Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SATHSCIF (State Agents on Trial: Hierarchies of State Criminality in Israel and France)
Reporting period: 2023-06-01 to 2026-05-31
Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
Different forms of violence generate different public, political, and legal responses. Some acts are treated as urgent and unacceptable; others are absorbed as routine or even expected. This project investigates that pattern in relation to violence committed by agents of the state: soldiers, police officers, and security personnel. It asks how legal systems, when prosecuting their own security agents for crimes committed on duty, construct hierarchies of seriousness among different forms of state violence, and what these hierarchies reveal about the political and social tolerance of state violence more broadly.
The project developed a model for analysing this question across three categories of offence: crimes against life and body, crimes against property, and sexual crimes, corresponding to three forms of protection central to liberal democracies (life, property, and bodily integrity). Its central hypothesis, tested and confirmed through an empirical study of Israel, is that when state security agents are the perpetrators, crimes against property and sexual crimes tend to be judged more harshly than crimes against life and body. This inversion of the ordinary hierarchy points to a deeper, institutionalised economy of what counts as acceptable and unacceptable state violence.
To study this, the project built a dataset of more than 100 Israeli court trials of state security agents, spanning from 1948 to the present, tracing how this hierarchy has been constructed, contested, and transformed over more than seven decades. The project was originally conceived as a comparative study of Israel and France. During implementation, sustained difficulties accessing French archival material meant that the empirical focus was narrowed to the Israeli case, while a research stay in France helped situate the Israeli findings within a broader international and comparative perspective.
The project draws on feminist critical security studies, critical criminology of the state, and legal and political anthropology, treating court trials not merely as legal proceedings but as sites where the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate state violence is actively constructed and contested. This interdisciplinary lens allows the project to move beyond a narrow legal reading of these trials toward an account of how legal language and courtroom practice produce judgments about whose violence and whose victimhood are taken seriously. In doing so, the project also questions common assumptions about national and international condemnation of sexual violence in conflict, and about how international humanitarian law is invoked in assessing the gravity of state violence.
The project's relevance grew substantially over its lifetime. The October 7th Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent genocide Israel has been carrying out against Gaza, alongside intensified efforts to push Palestinians out of the West Bank, have led institutions, associations, and researchers to look more closely at the genealogy of Israeli violence against Palestinians. Against this backdrop, the project's historical dataset and analytical framework offer a longer-term, evidence-based perspective on patterns of state violence often discussed only in relation to the present moment, and the project's findings have already contributed to ongoing investigations into Israeli violations of Palestinians' human rights and war crimes.
The project's expected impact operates on three levels: contributing new theoretical vocabulary to academic debates on state crime and legal accountability; producing findings usable by legal practitioners, policy makers, and human rights bodies working on accountability for state violence; and shaping broader public understanding of how legal systems can simultaneously condemn and legitimise state violence.
The project developed a model for analysing this question across three categories of offence: crimes against life and body, crimes against property, and sexual crimes, corresponding to three forms of protection central to liberal democracies (life, property, and bodily integrity). Its central hypothesis, tested and confirmed through an empirical study of Israel, is that when state security agents are the perpetrators, crimes against property and sexual crimes tend to be judged more harshly than crimes against life and body. This inversion of the ordinary hierarchy points to a deeper, institutionalised economy of what counts as acceptable and unacceptable state violence.
To study this, the project built a dataset of more than 100 Israeli court trials of state security agents, spanning from 1948 to the present, tracing how this hierarchy has been constructed, contested, and transformed over more than seven decades. The project was originally conceived as a comparative study of Israel and France. During implementation, sustained difficulties accessing French archival material meant that the empirical focus was narrowed to the Israeli case, while a research stay in France helped situate the Israeli findings within a broader international and comparative perspective.
The project draws on feminist critical security studies, critical criminology of the state, and legal and political anthropology, treating court trials not merely as legal proceedings but as sites where the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate state violence is actively constructed and contested. This interdisciplinary lens allows the project to move beyond a narrow legal reading of these trials toward an account of how legal language and courtroom practice produce judgments about whose violence and whose victimhood are taken seriously. In doing so, the project also questions common assumptions about national and international condemnation of sexual violence in conflict, and about how international humanitarian law is invoked in assessing the gravity of state violence.
