Yagil Levy
Biographic Data
| ID | 249733 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yagil Levy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yagil |
| FAMILY NAME | Levy |
| SIGNATURE | LEVY Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Open University of Israel |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2167-1260 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 289 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Conceptualizing Matrix Control
This exploratory analysis advances the concept of “matrix control” in civil–military relations. While existing theories conceptualize military–civilian dynamics through centralized, hierarchical mechanisms of control, this study identifies an emerging pattern where control is exercised through decentralized networks of local actors, particularly in noncombat missions within civilian communities. Drawing on cases from established democracies, this…
Beyond militarization
Militarization has long been a central tool for legitimizing the use of force against external adversaries. Yet militarization and the legitimacy of force are not identical concepts. While militarization refers to ideological processes that normalize and valorize violence, legitimacy concerns the perception that a state’s resort to force is appropriate, proper, or desirable within socially constructed systems of norms and values. Drawing on gener…
The do‐able solution to the interface problem
Philosophers and cognitive scientists increasingly recognize the need to appeal to motor representations over and above intentions in attempting to understand how action is planned and executed. But doing so gives rise to a puzzle, which has come to be known as “the Interface Problem”: How is it that intentions and motor representations manage to interface in producing action? The question has semed puzzling, because each state is thought to be f…
Dehumanization of Disregard
The prevalent assumption in media discourse suggests that, due to an intelligence failure and the perception of Hamas's being effectively deterred, Israel was unexpectedly attacked on October 7, 2023. This study, by contrast, delves into the concept of “dehumanization of disregard” within the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, drawing from Judith Butler's notion of “ungrievable death.” It posits that Israeli attitudes toward the Gazan population are m…
The Conceptual Failure of the Israeli Military
The prevailing assumption in the media discourse is that on 7 October, Israel was taken by surprise when Hamas squads launched an attack on the Gaza–Israel border. This event challenged the intelligence community's perception that Hamas had been effectively deterred. It also raised questions about the efficacy of border defenses backed by technological systems. To better understand the origins of these perceptions and the failures they created, i…
The logic of body counting
The priority of intentional action
Philosophical orthodoxy has it that intentional action consists in one's intention appropriately causing a motion of one's body, placing the latter (conceptually and/or metaphysically) prior to the former. Here, I argue that this standard schema should be reversed: acting intentionally is at least conceptually prior to intending. The argument is modelled on a Williamsonian argument for the priority of knowledge developed by Jenifer Nagel. She arg…
Who is a reasoner
This paper aims to make progress in understanding the nature of reasoning. Its primary goal is to defend a novel account of what reasoning might be, in terms of how reasoning contributes to settling (practical and theoretical) inquiries. Prior to spelling out this constructive proposal, however, the paper problematizes a very common picture of reasoning in an attempt to demonstrate the need for an alternative approach. The overarching argument of…
Neo-Ryleanism about self-understanding
The paper aims to defend the standard view of what it dubs ‘Self-understanding’ — i.e. (very roughly) our knowledge of why we behave as we do — from the threat posed to it by Neo-Ryleanism. While the standard, entrenched view regards self-understanding as special in kind and status, the Neo-Rylean agrees with Gilbert Ryle that our method of understanding ourselves is much the same as our method of understanding others, involving self-interpretati…
‘The Skills. . . had to be Used Simply Because They Were There’
This article is conceptually motivated to show how instrumental rationality is reflected in the military domain. Instrumental rationality refers to the adoption of suitable means to achieve particular ends. However, this conception was criticised by the Frankfurt School for focusing on means rather than on ends. Based on this critique, I present specific categories of instrumental rationality in the military domain. I will argue that instrumental…
Legitimacy of violence
This article is conceptually motivated. By drawing on cases from the U.S. and Israeli militaries, it aims at demonstrating the existence of two separate systems of legitimacy of military violence – extra-military and intra-military – and mapping the gaps between them. It conceptualizes the legitimacy of violence and then maps seven conditions under which gaps are created between the two systems, as follows: the uniqueness of military culture, the…
What Is the Social Responsibility of Social Scientists to Influence National Security Affairs
