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.
