Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire

Yael Berda is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) of Sociology & Anthropology at Hebrew University and a non-resident fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy school of government.

Berda publishes, teaches, and speaks on the intersections of law & society, bureaucracy and the state, race and racism and sociology of empires and colonialism.

 Her most recent book is “Colonial bureaucracy and contemporary citizenship: Legacies of race and emergency in the British Empire”, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Her second book is “Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the West Bank (Stanford University Press, 2017 ).

 Her current projects include the study of citizenship as a “mobility regime”, How emergency laws shaped the political economy of colonial states, how bureaucracy makes contemporary homeland security practices and what plea bargains tell us about political regimes. She was a practicing Human Rights lawyer, litigating in the military, district, and the Supreme Court in Israel/Palestine. Berda received her PhD in Sociology  from Princeton University; MA from Tel Aviv University and LLB from Hebrew University faculty of Law.