Neve Gordon

Born and raised in Israel, Neve Gordon taught at Ben-Gurion University for seventeen years before moving to the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. His first book, Israel’s Occupation (2008), provides a structural history of Israel’s mechanisms of control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and still serves as a reference book for anyone interested in Israel’s military occupation. His second book, The Human Right to Dominate (2015 with Nicola Perugini) examines how human rights, which are generally conceived as tools for advancing emancipation, can also be used to enhance subjugation and dispossession. His most recent book Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (2020 also with Perugini) traces the marginal and controversial figure of the human shield over a period of 150 years in order to interrogate the laws of war and how the ethics of humane violence are produced. Gordon was also the first director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel during the first Palestinian Intifada, a founding member and activist of Ta’ayush-Jerusalem during the second Intifada, and, following the birth of his two children, he helped found (and served for ten years as a board member) of the bi-lingual Jewish-Palestinian school Hagar. He is currently the Vice President of the British Society for Middle East Studies and a board member of the International State Crime Initiative. Follow him on Twitter @nevegordon or on FB. 

Nicola Perugini’s research focuses mainly on international law, human rights, and violence. He is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015) and Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press 2020). Nicola has published articles on war and the ethics of violence; the politics of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law; humanitarianism’s visual cultures; war and embedded anthropology; refugees and asylum seekers; law, space and colonialism; settler-colonialism and trauma in Israel/Palestine. Nicola is currently working on two research projects. The first is an exploration of the global history of the University of Edinburgh during the mandate of one of his imperial chancellors, Arthur James Balfour. The second, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines decolonization wars and international law. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2012/2013), a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University (2014-2016), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2017-2019). He has taught at the American University of Rome, the Al Quds Bard College in Jerusalem where he also directed the Human Rights Program, Brown University, and the University of Bologna. He has served as consultant for UNESCO and UN Women. His opinion pieces have appeared in Al Jazeera English, LRB Blog, Newseek, Internazionale, The Nation, the Huffington Post, the Conversation, Just Security, Open Democracy, the Herald. He tweets @PeruginiNic.