Books by Nicola Perugini
This translation, not unlike the English version, begins with an epigraph from Curzio Malaparte's... more This translation, not unlike the English version, begins with an epigraph from Curzio Malaparte's 1949 novel The Skin, where a thinly veiled racist joke is used to describe how Arab men began using Arab women and children as human shields after the Americans "landed in North Africa." "The Arab, it is true, still goes on horseback," Malaparte writes, "and his wife continues to accompany him on foot as before, with her child on her back and a bundle on her head. But she no longer walks behind the horse's tail. She now walks in front of the horse-because, of the mines." While the orientalist quip is directed at a stereotypical "Arab" almost untouched by historical transformation, Malaparte alludes to the violent encounter between West and East. He suggests that the mortifying treatment of women and children by Arab men in North Africa deteriorates even further following western invasion. Indeed, for the Italian writer it was the dispersal of American mines across the terrain that triggered the weaponization of Arab women and children and their use as human shields.
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University of California Press, 2020
From Syrian civilians locked in iron cages to veterans joining peaceful indigenous water protecto... more 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 antinuclear struggles, civil and environmental protests, and even computer games. The phenomenon, however, is by no means a new one.
Describing the use of human shields in key historical and contemporary moments across the globe, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini demonstrate how the increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable. They show how the law facilitates the use of lethal violence against vulnerable people while portraying it as humane, but they also reveal how people can and do use their own vulnerability to resist violence and denounce forms of dehumanization. Ultimately, Human Shields unsettles our common ethical assumptions about violence and the law and urges us to imagine entirely new forms of humane politics.
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This introductory chapter problematizes the linear narrative of global redemption through human r... more This introductory chapter problematizes the linear narrative of global redemption through human rights by analyzing the relationship between human rights and domination. Defining domination as a relationship of subjugation characterized by the use of force and coercion, the authors show how actors with different agendas, ideals, and beliefs launch similar types of campaigns articulated through the language of human rights in order to advance opposed political objectives. The chapter argues that precisely because human rights have no essential core, they can be appropriated in various ways and can potentially acquire new political meanings, which may invert already existing ones. Within the current context of convergences, mirroring, and inversions, the instrumentalist conception of human rights—according to which conservatives or militaries deploy human rights merely as a pretext for attaining other political objectives—is revealed to be both empirically and theoretically flawed.
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In the summer of 2015, the three of us met to research
the Muqata’as, the one in Ramallah and the... more In the summer of 2015, the three of us met to research
the Muqata’as, the one in Ramallah and the others that
were built in Mandate Palestine. Constructed by the
British, the buildings constitute the first security system
to be established after the fall of the Ottoman empire.
They are also known as Tegart forts, named after Sir
Charles Tegart, the engineer and architect of the British
counterinsurgency programme. The Muqata’as are
police forts, the basic architectural infrastructure of
counterinsurgency in Mandate Palestine, and also used
to suppress the Arab Revolt in the late 1930s. In Morbid
Symptoms we investigate their history and the transitions
of power they went through, both as material objects and
symbolic sites that can illuminate the understanding of
the current Palestinian condition.
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At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives, who just decades before h... more At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives, who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture, began to embrace human rights in order to advance their political goals.
In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights — generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices — are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other's political strategies.
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Edited volumes by Nicola Perugini
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Articles by Nicola Perugini
Institute for Palestine Studies Policy Papers, 2024
Since the beginning of its genocide in Gaza in October 2023, Israel has carried out almost five h... more Since the beginning of its genocide in Gaza in October 2023, Israel has carried out almost five hundred attacks on Gaza's healthcare facilities and staff in what can be characterized as “medicide”—which we define as the destruction of a healthcare system in whole or in part with the aim of obliterating or damaging the conditions needed for saving and sustaining the lives of the sick and the wounded. Several thousand civilians have been killed and injured in these attacks, among them doctors, nurses, medics, and ambulance drivers. About two-thirds of the hospitals are no longer operational and those that remain open operate in limited capacity due to lack of fuel, medicine, medical equipment, and food. Empirical evidence not only from Gaza, but also from Syria and Yemen, has shown that due to this and other exceptions the law has done little if anything to prevent a culture of hospital bombings. Reforming international law to include an absolute prohibition of bombing medical units and staff could help prevent the systemic and egregious violations we are currently witnessing and the disturbing logic informing them.