The project's relevance grew substantially over its lifetime. The October 7th Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent genocide Israel has been carrying out against Gaza, alongside intensified efforts to push Palestinians out of the West Bank, have led institutions, associations, and researchers to look more closely at the genealogy of Israeli violence against Palestinians. Against this backdrop, the project's historical dataset and analytical framework offer a longer-term, evidence-based perspective on patterns of state violence often discussed only in relation to the present moment, and the project's findings have already contributed to ongoing investigations into Israeli violations of Palestinians' human rights and war crimes.
The project's expected impact operates on three levels: contributing new theoretical vocabulary to academic debates on state crime and legal accountability; producing findings usable by legal practitioners, policy makers, and human rights bodies working on accountability for state violence; and shaping broader public understanding of how legal systems can simultaneously condemn and legitimise state violence.
Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far
Over the course of the fellowship, work centred on three interconnected strands: archival and database research, systematic analysis of court trials, and the corresponding development of an original dataset.
Research began with the development of a theoretical and methodological framework that combined feminist critical security studies, critical criminology of the state, and legal and political anthropology, alongside an extensive literature review. This framework, together with a research data management plan, was established early in the project and guided the subsequent stages of work.
The project's empirical work was originally designed to be comparative, examining trials of state security agents in both Israel and France. Archival fieldwork was carried out in Switzerland (the UN Human Rights Committee and the International Committee of the Red Cross archives in Geneva) and in France (the French National Archives, the François Mitterrand Library, and military archives), alongside searches of Israeli and French legal and media databases. Access to Israeli governmental and legal sources was significantly hampered from late 2023 onward due to restrictions on access from abroad; this obstacle was ultimately overcome. Formal declassification requests submitted to French authorities for military and security material went unanswered, and further inquiries confirmed that available French sources would not support the project's methodology at the required historical depth. As a result, the French case was formally dropped from the project's scope, and the empirical focus was concentrated on Israel.
This work resulted in a dataset of more than 100 court trials of Israeli state security agents, spanning from 1948 to the present, compiled from archival, legal, and media sources. The dataset is currently undergoing anonymisation to meet data protection requirements ahead of its deposit in a public repository.
Systematic analysis of this dataset, drawing on the project's interdisciplinary framework, examined how Israeli courts have hierarchised different categories of violence committed by state security agents against Palestinians, and how this hierarchy has been constructed, justified, and contested since 1948. The analysis confirmed the project's central hypothesis: that crimes against property and sexual crimes tend to be judged more harshly than crimes against life and body when the perpetrators are state security agents. Findings from this analysis are being finalised into two peer-reviewed academic publications and a book manuscript.
The project's non-academic placement, initially planned with an Israeli human rights organisation, was formally revised during implementation in light of regional developments. It was instead carried out with a United Nations Commission of Inquiry, where the project's data and expertise on historical cases of sexual violence directly supported ongoing investigative work. This placement provided first-hand exposure to the methodologies and evidentiary standards used in international human rights investigations.
A research secondment in France, originally intended to support data collection for the French case, instead confirmed the infeasibility of that case within the project's timeframe, contributing to the decision to concentrate the project's resources on the Israeli case.
Research began with the development of a theoretical and methodological framework that combined feminist critical security studies, critical criminology of the state, and legal and political anthropology, alongside an extensive literature review. This framework, together with a research data management plan, was established early in the project and guided the subsequent stages of work.
The project's empirical work was originally designed to be comparative, examining trials of state security agents in both Israel and France. Archival fieldwork was carried out in Switzerland (the UN Human Rights Committee and the International Committee of the Red Cross archives in Geneva) and in France (the French National Archives, the François Mitterrand Library, and military archives), alongside searches of Israeli and French legal and media databases. Access to Israeli governmental and legal sources was significantly hampered from late 2023 onward due to restrictions on access from abroad; this obstacle was ultimately overcome. Formal declassification requests submitted to French authorities for military and security material went unanswered, and further inquiries confirmed that available French sources would not support the project's methodology at the required historical depth. As a result, the French case was formally dropped from the project's scope, and the empirical focus was concentrated on Israel.
This work resulted in a dataset of more than 100 court trials of Israeli state security agents, spanning from 1948 to the present, compiled from archival, legal, and media sources. The dataset is currently undergoing anonymisation to meet data protection requirements ahead of its deposit in a public repository.
