"From Syrian civilians locked in iron cages to veterans joining peaceful indigenous water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, from Sri Lanka to Iraq and from Yemen to the United States, human beings have been used as shields for protection, coercion, or deterrence. Over the past decade, human shields have also appeared with increasing frequency in noncombat contexts such as antinuclear struggles, civil and environmental protests, and even computer games. The phenomenon, however, is by no means a new one. In Human Shields, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini describe how human shields have been used in key historical and contemporary moments and across geographical sites. The practice of human shielding corresponds with the history of shifting understandings of what is valued as "human": in the American Civil War and the Franco-German War, only the elite were used as shields, while in later conflicts, hundreds of thousands of women and children and people of color were placed in the crossfire as deterrents. Human Shields demonstrates how this increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable"-- Provided by publisher.

Introduction -- Civil war : humane warfare in the United States -- Irregulars : the Franco-German War and the legal use of human shields -- Settlers : the Second Boer War and the limits of liberal humanitarianism -- Reports : World War I and the German use of human screens -- Peace army : international pacifism and voluntary shielding during the Sino-Japanese War -- Emblem : the Italo-Ethiopian War and Red Cross medical facilities -- Nuremberg : Nazi human shielding and the lack of civilian protections -- Codification : the Geneva Conventions and the passive civilian -- People's war : casting Vietnamese resistance as human shielding -- Environment : green human shielding -- Resistance : antimilitary activism in Iraq and Palestine -- Humanitarian crimes : the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia -- Manuals : military handbooks as lawmaking tools -- Scale : human shielding in Sri Lanka and the principle of proportionality -- Hospitals : the use of medical facilities as shields -- Proximity : civilians trapped in the midst of the war on ISIS -- Info-war : the Gaza wars and social media -- Post-human shielding : drone warfare and new surveillance technologies -- Women and children : gender, passivity, and human shields -- Spectacle : viral images that dehumanize or humanize shields -- Computer games : human shields in virtual wars -- Protest : civil disobedience as an act of war.