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Millenium: Journal of International Studies, 2024
Within international humanitarian law (IHL) the legal figure of the civilian is conceived as a pa... more Within international humanitarian law (IHL) the legal figure of the civilian is conceived as a passive victim of war in need of protection, while civilians who become actively involved in hostilities lose their protections. The distinction between civilians and combatants is accordingly a fundamental principle informing IHL and is considered a standard of civilisation and humane warfare. This paper interrogates what happens when this standard is applied to anticolonial wars, where entire civilian populations participated in self-emancipatory violence and actively blurred this distinction in order to advance their own liberation. Advancing a theory aimed at decolonising the legal figure of the civilian, I analyse the specific nature of anticolonial violence and the call of anticolonial thinkers to deliberately undermine the distinction between civilians and combatants. Building on the ethos of civilian participation articulated by different anticolonial thinkers and adopting a 'revisionist' approach, I argue that the passive conception of the civilian at the heart of the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols faces the risk of outlawing anticolonial violence and its political ethos of liberation.
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Retrosopect Journal, Race in Retrospect, 2021
The article explores Arthur James Balfour's legacy at the University of Edinburgh as imperial sta... more The article explores Arthur James Balfour's legacy at the University of Edinburgh as imperial statesman and Chancellor of the university in the period 1891-1930. It examines Balfour's contribution to the constitution of a racialised global order during his mandate at Edinburgh.
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img journal, 2020
From phalanx-fighting, through the use of multiple distance weapons, to the development of ... more From phalanx-fighting, through the use of multiple distance weapons, to the development of airpower and drone warfare in the last century, the history of armed conflicts is one of increasing distance from which people are killed, but also one of increasing weaponization of the human body. Starting from World War I, innocent civilians who were used as human shields to protect military targets in violation of the laws of war were often defined as ‘human screens’.The notion of human screen, I argue in this article, is not merely a synonym for human shield. In fact, the human screen is not only a human weapon. As I show in this archaeo-logical exploration, the process of transformation of the human body into a screen translates also into the development of a new media technology that both allows to modulate the use of lethal force and shape the perception and political meaning of violence in the battlefield.
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European Journal of International Law, 2019
Assaults on hospitals have become part of a widespread warfare strategy, propelling numerous acto... more Assaults on hospitals have become part of a widespread warfare strategy, propelling numerous actors to claim that belligerents are not being held accountable for attacking medical units. Acknowledging that international humanitarian law (IHL) offers medical units protections, belligerents often claim that the hospitals were being used to shield military targets and therefore the bombing was legitimate. Tracing the history of hospital bombings alongside the development of legal articles dealing with the protection of medical units, we show how, from the early 20th century, international law has introduced a series of exceptions that legitimize attacks on hospitals that were framed as shields. Next, we demonstrate that the shielding argument justifies bombing hospitals because they have ostensibly assumed a threshold position in-between the two axiomatic poles informing the laws of war-combatants and civilians. We argue, however, that medical units tend to occupy a legal and spatial threshold during war and, since IHL does not have the vocabulary to acknowledge the liminal nature of medical units and identifies between liminality and criminality, it introduces several exceptions that help belligerents legitimize their attacks. By way of conclusion, we maintain that the only way to address the deliberate and widespread destruction of medical units is by reforming the law through the introduction of an absolute ban.
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Madar. Israeli Affairs Journal, 2020
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EJILTALK!, 2019
The difference between Beer’s and our position is thus straightforward. We consider hospitals as ... more The difference between Beer’s and our position is thus straightforward. We consider hospitals as high value assets, as sanctuaries, and their bombing as cruel and inhumane, and put the protections offered to them before the right of militaries to attack, while Beer, wittingly or not, ends up defending those who attack hospitals. We make the case for a ban with no exceptions regardless of the identity of the adversary, while he accepts the existing exceptions, knowing that states have repeatedly used them to legitimise hospital bombings. We believe the law should provide hospitals with absolute protection from the threat of being bombed, while he believes that the threat of bombing hospitals protects them.
