Description
This paper investigates how 'police bombing' practices in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s were justified by Britain through a particular notion of 'humaneness'. Analysing British parliamentary debates and media coverage of police bombing at the time, the paper shows how racialised and gendered assumptions about tribal areas and peoples under imperial control were linked to justifications of bombing practices as ethical and legal. Building on postcolonial and critical IR and International Law literature, the paper shows how this racialised framing of 'humaneness' still lingers in contemporary justifications of asymmetric counterterrorism practices, for example through the invocation of 'human shields'.
