About the Seminar
Please join us as Revital Madar presents "Beyond Instrumentalization: Sexual Violence, Looting, and the Order of State Violence."
You can join in person in room P1-547 or online.
Scholarship on conflict-related sexual violence has been shaped by two interventions. The first challenges the historical invisbility of sexual violence in war, tracing a legal revolution — from the ICTY and ICTR through UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820 — that culminated in sexual violence's recognition as a weapon of war, a crime against humanity, and a trigger for international intervention (Charlesworth & Chinkin, 2000; MacKinnon, 2006; Benson & Gizelis, 2020). The second looks at the costs of this very success, pointing out that the fetishization of sexual violence in security discourse decontextualizes it from broader political and economic structures (Meger, 2016), that international attention to sexual violence reinscribes colonial imaginaries (Mertens & Pardy, 2017), and that it displaces other wartime injuries like killing, torture, and economic destruction while individualizing this violence's structural political conditions (Engle, 2020). Within these critiques of what can be broadly termed "International Conflict Feminism" (Nesiah, 2023), what remains less explored is the question of what function sexual violence performs within the broader order of state violence, and specifically in relation to the old sovereign right to kill.
A dataset of over 100 trials of Israeli state security agents prosecuted for crimes committed against Palestinians from 1948 to the present, shows that sentences for sex and property crimes were significantly higher than those for bodily harm and killing offences; that security justifications, routinely accepted in cases involving physical force, were consistently dismissed in or absent from trials involving rape or looting; and that judges' rhetoric framed sex and property crimes as a collective disgrace and a deviation from the values the state claims to uphold. These findings shed new light on the coupling of rape and looting, long interpreted as evidence of indifference to both (Inal, 2013). Both emerge as forms of violence that states are willing to condemn precisely because neither can be justified by security imperatives, and their harsher prosecution serves to preserve the state's capacity to justify killing and bodily harm by offloading moral costs elsewhere. In other words, the condemnation of sexual violence is not a departure from the logic of state violence but an integral part of it.
Online meeting information
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About the Speaker
Revital Madar is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the European University Institute
Revital Madar is an interdisciplinary political theorist whose research examines the intersection of law, sovereignty, and violence in liberal democracies. Her work is an ongoing attempt to understand how state violence is legalized, normalized, and legitimized against the backdrop of the legal system.
Her current Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, "State Agents on Trial: Hierarchies of State Criminality in Israel and France," investigates trials of state security agents as sites of contention over the state's legitimate use of violence. By conducting an intersectional analysis of different forms of state criminality, Madar seeks to understand which violent practices the state is willing to abandon and which it protects, what can this tell us about the order of state violence, and how security justifications shape these hierarchies beyond the sensualization of sexual violence, and the framing of looting as individually driven crimes.
Revital Madar has published in leading journals, including Conflict and Society and Identities. Her research challenges the wartime rape paradigm, arguing that it obscures how ongoing occupation differs from wars, leading to further silencing of victims. Her publications "Deathmurder" and "The Construction of Palestinian Death" delineate how colonial law compartmentalizes the death of those designated as state enemies through processes of formal accountability. Her current book project, "Soldiers on Trial: Palestinian Bodies and Israeli Sovereignty," questions common assumptions about legal accountability by demonstrating how such processes can reinforce rather than challenge state violence.
After being awarded a PhD by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, she held a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute Law Department. She has held visiting positions at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Sciences Po, Université de Liège, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), and taught at Sciences Po, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Recognizing the unique challenges first-generation students face, particularly at the graduate level, Madar has initiated academic professionalization workshops to address these barriers. In her commitment to public scholarship, she has designed and moderated community courses on feminist and Mizrahi theories.