Dr Viterbo won this award for his book, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine, published by Cambridge University Press
The book prize, awarded at the annual conference of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, is aimed at advancing the dissemination of knowledge in the field of socio-legal studies.
Bridging disciplinary divides, and drawing on hundreds of previously unexamined sources (many of which are not publicly available), Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood, in Israel/Palestine reveals how Israel has increasingly used children's rights and international law to hone and legitimise its violence against Palestinians. In the book, Dr Hedi Viterbo exposes the human rights community's complicity in this situation, due to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international law, and its recurring emulation of Israel's security discourse. And he examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponise the categories 'child' and 'adult.'