Mainstream scholars of IR favor policy-relevant research, that is the agenda to influence government policymakers by offering policy recommendations. In this article, I offer a different perspective by presenting alternative arguments about social scientists' responsibility to influence. By drawing on themes of public sociology and critical sociology, security studies and public policy, I argue that the core of this responsibility is to seek to i…
The people's army “enemising” the people
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were deployed extensively relative to other democracies’ militaries to combat the coronavirus during 2020–1. Ostensibly, the military's engagements are instrumental in addressing the pandemic due to its resources and hierarchical discipline, and especially in light of its centrality in Israel. However, problems remain concerning this deployment, the most prominent and relevant to the case of Israel being the high l…
The Israeli policing army – the gray arm of annexation
This article aims at challenging the widely accepted argument that Israel has failed to enforce the law on Jewish communities in the West Bank. It argues instead that, since the 2000s, there has been a gradual creation of two armies within the Israel Defense Forces: alongside the ‘official’ army, a ‘policing’ force has emerged in the Israeli-controlled West Bank. Although it is ostensibly subordinate to formal political authority, it has become a…
Events, processes, and the time of a killing
The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act‐individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong‐headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurrents, viz. process…
Who Controls the Israeli Policing Army
Since the 2000s, a fundamental structural change has led to the development of two armies within the IDF. In co-existence with the ‘official’ army, a ‘policing’ force has emerged in the West Bank. Ostensibly subordinated to political authority, it has evolved into a quasi-militia force, enacting policies that often deviate from the official line. The question of who controls this policing army is central to this article. I argue that this policin…
Theorizing the domestic legitimacy of using force
Theorizing Desecularization of the Military
This article addresses scholarly deficiencies in identifying the conditions under which the desecularization of militaries takes place. To theorize this process, two militaries are studied, the United States and Israel. Arguably, six drivers sequentially generate the desecularization of the militaries: (1) Militaries largely mirror the growing influence of religion in the broader society. However, intramilitary drivers play their role in promotin…
Constructivism and the Problem of Normative Indeterminacy
Does the normative question about rationality rest on a mistake
Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Meet Evolutionary Science
Evolutionary debunking arguments appeal to selective etiologies of human morality in an attempt to undermine moral realism. But is morality actually the product of evolution by natural selection? Although debunking arguments have attracted considerable attention in recent years, little of it has been devoted to whether the underlying evolutionary assumptions are credible. In this paper, we take a closer look at the evolutionary hypotheses put for…
Conceptualizing the Spectrum of the Bereavement Discourse
This article presents the spectrum of the bereavement discourse, namely, how various social groups interpret the loss of their children's lives or the potential risk to their lives posed by their military service and translate it into public discourse, as a spectrum of attitudes. It is argued that this spectrum ranges from subversive to submissive approaches. Furthermore, within the confines of the declining casualty tolerance, two variables cumu…
The Gaza Fighting
Control from within
This article attempts to fill a gap in the literature about civilian control by presenting the concept of control from within the military and investigating its determinants. Control from within is the intentional action taken by soldiers tasked with missions with which they disagree in an attempt to affect how the military implements politically based directives. The forms of control from within include restraining the aggressiveness of other so…
The Debunking Challenge to Moral Realism
Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) have attracted extensive attention in metaethics, as they pose an important challenge to moral realism. Mogensen suggests that EDAs contain a fallacy, by confusing two distinct forms of biological explanation—ultimate and proximate. If correct, the point is of considerable importance: evolutionary genealogies of human morality are simply irrelevant for debunking. But we argue that the actual situation is su…
From ?Obligatory Militarism? to ?Contractual Militarism??Competing Models of Citizenship
Yagil Levy, Edna Lomsky-Feder, Noa Harel, From "Obligatory Militarism" to "Contractual Militarism"—Competing Models of Citizenship, Israel Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, "An Army That Has a State?" (Spring, 2007), pp. 127-148
Militarizing inequality
The Theocratization of the Israeli Military
This article portrays the theocratization of the Israeli military. At the center of this process stands the national-religious sector, which has significantly upgraded its presence in the ranks since the late 1970s. It is argued that four integrated and cumulative processes gradually generated this shift toward the theocratization of the Israeli military: (1) the crafting of institutional arrangements that enable the service of religious soldiers…
The Essence of the “Market Army”