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State Crime, 2019
Italy's war crimes during the 1935-1936 invasion of Ethiopia have been broadly documented by diff... more Italy's war crimes during the 1935-1936 invasion of Ethiopia have been broadly documented by different historians of Italian colonialism. However, its systematic bombardment of medical facilities operated by different Red Cross Societies is much less known. Relying on archival materials, we show how the fascist regime presented these attacks as legitimate reprisal; it was, the Italians claimed, the Ethiopian forces who had violated international law, particularly the principle of distinction, when they used medical facilities to hide. Reconstructing the debates about the Red Cross medical units, we show how Ethiopia's sovereign status rendered international law applicable, since the war was carried out between two internationally recognized countries rather than between a sovereign state and its colonial subjects. Simultaneously however, Ethiopia's status as a sovereign state was extremely precarious. The African country was successfully framed by both Italy and the Red Cross as uncivilized through the creation of an artificial link between the ostensible inability to follow the principle of distinction (i.e. hiding behind medical units) and the population's race. The move from sovereignty to race is, we claim, illuminating because it reveals how the inclusion of Ethiopia into the family of nations not only did not undermine the colonial imprint of international law, but also helped cement it. It is therefore crucial to think about the process of colonial inclusion into the liberal order of humanity against the grain, and to reveal how integration through sovereignty can be transmogrified into racist exclusion.
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Settler Colonial Studies, 2018
In this article, I analyze the emergence of a new discourse among
Jewish settlers during the 2005... more In this article, I analyze the emergence of a new discourse among
Jewish settlers during the 2005–2006 Israeli disengagement from
the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. I define this
new discourse as settler colonial inversions – the mimic
transformation of the settler subject into the indigene, and of the
Palestinian indigene into the settler. After reconstructing the
context of the 2005–2006 disengagement and the emergence of
new settler colonial actors and discourses, I turn to analyze an
interview I carried out with one of the settlers involved in the
disengagement, an art therapist who also took part in the creation
of the Gush Katif Museum. Next, I reconstruct the narrative
structure of the museum and its crucial discursive operations,
analyzing the settler inversions appearing in the museum. I
conclude by comparing Jewish settler inversions with other forms
of settler colonial mimicry.
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Pier Paolo Pasolini Framed and Unframed. A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century, 2019
Although situated in a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches, the literature on Pier ... more Although situated in a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches, the literature on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work and his relationship with colonized, formerly colonized, and decolonizing countries often struggles to understand his political and intellectual stance on the major historical processes of the last century. Some important commentaries have focused on the relationship between Pasolini and “alterity” and on his “heretical Orientalism,” to use Luca Caminati’s apt expression; on Pasolini’s “Southern response” to the colonial question; on cultural issues that emerged in formerly colonized countries after independence; and on the critical rethinking of the relationship between race and nation-state that Pasolini stages in his films. However, more than forty years after his death, our understanding of the modes of expression through which Pasolini defined his position toward decolonization processes remains incomplete.
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This paper interrogates the relationship among visibility, distinction, international humanitaria... more This paper interrogates the relationship among visibility, distinction, international humanitarian law and ethics in contemporary theatres of violence. After introducing the notions of " civilianization of armed conflict " and " battlespaces " , we briefly discuss the evisceration of one of international humanitarian law's axiomatic figures: the civilian. We show how liberal militaries have created an apparatus of distinction that expands that which is perceptible by subjecting big data to algorithmic analysis, combining the traditional humanist lens with a post-humanist one. The apparatus functions before, during, and after the fray not only as an operational technology that directs the fighting or as a discursive mechanism responsible for producing the legal and ethical interpretation of hostilities, but also as a force that produces liminal subjects. Focusing on two legal figures— " enemies killed in action " and " human shields " —we show how the apparatus helps justify killing civilians and targeting civilian spaces during war.
