The socio-legal construction of otherness under a neo-liberal regime: The case of foreign workers in the Israeli criminal courts

This paper attempts to reveal the ways in which criminal courts in Israel constructed foreign workers brought to trial as 'others'. Individual foreign workers were framed as being irrelevant as bearers of rights while, in a parallel process, foreign workers as a group were constructed as symbolically relevant to discussions regarding the state governance of social risk. The study spans the years 19942011, when Israel adopted a new neo-liberal regime. The paper shows that the complex penal construction of the 'other' was used as a platform to justify and support the fuelling of the country's globalized neo-liberal economy with cheap migrant workers.