Western armies have undergone substantial organizational‐cultural transformations since the end of the Cold War. Two main themes have been suggested to describe these transformations: postmodernity and post‐Fordism. This article analyzes these profound shifts. The author portrays the new Western army as a “market army,” distancing itself from the “citizen army,” and envisions a continuum between these extreme types. The market army emulates marke…
An Unbearable Price
The War of the Peripheries
With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000), the Israeli state impressively regained its relative autonomous capacity in managing a prolonged military undertaking without significant internal opposition, in contrast to the erosion in autonomy during the Lebanon War (1982–2000) and the first Intifada (1987–1993). Arguably, the state's relative autonomy increased in light of the changes in the social composition of the military's casualties in…
Soldiers as laborers
Women Breaking the Silence
This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women's antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of 'Women Breaking the Silence' (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women's antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women's antiwar discourse from the gendered margina…
Is There a Motivation Crisis in Military Recruitment in Israel
What is Controlled by Civilian Control of the Military? Control of the Military vs. Control of Militarization
This article addresses a gap in the scholarly literature. Students of militarism do not link the propensity to use force to the broader issue of what type of civilian control may restrain the use of force. Similarly, even students of civilian control who acknowledge that civilian control and military restraint do not necessarily go hand in hand have not questioned the extent to which we should decouple the two different processes as different mod…
Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Meet Evolutionary Science
Evolutionary debunking arguments appeal to selective etiologies of human morality in an attempt to undermine moral realism. But is morality actually the product of evolution by natural selection? Although debunking arguments have attracted considerable attention in recent years, little of it has been devoted to whether the underlying evolutionary assumptions are credible. In this paper, we take a closer look at the evolutionary hypotheses put for…
How Military Recruitment Affects Collective Action and its Outcomes1
This paper aims to advance the research on the conjunction of two fields—antiwar protest and casualty aversion—by offering a conceptual development of the role of military recruitment in affecting casualty sensitivity–incited antiwar mobilization. Scholars have shown that sensitivity to losses is not a constant variable. Its reflection in the public sphere is affected by variables clustered together as "the politics of war," such as sense of thre…
The Clash between Feminism and Religion in the Israeli Military
Journal Article The Clash between Feminism and Religion in the Israeli Military: A Multilayered Analysis Get access Yagil Levy Yagil Levy Email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 17, Issue 2, Summer 2010, Pages 185–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxq002 Published: 05 March 2010
From Republican to Market Control over the Armed Forces
This article claims that types of reward systems that form the mechanism of military recruitment affect types of civilian control over the military. Specifically, the alteration of the reward system from institution/symbolic to occupation/material modes has changed the mode of civilian control from republican to market control. Market control has supplanted the historical citizen-soldier model of civilian control, by which the political community…
Religious Authorities in the Military and Civilian Control
This article takes a step toward filling the gap in the scholarly literature by examining the impact of religious intervention in the military on civil-military relations. Using the case of Israel, I argue that although the subordination of the Israeli military to elected civilians has remained intact, and the supreme command has been mostly secular, external religious authorities operate within the formal chain of command and in tandem with the …
A Revised Model of Civilian Control of the Military
What determines the subordination of the military to civilian control? Existing scholarship has neglected the power structure within which relations between the military and civilians are embedded. Addressing this oversight, this article theorizes that civilian control of the military is influenced by two relations of exchange: (1) the republican exchange, wherein the state provides its citizens with rights in exchange for their military sacrific…
Israel's violated republican equation
Historically, Israel's ability to sustain a situation of armed conflict for a long time was predicated on the republican equation in which the dominant group – the secular Ashkenazim – exchanged military sacrifice for social dominance. Nonetheless, an imbalance between military burden and social rewards, which emerged during the 1970s and1980s, led the middle-class Ashkenazim to undertake collective action aimed at reducing the burden of military…
Theorizing the domestic legitimacy of using force
The Israeli Military
Alternative Politics and the Transformation of Society–Military Relations
