Yael Berda

Sociology, PhD candidate

Dept. of Sociology,
125 Wallace Hall
Princeton University
yberda@princeton.edu

Yael Berda is an Israeli Lawyer and a Phd student in the department of sociology at Princeton University. Born in New York city and raised in West Jerusalem, Yael has been highly engaged in social justice activism and politics in Israel.

Yael graduated from the faculty of Law at Hebrew university, and pursued her Masters degree at the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her masters thesis looks at the bureaucracy of the occupation in the Palestinian territory. The first institutional ethnography of the permit regime in the West bank, Her forthcoming book, "the Bureucracy of the occupation" (Forthcoming, 2010 (Hebrew), Van Leer institute and Hakibutz hameuhad publishing) explores the influence of Colonial administrative legacies on the contemporary military  civil administration in the occupied territories.

Yael is currently working on her dissertation project which will examine the persistance of bureucratic legacies following regime change in former colonies. Focusing on British colonial legacies of administration on population management practices in post colonies afflicted by partition plans: Israel, Cyprus and India.

These cases provide a rich arena of exploration where the colonial past and it's toolkits and modalities of governance and control present challenges to both priniciples of the rule of law and to classical models of bureaucracy and administration.Exploring these challanges can provide insights to the ways state bureucracy becomes a primary site of erosion of political and civil rights, and a sight where through procedural violence, it limits democratic participation and reproduces discrimination and perpetuates racial, ethnic and religious inequalities.

Yael is interested in the intersections of administrative and constituional law, historical - comparative sociology, the sociology of culture, social theory and postcolonial theory, and how these intellectual lenses provide tools for understanding violence at the international, state and urban levels. . 2008

Before coming to Princeton and LAPA, Yael was a practicing Human rights lawyer in Israel, first in the law offices of Avidgor Feldman, and than pursued her own practice in Jerusalem focusing on Administrative and constitution Law, specifically cases of freedom of speech and artistic expression, freedom of association, and freedom of movement. She has argued cases in the Israeli Supreme court, the district administrative courts and the military criminal courts.

In 1997, she co-founded the Mahapach - taghir movement, which has grown to be the largest community organizing student movement in the county focusing on social rights and civic participation of residents of disempowered communities in Jewish neighborhoods and Palestinian villages. During the last decade she has run election campaigns for the Meretz party, primary election campaigns, and for Municipal Elections in Jerusalem. Yael has worked in the Israeli parliement, as a columnist and was a political commentator for channel 10's "Politics Plus" television program.She has spoken to diverse audiences, from university students in campuses across the US, religious communities, and the UN general assembly.

Publications

Shenhav Yehouda and Yael Berda. 2009. "The Colonial Foundations of State of Exception: Juxtaposing the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territories with Colonial Bureaucratic History" in Givoni M., S. Hanafi, and A, Ophir (eds.), The Power of exclusive inclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the occupied Palestinian Territories. Zone Books, MIT press.

Berda, Yael. 2009. "The bureuacracy of the occupation - Love letter to Hannah Arendt" In Dissonant Memories, Fragmented Present: Exchanging Young Discourses between Israel and Germany. Misselwitch & Siebeck, Eds. Transcript publishing, London & New Brunswick.

 Berda, Yael .2008. "La burocracia de la ocupación: tiempo, espacio y cuerpo." In Asymetric Conflict, ed. P. Vilenove, CCCB & University of Barcelona.