Frontiers and Ghettos State Violence in Serbia and Israel by James Ron (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 208 pages.)

Abstract

Scholars of state violence, among them sociologists and legal scholars, have
insisted upon the existence of certain distinctions that separate those police
methods deemed acceptable to the international human rights community
from those methods of state brutality considered worthy of condemnation.
Interestingly, most of the cases that cause confusion over what can be considered
a legitimate use of state violence and what is condemned emanate from
the same places: Serbia and Israel. James Ron’s impressive study of state violence
under these two modern regimes offers an important genealogical and
comparative analysis of these blurred moral, ethical, and analytical lines.
Ron’s work in Frontiers and Ghettos highlights, in particular, patterns
of state violence in territories that are under varying degrees of direct state
control. These patterns both challenge assumptions about Israeli and Serbian
history and serve as a corrective to much of the theoretical literature on state
violence. Ron clearly argues that it is the nature of the state’s formal relationship
with its territories that ultimately determines the level of state violence
in both the Balkans and Palestine. His insight into these patterns is,
perhaps, especially persuasive because they are fruitfully compared over
distinct periods of both regions’ history.
At the heart of this provocative study is a bravely argued claim that patterns
of state violence vary because of international borders and how states
operate within and beyond them. Ron suggests that geographical and administrative
borders enforce a certain relational order between mechanisms of
coercion and the extent to which the international community will tolerate
state brutality. To make his argument, he carefully outlines how Serbian and
Israeli repertoires of coercion dramatically changed depending upon the
nature of each state’s direct relationship with the territories in which they
operated. In the cases of Serbia’s activities in the former Yugoslavia and
Israel’s actions in Palestine and southern Lebanon, he sees a pattern of ...