Hagar Kotef
Biographic Data
| ID | 323177 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hagar Kotef |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hagar |
| FAMILY NAME | Kotef |
| SIGNATURE | KOTEF H |
| AFFILIATIONS | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5481-1306 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Editor's Introduction to the July Issue
Theory & Event: Introduction January 2025
Torture’s Bureaucracy and the “Legitimacy Effect”
This article tells the story of one small department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice: “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators” (in Hebrew: Mavtan). Tasked with examining complaints of torture in GSS interrogations, and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation, Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. By a…
Cruel Fantasies: Reading Fanon with Lauren Berlant
This paper examines Wretched of the Earth with Lauren Berlant, specifically through the prism of Cruel Optimism . I propose that we might read the concept of decolonization that opens “On Violence” (decolonization as a replacement for which violence is essential) as a form of cruel optimism: a promise for the future that is shaped by the limits and violence of present conditions and is thus eventually an obstacle to achieving the ends it promises…
Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theory
Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body
This article proposes that Locke's basic property-making unit, and thus also contracting unit, is the household rather than the individual. Progressing through two parallel arguments concerning Locke's theory of property-one focuses on the theory of mixing in Roman law and the other on more traditional understanding of labor-it shows how a plurality of people and animals is united under the rule of a single person, allowing the formal category of…
When does a native become a settler? (With apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)
The simplest definition of Indigenous people, obviously enough, is that they are the only ones who have not come from somewhere else. (Wolfe, 2016, p. 16) With a nod to Mahmood Mamdani (1998), Raef Zreik asked, in an article of the same title: "When Does a Settler Become a Native?" (Zreik, 2016). Zreik begins his article by exploring the terms of the question itself: Is it historical (how much time needs to pass for the settler to become a native…
Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine
The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine
Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and na…
Violent Attachments
Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. …
In-secure identities: On the securitization of abnormality
Highly securitized sites, such as airports, are increasingly using screening methods designed to purge racial profiling from their practices. In these contexts, not only are profiling methods seen as unlawful, but are also perceived as ineffective from a security perspective. Instead of basing security screenings on a perceived 'dangerousness' of social categories, these new screening methods aim to rely on automatic and objective criteria. This …
Migration, settlement, movement
Fragments
Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine
Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility
Limits of Dissent, Perils of Activism: Spaces of Resistance and the New Security Logic
On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army while he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW) in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bullets at a Jewish‐Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, the enveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similar shootings t…
Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes: Freedom, Movement, Gender, and Empire in Western Political Thought
This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial) and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we…
Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine
Looking at one site, the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory, this article seeks to understand the mechanisms by which violence can present itself as justifiable (or justified), even when it materializes within frames presumably set to annul it. We look at the checkpoints as a condensed microcosmos operating within two such frames. One is the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ (the checkpoints became a primary tec…
Baking at the Front Line, Sleeping with the Enemy: Reflections on Gender and Women's Peace Activism in Israel
One day in the summer of 2004, a shift of activists from Checkpoint Watch (CPW) brought to the checkpoint some cookies that one of them had baked earlier that morning. Checkpoint Watch is an all-women Israeli organization that opposes the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Israeli 1967 occupation more broadly. Its members conduct routine tours to monitor changes in the deployment of checkpoints and stand in regula…
Objects of Security: Gendered Violence and Securitized Humanitarianism in Occupied Gaza
This essay seeks to define the current regime of national security, tracing a shift within the gender categories that subtend notions of justified (state) violence. It focuses on Israel's occupation, and in particular its violent control over the Gaza Strip, to examine the relations between war and enmity on the one hand and humanitarianism and subject-citizens on the other. I argue that security relies on a new mechanism of justifying violence, …
(En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention
This article is the outcome of three years of experience, between the two of us, of weekly shifts, standing with Checkpoint Watch (CPW) at the checkpoints that are spread throughout the Palestinian Occupied Territories. It is the product of these three years of observations, dilemmas, internal conflicts, and contradictory impulses. All of the critiques that this article suggests are thus ones that we as members of CPW often struggled with ourselv…
(En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention
This article is the outcome of three years of experience, between the two of us, of weekly shifts, standing with Checkpoint Watch (CPW) at the checkpoints that are spread throughout the Palestinian Occupied Territories. It is the product of these three years of observations, dilemmas, internal conflicts, and contradictory impulses. All of the critiques that this article suggests are thus ones that we as members of CPW often struggled with ourselv…
Baking at the Front Line, Sleeping with the Enemy: Reflections on Gender and Women's Peace Activism in Israel
One day in the summer of 2004, a shift of activists from Checkpoint Watch (CPW) brought to the checkpoint some cookies that one of them had baked earlier that morning. Checkpoint Watch is an all-women Israeli organization that opposes the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Israeli 1967 occupation more broadly. Its members conduct routine tours to monitor changes in the deployment of checkpoints and stand in regula…
When does a native become a settler? (With apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)
The simplest definition of Indigenous people, obviously enough, is that they are the only ones who have not come from somewhere else. (Wolfe, 2016, p. 16) With a nod to Mahmood Mamdani (1998), Raef Zreik asked, in an article of the same title: "When Does a Settler Become a Native?" (Zreik, 2016). Zreik begins his article by exploring the terms of the question itself: Is it historical (how much time needs to pass for the settler to become a native…
