Revital MADAR

Bio

Revital Madar is an F.R.S.-FNRS Research Fellow at REPI and the Centre de droit international (CDI). An interdisciplinary political theorist, she works at the intersection of law, sovereignty, and violence, with a focus on how liberal democracies legitimize their violence through regulatory and administrative instruments. Her research traces the continuum from everyday violence to mass violence, and law's role in the dehumanization that legitimizes state violence. She has worked on trials of Israeli security forces, on how political deaths were narrated in apartheid South Africa, and on conflict-related sexual violence. Across these projects, she works with archives, bringing critical discourse analysis to bear on court records and cultural materials from a feminist and anticolonial perspective.

Following her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2021), she joined the European University Institute (EUI, Florence) as a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Law (2021-2022). She then remained at the EUI, joining the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2023-2026). She has been a visiting researcher at CERI (Sciences Po Paris), the Graduate Institute (IHEID, Geneva), and the University of Liège. Her work has appeared in Identities and Conflict and Society, among other venues, and her book Soldiers on Trial: Palestinian Bodies and Israeli Sovereignty is under contract with Central European University Press.

Research interests

• Political theory and philosophy
• Law, sovereignty, and legitimation of violence
• Administrative regulation of violence
• Conflict-related sexual violence
• Legal epistemologies and criminology of state crime
• Settler colonialism; Israel/Palestine

Research activities

• “The Political, Spatial, and Epistemological Realm of Israeli Rules of Engagement” (2026- )
• “State Agents on Trial: Hierarchies of State Criminality in Israel and France” (2023-2026)

Publications

Books

• Madar, Revital. En préparation / In preparation. Soldiers on Trial: Palestinian Bodies and Israeli Sovereignty. Under contract with Central European University Press.

Peer-reviewed articles

• Madar, Revital. 2024. « The Construction of Palestinian Death as an Exceptional Repetition in Israel ». Identities 31(3): 333-350. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2023.2259218

• Madar, Revital. 2023. « Beyond Male Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War: Israeli State Sexual Violence against Palestinians ». Conflict and Society 9(1): 72-88. https://doi.org/10.3167/arcs.2023.090105
• Madar, Revital. 2015. « Covered yet Overexposed: From a Female Religious Jewish Performance to Israel’s Status as a Western or Non-Western Country ». International Journal of Fashion Studies 2(1): 115-120.
• Madar, Revital. 2015. « Stretching What Already Exists ». Bezalel – Journal of Visual and Material Culture 2 [hébreu / Hebrew].

Book chapters

• Madar, Revital. Soumis / Submitted. « The Legacy of Governance Feminism in the Aftermath of October 7th ». In S. Boulos, H. Matthews and M. Burgis-Kasthala (eds.), Gaza, Genocide and Gender Governance: Feminist Conversations on the Limits of the Law. IB Tauris/Bloomsbury.

• Madar, Revital. 2025. « On the Expansive Tendencies of Southern Criminology and State Crime Criminology and Towards a Reductive Model of State Violence ». In K. Carrington et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South (2nd ed.). Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74932-2_122-1
• Madar, Revital. 2025. « On the Matter of the Law and Socio-Legal Identifications ». In C. Boulanger, N. Creutzfeldt and J. Hendry (eds.), Socio-Legal Trajectories across Europe: Comparative Perspectives. Oñati International Series in Law and Society. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 135-150.
• Madar, Revital. 2020. « Deathmurder: From the Language of Humanity to the Question of Who Can Be Murdered ». In M. Consonni and V. Liska (eds.), Sartre, Jews and the Other: Rethinking Antisemitism, Race, and Gender. De Gruyter, 207-226. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110600124-014
• Madar, Revital. 2019. « ‘Do You Know What’s an Arab Bystander?’ The Kafr Qasim Trial as a Case Study for a Sovereign Failure ». In A. Jamal (ed.), The Conflict: Sociological, Historical and Geopolitical Aspects. Tel Aviv University, 25-48 [hébreu / Hebrew].

Datasets

• Madar, Revital. 2026. Prosecuting Israeli Security Personnel for Crimes against Palestinians and Lebanese: Offences against Body and Life, Sexual Offences and Property Crimes, 1948–2023 (Version 1) [Dataset]. European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. https://hdl.handle.net/1814/95795

• Madar, Revital. 2021. Repudiated Violence in Israel-Palestine, 1948-2019 [Dataset]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7244451

Work in progress

• Madar, Revital. En préparation / In preparation. « Looting and Rape as Boundary-Making State Crimes ». Article.

• Madar, Revital. En préparation / In preparation. « Home Is Where the Settler Is: On Vertical and Horizontal Expansions of the Sovereign Right to Kill ». Article.