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Afriche e Orienti , 2015
Ancora a oltre quarant'anni dalla sua morte, l'analisi delle modalità espressive attraverso le qu... more Ancora a oltre quarant'anni dalla sua morte, l'analisi delle modalità espressive attraverso le quali Pier Paolo Pasolini ha saputo prendere posizione, in particolare attraverso il montaggio cinematografico e poetico di immagini, davanti ai processi di decolonizzazione sembra tutt'altro che compiuta. A partire dal film 'La rabbia' questo articolo solleva e cerca di rispondere ad alcune questioni in merito. Quali sono le modalità con cui Pasolini apprende e inquadra le lotti di liberazione africane, asiatiche e americane? Attraverso quali chiavi euristiche e quali tecniche di immaginazione elabora la sua comprensione dell'eccezionale trasformazione storica prodotta dalla decolonizzazione? Che tipo di relazione scorge tra trasformazioni d'oltremare e trasformazioni europee e italiane del dopoguerra?
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In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding... more In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the IDF on social media. Exposing the connection between the re-signification of space and the constitution of a civilian as a shield, we maintain that the infographics are part of a broader apparatus of discrimination deployed by Israel to frame its violence post hoc in order to claim that this violence was utilized in accordance with international law. We conclude by arguing that the relatively recent appearance of human shields highlights the manifestation of a contemporary political antinomy: human shields have to continue to be considered protected civilians, but since they are considered an integral part of the hostilities they are transformed into killable subjects.
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Human shields were prominent in the 2016 military campaign seeking to recapture Mosul from the ha... more Human shields were prominent in the 2016 military campaign seeking to recapture Mosul from the hands of ISIS militants. On October 24, 2016, Pope Francis expressed his concern over the use of over two hundred boys and men as human shields in the Iraqi city. In an election rally the following day, Donald Trump decried the enemy's use of " human shields all over the place, " while the New York Times reported that the Islamic State is driving hundreds of civilians into Mosul, using them as human shields. A few days later, the United Nations disseminated a press release, warning that ISIS militants are using " tens of thousands " as human shields, thus casting massive numbers of Iraqi civilians as weapons of war. Surely thousands of Iraqi civilians did not volunteer to become shields, and, most likely, the vast majority of them were not coerced into becoming involuntary shields. Their proximity to the fray in Mosul, a city that had become a conflict zone, was enough to brand them as weapons and to categorize them as human shields, thereby stripping them of some of the protections international humanitarian law (IHL) bestows on civilians.
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Books by Nicola Perugini
Describing the use of human shields in key historical and contemporary moments across the globe, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini demonstrate how the increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable. They show how the law facilitates the use of lethal violence against vulnerable people while portraying it as humane, but they also reveal how people can and do use their own vulnerability to resist violence and denounce forms of dehumanization. Ultimately, Human Shields unsettles our common ethical assumptions about violence and the law and urges us to imagine entirely new forms of humane politics.
the Muqata’as, the one in Ramallah and the others that
were built in Mandate Palestine. Constructed by the
British, the buildings constitute the first security system
to be established after the fall of the Ottoman empire.
They are also known as Tegart forts, named after Sir
Charles Tegart, the engineer and architect of the British
counterinsurgency programme. The Muqata’as are
police forts, the basic architectural infrastructure of
counterinsurgency in Mandate Palestine, and also used
to suppress the Arab Revolt in the late 1930s. In Morbid
Symptoms we investigate their history and the transitions
of power they went through, both as material objects and
symbolic sites that can illuminate the understanding of
the current Palestinian condition.
In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights — generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices — are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other's political strategies.
Edited volumes by Nicola Perugini
Articles by Nicola Perugini
Jewish settlers during the 2005–2006 Israeli disengagement from
the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. I define this
new discourse as settler colonial inversions – the mimic
transformation of the settler subject into the indigene, and of the
Palestinian indigene into the settler. After reconstructing the
context of the 2005–2006 disengagement and the emergence of
new settler colonial actors and discourses, I turn to analyze an
interview I carried out with one of the settlers involved in the
disengagement, an art therapist who also took part in the creation
of the Gush Katif Museum. Next, I reconstruct the narrative
structure of the museum and its crucial discursive operations,
analyzing the settler inversions appearing in the museum. I
conclude by comparing Jewish settler inversions with other forms
of settler colonial mimicry.