This article attempts to explain transformations in military—society relations using models developed in the context of political participation and social learning. The authors suggest that patterns of alternative politics might evolve from the undermining of the “republican contract,” that is, the exchange between citizens' military sacrifice and the rights and rewards granted to them by the state. This situation creates growing dissatisfaction …
The Right to Fight
The worldwide demand by gays and lesbians that they be allowed to openly participate in military service and the ways in which this demand have been handled reveal discrepancies between political culture and actual recruitment practices. This article offers a model drawn from a multiple-case study for explaining recruitment policies toward homosexuals. Arguably, to the extent that the military is used to perform civilian-social roles that determi…
Theorizing Desecularization of the Military
This article addresses scholarly deficiencies in identifying the conditions under which the desecularization of militaries takes place. To theorize this process, two militaries are studied, the United States and Israel. Arguably, six drivers sequentially generate the desecularization of the militaries: (1) Militaries largely mirror the growing influence of religion in the broader society. However, intramilitary drivers play their role in promotin…
Control from within
This article attempts to fill a gap in the literature about civilian control by presenting the concept of control from within the military and investigating its determinants. Control from within is the intentional action taken by soldiers tasked with missions with which they disagree in an attempt to affect how the military implements politically based directives. The forms of control from within include restraining the aggressiveness of other so…
Convertible Sacrifice-A Conceptual Proposition
This article follows the approach, drawn from the bellicose school of state formation, according to which the state mobilizes the war sacrifice of its citizenry in return for rewards that different groups reap from military service. However, a significant gap in this school can be identified: Scholars have not theorized the variations in the value of the rewards that the state provides in exchange for war sacrifices, nor the factors determining t…
The Tradeoff between Force and Casualties
The Gaza War between Israel and Hamas in winter 2009, in which excessive use of lethal force caused the deaths of many Gazan non-combatants, shed light on how casualty shyness leads democracies to use excessive force to reduce the risk to which soldiers are exposed at the expense of the opponent’s non-combatant fatalities. This can be termed the force/casualty tradeoff (FCT). Because this tradeoff is only one manifestation of state action, a more…
After Rabin and Peres
Militarizing inequality
Israel's Rough Draft
The War of the Peripheries
With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000), the Israeli state impressively regained its relative autonomous capacity in managing a prolonged military undertaking without significant internal opposition, in contrast to the erosion in autonomy during the Lebanon War (1982–2000) and the first Intifada (1987–1993). Arguably, the state's relative autonomy increased in light of the changes in the social composition of the military's casualties in…
From ?Obligatory Militarism? to ?Contractual Militarism??Competing Models of Citizenship
Yagil Levy, Edna Lomsky-Feder, Noa Harel, From "Obligatory Militarism" to "Contractual Militarism"—Competing Models of Citizenship, Israel Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, "An Army That Has a State?" (Spring, 2007), pp. 127-148
The Embedded Military
In the summer of 2005, the Israeli military evacuated thousands of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank in the framework of the Disengagement Plan. Not only was the evacuation swift, but the army also maintained the unity of its ranks and avoided massive refusal of the national religious conscripts who identified with the settlers. It is argued that the effective functioning of the Israel Defense Forces can be attributed…
The Right to Fight
The worldwide demand by gays and lesbians that they be allowed to openly participate in military service and the ways in which this demand have been handled reveal discrepancies between political culture and actual recruitment practices. This article offers a model drawn from a multiple-case study for explaining recruitment policies toward homosexuals. Arguably, to the extent that the military is used to perform civilian-social roles that determi…
Soldiers as laborers
Israel since 1980
Over the last quarter century, a radical demographic, economic and political transformation has been taking place from within Israel. Israelis are beginning to ask some fundamental questions about the country they live in and what it means to be an Israeli. This book, written by five Israeli academics, probes the changing nature of Israeli society over the last twenty-five years. It considers the deep rifts in that society caused by ethnic, cultu…
The Second Lebanon War
The Second Lebanon War reflected and accelerated a broader change in the mode of civilian supervision of the army. This change can be described as a shift from republican control to market control over the army. The historical citizen-soldier type of political control, by which the political community supervised the military through the social groups serving in the military and the social networks from which they emerged, is supplanted by market …
The Sociological Heritage of Moshe Lissak
