About

Smadar Ben-Natan is a legal scholar of human rights, criminal justice, and armed conflict. She specializes in human rights, armed conflict, and criminal justice, colonialism and conflict, military law and incarceration in Israel/Palestine.

I am a professor of global studies and human rights in the School of Global Studies and Languages, University of Oregon. In 2020-2022 I was a Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar. I am currently writing on a book manuscript titled Citizen-Enemies: Military Courts and the Construction of Citizenship in Israel/Palestine, and working on a second book project, The Carceral State in Conflict: Between Reconciliation and Radicalization.

I hold a Ph.D. in law from Tel Aviv University, a master’s in international human rights law from the University of Oxford, and an L.L.B. from Tel Aviv University. I was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and Harvard University, and a postdoctoral fellow in Israel/Palestine studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. A longtime practicing lawyer of human rights and criminal defense in Israel and Palestine, litigating in military and civilian courts up to the Israeli Supreme Court, and an international expert on torture.