Describing the use of human shields in key historical and contemporary moments across the globe, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini demonstrate how the increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable. They show how the law facilitates the use of lethal violence against vulnerable people while portraying it as humane, but they also reveal how people can and do use their own vulnerability to resist violence and denounce forms of dehumanization. Ultimately, Human Shields unsettles our common ethical assumptions about violence and the law and urges us to imagine entirely new forms of humane politics.
the Muqata’as, the one in Ramallah and the others that
were built in Mandate Palestine. Constructed by the
British, the buildings constitute the first security system
to be established after the fall of the Ottoman empire.
They are also known as Tegart forts, named after Sir
Charles Tegart, the engineer and architect of the British
counterinsurgency programme. The Muqata’as are
police forts, the basic architectural infrastructure of
counterinsurgency in Mandate Palestine, and also used
to suppress the Arab Revolt in the late 1930s. In Morbid
Symptoms we investigate their history and the transitions
of power they went through, both as material objects and
symbolic sites that can illuminate the understanding of
the current Palestinian condition.
In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights — generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices — are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other's political strategies.
Jewish settlers during the 2005–2006 Israeli disengagement from
the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. I define this
new discourse as settler colonial inversions – the mimic
transformation of the settler subject into the indigene, and of the
Palestinian indigene into the settler. After reconstructing the
context of the 2005–2006 disengagement and the emergence of
new settler colonial actors and discourses, I turn to analyze an
interview I carried out with one of the settlers involved in the
disengagement, an art therapist who also took part in the creation
of the Gush Katif Museum. Next, I reconstruct the narrative
structure of the museum and its crucial discursive operations,
analyzing the settler inversions appearing in the museum. I
conclude by comparing Jewish settler inversions with other forms
of settler colonial mimicry.
and interventions in contexts of natural and man-made
catastrophes is growing on a global scale. An increasingly
close relationship exists between image production, news
production and humanitarian industry. In this article, we
argue that this process is transforming the meaning of the
social, political and ethical act of bearing witness. We
analyse the epistemic and political implications of visual
humanitarian testimony through the documentary film
Enjoy Poverty (2008), shot in Congo by the Dutch artist
Renzo Martens. Examining some of the key scenes of the
film, we undertake an analysis of the visual culture of
humanitarianism within which the contemporary
production of sensational images of strong emotional
impact is inscribed and justified. We maintain that
rethinking testimonial debt in light of contemporary
visual humanitarianism fundamentally means to
acknowledge and explore the hierarchical relationship
that visual humanitarianism creates between the
witnesses, the victims and the spectators. We conclude by
arguing that Enjoy Poverty constitutes an attempt to
generate a new visual, discursive and political horizon
within which one can prevent the transformation of the
testimonial relationship into a relationship of power.
that have been taking place at DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency,
in Beit Sahour, Palestine, since 2010. Previous research episodes were published in
Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg Press, 2014), the London Review of International
Law 1, no. 1 (2014), and Limes, Rivista italiana di geopolitica, no. 3 (2011).
while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the
legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise
genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in
the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the IDF on social media.
Exposing the connection between the re-signification of space and the constitution of a civilian
as a shield, we maintain that the infographics are part of a broader apparatus of discrimination
deployed by Israel to frame its violence post hoc in order to claim that this violence was utilized in
accordance with international law. We conclude by arguing that the relatively recent appearance
of human shields highlights the manifestation of a contemporary political antinomy: human shields
have to continue to be considered protected civilians, but since they are considered an integral
part of the hostilities they are transformed into killable subjects.
iteration of Palestinian experiments with parliamentary
democracy. But its establishment overshadowed the Palestinian
National Council, also known as the parliament-in-exile—
which is the only Palestinian assembly aspiring to represent all
Palestinians whether in Israel, occupied Palestine, or in exile.
Parliaments-in-exile were a form of political representation
exercised throughout the years of exile of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO), when parliamentary gatherings
sought to account for a scattered and extraterritorial
polity, a polity in conflict, without the possibility of arranging
for a census on the basis of which proportional representation
could be organized, and without the possibility of physically
congregating in Palestine.