Systematic analysis of this dataset, drawing on the project's interdisciplinary framework, examined how Israeli courts have hierarchised different categories of violence committed by state security agents against Palestinians, and how this hierarchy has been constructed, justified, and contested since 1948. The analysis confirmed the project's central hypothesis: that crimes against property and sexual crimes tend to be judged more harshly than crimes against life and body when the perpetrators are state security agents. Findings from this analysis are being finalised into two peer-reviewed academic publications and a book manuscript.
The project's non-academic placement, initially planned with an Israeli human rights organisation, was formally revised during implementation in light of regional developments. It was instead carried out with a United Nations Commission of Inquiry, where the project's data and expertise on historical cases of sexual violence directly supported ongoing investigative work. This placement provided first-hand exposure to the methodologies and evidentiary standards used in international human rights investigations.
A research secondment in France, originally intended to support data collection for the French case, instead confirmed the infeasibility of that case within the project's timeframe, contributing to the decision to concentrate the project's resources on the Israeli case.
Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)
The project's principal result beyond the state of the art is the systematic empirical confirmation, across a dataset of more than 100 trials spanning 1948 to the present, of a consistent hierarchy in how Israeli courts sanction violence committed by state security agents: crimes against property and sexual crimes are judged more harshly than crimes against life and body. This moves existing scholarship on hierarchies of state violence beyond single-case or short-timeframe studies to a longitudinal, dataset-driven analysis capable of tracking how this hierarchy has shifted over more than seven decades.
Methodologically, the project developed and applied an approach to reading court trials as sites of political contestation rather than as indicators of legal or institutional accountability, moving deliberately away from treating verdicts and sentences as the main, if not only, evidence of a state's willingness to hold its own agents to account. This approach, developed and tested on the Israeli case, offers a transferable framework for studying hierarchies of state criminality in other national contexts.
Key needs to ensure further uptake and success:
* Further comparative research. The dropping of the French case means the project's central hypothesis has been tested and confirmed for a single national context. Extending the analytical framework to other liberal democracies is needed to establish the broader generalisability of the findings.
* Dataset access and reuse. The value of the dataset for other researchers and for human rights and legal accountability work depends on the completion of anonymisation and its deposit under a two-tier embargoed and open access strategy. Timely completion of this process is a precondition for uptake by the wider research and practitioner community.
* Publication of the forthcoming book and two peer-reviewed articles. The project's core theoretical contribution will be consolidated in a forthcoming book manuscript and two articles currently in preparation; publication of these works is necessary for the findings to be available for citation, critique, and use by other researchers and practitioners.
* Sustained engagement with international human rights bodies. The project's contribution to the work of a UN Commission of Inquiry during the fellowship indicates a concrete channel for uptake; sustaining and extending this kind of engagement beyond the fellowship would extend the project's practical impact.
Methodologically, the project developed and applied an approach to reading court trials as sites of political contestation rather than as indicators of legal or institutional accountability, moving deliberately away from treating verdicts and sentences as the main, if not only, evidence of a state's willingness to hold its own agents to account. This approach, developed and tested on the Israeli case, offers a transferable framework for studying hierarchies of state criminality in other national contexts.
Key needs to ensure further uptake and success:
* Further comparative research. The dropping of the French case means the project's central hypothesis has been tested and confirmed for a single national context. Extending the analytical framework to other liberal democracies is needed to establish the broader generalisability of the findings.
* Dataset access and reuse. The value of the dataset for other researchers and for human rights and legal accountability work depends on the completion of anonymisation and its deposit under a two-tier embargoed and open access strategy. Timely completion of this process is a precondition for uptake by the wider research and practitioner community.
* Publication of the forthcoming book and two peer-reviewed articles. The project's core theoretical contribution will be consolidated in a forthcoming book manuscript and two articles currently in preparation; publication of these works is necessary for the findings to be available for citation, critique, and use by other researchers and practitioners.
* Sustained engagement with international human rights bodies. The project's contribution to the work of a UN Commission of Inquiry during the fellowship indicates a concrete channel for uptake; sustaining and extending this kind of engagement beyond the fellowship would extend the project's practical impact.