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Human Rights as a Security Threat: Lawfare and the Campaign against Human Rights NGOs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Neve Gordon
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Abstract

In this article, I show how the term lawfare is being deployed as a speech act in order to encode the field of human rights as a national security threat. The objective, I claim, is to hinder the work of human rights organizations that produce and disseminate knowledge about social wrongs perpetrated by military personnel and government officials, particularly evidence of acts emanating from the global war on terrorism—such as torture and extrajudicial executions—that constitute war crimes and can be presented in courts that exercise universal jurisdiction. Using Israel as a case study, I investigate the local and global dimensions of the securitization processes, focusing on how different securitizing actors—academics, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, policy makers, and legislators—mobilize the media, shape public opinion, lobby legislators and policy makers, introduce new laws, and pressure donors to pave the way for a form of exceptional intervention to limit the scope of human rights work.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 311 - 344
Copyright
© 2014 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article was written during a sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and was presented at the School of Social Science seminar. I would like to thank the seminar participants for their comments and suggestions. The article also benefited from the comments of Merav Amir, Nitza Berkovitch, Clifford Bob, Miriam Lowi, Nicola Perugini, James Ron, Catherine Rottenberg, Rebecca Stein, and Hadas Ziv as well as from LSR's editors and anonymous reviewers.

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