Moshe Lissak is the founding father of military sociology in Israel. He was the first to offer a conceptual framework for the discussion of civilmilitary relations, central to which is role expansion, convergence/divergence and institutional linkages . He was the first to try to provide an empirical dimension to the concepts. Moreover, Lissak developed this conceptual framework out of a theoretical discussion that relates to armed forces in gener…
Alternative Politics and the Transformation of Society–Military Relations
This article attempts to explain transformations in military—society relations using models developed in the context of political participation and social learning. The authors suggest that patterns of alternative politics might evolve from the undermining of the “republican contract,” that is, the exchange between citizens' military sacrifice and the rights and rewards granted to them by the state. This situation creates growing dissatisfaction …
Militarizing peace
This article deals with the question of why the Israeli military played a major role in the design and implementation of the Oslo Accords in the years 1993–2000 even though this process was originally initiated as a diplomatic move. It is argued that the explanation lies in the army's role in politically mobilizing the anti-Oslo front comprised of religious and peripheral groups, most of whom had a nationalist agenda, as a strategy to counter the…
The Linkage Between Israel's Military Policies and the Military's Social Composition The Case of the al-Aqsa Intifada
With the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 and in contrast to past wars, the Israeli state impressively regained its relative autonomous capacity in managing a prolonged military operation without significant internal opposition. Arguably, the state's autonomy increased in light of the alteration of the social composition of the army, from relying on the Ashkenazi middle class to drawing on peripheral and religious social groups. Specifica…
Israel's violated republican equation
Historically, Israel's ability to sustain a situation of armed conflict for a long time was predicated on the republican equation in which the dominant group – the secular Ashkenazim – exchanged military sacrifice for social dominance. Nonetheless, an imbalance between military burden and social rewards, which emerged during the 1970s and1980s, led the middle-class Ashkenazim to undertake collective action aimed at reducing the burden of military…
The Second Lebanon War
This article addresses the question of why Israel initiated the Second Lebanon War so quickly, despite the civilian agenda to which the government had been committed, other mitigating factors, and the fact that the kidnapping of two soldiers did not warrant such a massive operation. Arguably, the war reflected the syndrome of a gap of legitimacies, that is, the gap that has emerged since the 1980s between high levels of political legitimacy for u…
Controlling the invisible
Is There a Motivation Crisis in Military Recruitment in Israel
An Unbearable Price
From Republican to Market Control over the Armed Forces
This article claims that types of reward systems that form the mechanism of military recruitment affect types of civilian control over the military. Specifically, the alteration of the reward system from institution/symbolic to occupation/material modes has changed the mode of civilian control from republican to market control. Market control has supplanted the historical citizen-soldier model of civilian control, by which the political community…
Structured Bellicosity
Subsequent to its inception and the conclusion of the 1948 War, Israel stood at a crossroads. It could choose either to embark on belligerency vis-à-vis the surrounding Arab world or pursue peaceful solutions. Israel opted for bellocisty. Why? It is argued that the political structure that gave precedence to the use of force is traceable to the Israeli type of state building with regard to the strategy the state adopted to absorb the mass Mizrach…
How the press impairs civilian control over the armed forces
This article extends the commonly accepted knowledge that the dissemination of information by the mass media does not necessarily promote the basic values of deliberative democracy by examining how the Israeli media covered the Second Lebanon War (2006). It is argued that the episodic approach of the media, which causes it to focus on events and stories, distracts it from questioning the logic of the use of force, questioning that might encourage…
The Clash between Feminism and Religion in the Israeli Military
Journal Article The Clash between Feminism and Religion in the Israeli Military: A Multilayered Analysis Get access Yagil Levy Yagil Levy Email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 17, Issue 2, Summer 2010, Pages 185–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxq002 Published: 05 March 2010
The Tradeoff between Force and Casualties
The Gaza War between Israel and Hamas in winter 2009, in which excessive use of lethal force caused the deaths of many Gazan non-combatants, shed light on how casualty shyness leads democracies to use excessive force to reduce the risk to which soldiers are exposed at the expense of the opponent’s non-combatant fatalities. This can be termed the force/casualty tradeoff (FCT). Because this tradeoff is only one manifestation of state action, a more…
How the Military’s Social Composition Affects Political Protest
Political science (58 works) · Law (50 works) · Sociology (49 works) · Politics (39 works) · Law (33 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (32 works) · Political economy (26 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (25 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Economics (20 works)