SOAS Research Online

A Free Database of the Latest Research by SOAS Academics and PhD Students

[skip to content]

Kotef, Hagar and Amir, Merav (2025) 'Torture’s Bureaucracy and the 'Legitimacy Effect'.' Perspectives on Politics. (Forthcoming)

[img] Text - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0).

Download (321kB)

Abstract

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 analysing this failure, we tell a segment of the story of torture in Israel and, more broadly, of the legal bureaucracy that makes state and colonial violence possible. Despite the failure to produce concrete outcomes, Mavtan is a very industrious unit. We argue that this extensive bureaucratic labor creates a semblance of the rule of law by performing an adherence to hallmarks of good governance, such as transparency and accountability. Paraphrasing Mitchell (1999), we call this semblance the “legitimacy effect,” as it works to produce state legitimacy on two levels: internationally, to cordon off external interventions, and domestically, to defuse the internal tension between torture and democracy. It hence allows torture to emerge as a problem that may be addressed procedurally, without ever contending with the violence and the violations of international law it necessarily entails.

Item Type: Journal Article
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Department of Politics & International Studies
ISSN: 15375927
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724001105
Date Deposited: 22 Oct 2024 07:33
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/42853
Funders: Economic and Social Research Council

Altmetric Data

Statistics

Download activity - last 12 monthsShow export options
Downloads since deposit
6 month trend
12Downloads
6 month trend
86Hits
Accesses by country - last 12 monthsShow export options
Accesses by referrer - last 12 monthsShow export options

Repository staff only

Edit Item Edit Item