Nicola Perugini, “Between Anti-Colonial Resistance and Colonial Genocide: Gaza at the Limits of International Law”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, November 2025, 1–14, doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214.
Perugini highlights a major blind spot in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as to how it has recognised anti-colonial wars. Perugini points out that IHL’s limited recognition of anti-colonial violence – enshrined in the 1977 Additional Protocols which institutionalised the right to fight against colonial occupation through armed struggle – rests on a static state-centric framework where the civilian is imagined only as a passive, nonpartisan victim in need of protection, while it is the combatant who engages in violently dismantling colonial occupation and domination through anti-colonial resistance. However, historically we know that anti-colonial movements have challenged this IHL principle of distinction between civilians and combatants by blurring the line between the two in a collective struggle. Adopting the perspective of the colonized, Perugini thus calls for “decolonizing the civilian” in international law. To Perugini, this perspective “forces us to rethink the civilian as a figure of resistance rather than passivity” (p.2).
In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the stakes around the distinction between civilians and combatants decide over life and death for most Gazans, and certainly for all males and even male children. As Perugini points out, Israel uses precisely this distinction to kill with impunity all those who dare to blur the line between civilians and combatants. The recent example of a local ZDF contractor also illustrates, how targetting of journalists is justified by Israel and German media by questioning the civilian status of journalists.
More specifically, by drawing on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Perugini highlights two dialectically entwined forms of transgression that are at odds with IHL. On the one hand, anticolonial forces merge the civilian and the combatant in their anticolonial struggle through, for instance, the network and infrastructure of tunnels which have a commercial and a military purpose. Through tunnelling, Palestinian resistance groups have undermined the distinction to be able to “challenge the asymmetry of the battlefield” through “subterranean warfare” (p.7). On the other hand, the state of Israel uses this very indistinction in order “to destroy the colonised people as people”. To Perugini, both transgressions of international law allow us to better grasp the limits of international law, as well as the relationship between colonial genocide and anticolonial resistance in settler-colonial contexts.
Perugini’s call to decolonize the civilian in IHL thus allows us to better understand why anticolonial resistance necessitates the indistinction, and how IHL allows Israel to justify self-defence as a coloniser by denying the colonised their own right to self-defence. “This inversion of aggression and defence is central to the colonial logic of genocide.” (p. 10).