Biography
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.