We kindly invite you to a lecture by dr. Revital Madar entitled »Legitimation through Condemnation: State Violence on Trial in Israeli Military Courts«, which will take place as part of Tuesday Meetings on Tuesday, 19 May 2026, at 11.00 am in the library of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law Ljubljana.
What do states legitimise when they condemn conflict-related sexual violence, and what makes states more willing to condemn this form of violence than crimes of bodily harm and killing?
Scholarship has shown that international attention to conflict-related sexual violence comes at a cost, tending to decontextualize it from broader structures of political and economic violence (Meger, 2016; Engle, 2020; Nesiah, 2023). Scholars have also asked why states came to embrace this agenda, explaining the shift primarily through political interest and security concerns (Crawford, 2017). What remains less explored is the function sexual violence performs within the broader order of state violence. This question is addressed in upcoming Tuesday Meeting through the framework of repudiated violence: a paradigm which captures trials in which states prosecute their own security agents for crimes committed against their emblematic enemies. As it will be shown, rather than marking a rupture with state violence, prosecution through these trials works within it, selectively condemning certain acts in ways that reinforce the legitimacy of others.
The empirical basis is a dataset of over 100 trials of Israeli state security agents prosecuted for crimes committed against Palestinians from 1948 to 2020, spanning military and civilian jurisdictions. Analysis of this dataset 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 violence, were consistently dismissed or absent in trials involving rape or pillage; and that judges’ rhetoric framed sex and property crimes as a collective disgrace and a deviation from the values the state claims to uphold.
The lecturer argues that existing explanations, in terms of military logics and narrow political interests, are insufficient. These patterns become legible only if we understand these trials as moments in which the state’s monopoly over its legitimate use of violence is renegotiated. Through this lens, the condemnation of sexual violence is no longer a departure from the logic of state violence. It is one of its constitutive operations.
Revital Madar is an interdisciplinary political theorist and researcher at the European University Institute (EUI), where she holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. Her research examines the relationship between law, sovereignty, and violence in liberal democracies, and is an ongoing attempt to understand how state violence is legalised, normalised, and legitimised through legal and normative mechanisms. She has published in Identities and Conflict & Society, and is currently working on her monograph: “Soldiers on Trials: Palestinian Bodies and Israeli Sovereignty.”
Tuesday’s meeting will be held in English.
Contact person and event moderator: Dr Lior Volinz.
Video and audio recording of the event is not allowed.
