal technology the ‘shrinking civilian’”.
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory. Noura is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines scholarly expertise and local knowledge. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Palestine Book Awards sponsored by the Middle East Monitor and winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award’s Bronze Medial in Current Events/Foreign Affairs.