Violent Attachments
Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. …
Limits of Dissent, Perils of Activism: Spaces of Resistance and the New Security Logic
On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army while he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW) in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bullets at a Jewish‐Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, the enveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similar shootings t…
In-secure identities: On the securitization of abnormality
Highly securitized sites, such as airports, are increasingly using screening methods designed to purge racial profiling from their practices. In these contexts, not only are profiling methods seen as unlawful, but are also perceived as ineffective from a security perspective. Instead of basing security screenings on a perceived 'dangerousness' of social categories, these new screening methods aim to rely on automatic and objective criteria. This …
Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes: Freedom, Movement, Gender, and Empire in Western Political Thought
This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial) and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we…
Objects of Security: Gendered Violence and Securitized Humanitarianism in Occupied Gaza
This essay seeks to define the current regime of national security, tracing a shift within the gender categories that subtend notions of justified (state) violence. It focuses on Israel's occupation, and in particular its violent control over the Gaza Strip, to examine the relations between war and enmity on the one hand and humanitarianism and subject-citizens on the other. I argue that security relies on a new mechanism of justifying violence, …
Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theory
(En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention
This article is the outcome of three years of experience, between the two of us, of weekly shifts, standing with Checkpoint Watch (CPW) at the checkpoints that are spread throughout the Palestinian Occupied Territories. It is the product of these three years of observations, dilemmas, internal conflicts, and contradictory impulses. All of the critiques that this article suggests are thus ones that we as members of CPW often struggled with ourselv…
Objects of Security: Gendered Violence and Securitized Humanitarianism in Occupied Gaza
This essay seeks to define the current regime of national security, tracing a shift within the gender categories that subtend notions of justified (state) violence. It focuses on Israel's occupation, and in particular its violent control over the Gaza Strip, to examine the relations between war and enmity on the one hand and humanitarianism and subject-citizens on the other. I argue that security relies on a new mechanism of justifying violence, …
Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine
Looking at one site, the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory, this article seeks to understand the mechanisms by which violence can present itself as justifiable (or justified), even when it materializes within frames presumably set to annul it. We look at the checkpoints as a condensed microcosmos operating within two such frames. One is the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ (the checkpoints became a primary tec…
Baking at the Front Line, Sleeping with the Enemy: Reflections on Gender and Women's Peace Activism in Israel
One day in the summer of 2004, a shift of activists from Checkpoint Watch (CPW) brought to the checkpoint some cookies that one of them had baked earlier that morning. Checkpoint Watch is an all-women Israeli organization that opposes the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Israeli 1967 occupation more broadly. Its members conduct routine tours to monitor changes in the deployment of checkpoints and stand in regula…
Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine
Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility
Limits of Dissent, Perils of Activism: Spaces of Resistance and the New Security Logic
On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army while he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW) in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bullets at a Jewish‐Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, the enveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similar shootings t…
Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes: Freedom, Movement, Gender, and Empire in Western Political Thought
This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial) and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we…
In-secure identities: On the securitization of abnormality
Highly securitized sites, such as airports, are increasingly using screening methods designed to purge racial profiling from their practices. In these contexts, not only are profiling methods seen as unlawful, but are also perceived as ineffective from a security perspective. Instead of basing security screenings on a perceived 'dangerousness' of social categories, these new screening methods aim to rely on automatic and objective criteria. This …
Migration, settlement, movement
Fragments
Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine
The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine
Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and na…
Violent Attachments
Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. …
Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body
This article proposes that Locke's basic property-making unit, and thus also contracting unit, is the household rather than the individual. Progressing through two parallel arguments concerning Locke's theory of property-one focuses on the theory of mixing in Roman law and the other on more traditional understanding of labor-it shows how a plurality of people and animals is united under the rule of a single person, allowing the formal category of…
When does a native become a settler? (With apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)
The simplest definition of Indigenous people, obviously enough, is that they are the only ones who have not come from somewhere else. (Wolfe, 2016, p. 16) With a nod to Mahmood Mamdani (1998), Raef Zreik asked, in an article of the same title: "When Does a Settler Become a Native?" (Zreik, 2016). Zreik begins his article by exploring the terms of the question itself: Is it historical (how much time needs to pass for the settler to become a native…
Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theory
Theory & Event: Introduction January 2025
Torture’s Bureaucracy and the “Legitimacy Effect”
This article tells the story of one small department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice: “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators” (in Hebrew: Mavtan). Tasked with examining complaints of torture in GSS interrogations, and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation, Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. By a…
Cruel Fantasies: Reading Fanon with Lauren Berlant
This paper examines Wretched of the Earth with Lauren Berlant, specifically through the prism of Cruel Optimism . I propose that we might read the concept of decolonization that opens “On Violence” (decolonization as a replacement for which violence is essential) as a form of cruel optimism: a promise for the future that is shaped by the limits and violence of present conditions and is thus eventually an obstacle to achieving the ends it promises…
Editor's Introduction to the July Issue
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · History (6 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)