Torture

About: Torture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8173 publications have been published within this topic receiving 109895 citations.

Explaining Commitment: States and the Convention against Torture

Abstract: Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time-duration model to test all of these explanations on state commitment to the international Convention Against Torture, one of the most important international human rights treaties. We find strong evidence for the importance of norms and all three types of costs, but no evidence supporting state desires to lock in the benefits of democracy in the face of domestic democratic instability.

What Stops the Torture

Abstract: States whose agents engage in torture in a given year have a 93% chance of continuing to torture in the following year. What leads governments to stop the use of torture? We focus on the principal–agent relationship between the executive and the individuals responsible for supervising and interrogating state prisoners. We argue that some liberal democratic institutions change the probability that leaders support the creation of institutions that discourage jailers and interrogators from engaging in torture, thus increasing the probability of a state terminating its use of torture. These relationships are strongly conditioned by the presence of violent dissent; states rarely terminate the use of torture when they face a threat. Once campaigns of violent dissent stop, however, states with popular suffrage and a free press are considerably more likely to terminate their use of torture. Also given the end of violent dissent, the greater the number of veto points in government, the lower the likelihood that a state terminates its use of torture.

Searching for “Voices”: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debate over Female Genital Operations

Abstract: This article lays the groundwork for a feminist and anthropological political response to female genital "operations" that transcends the current debate over the phenomenon which is couched in terms of cultural relativism or of politically-informed outrage. After an introduction the study considers the politics involved in assigning a name to the procedure and explains the authors reason for choosing female genital "operation" over the more commonly used "circumcision" "mutilation" or "torture." In the next section clitoridectomy is contextualized through a recounting of the circumstances under which the procedure was performed in the western Kenyan village of Kikhome in 1988. This discussion focuses on the ceremonies surrounding the circumcisions of young men and women the authors attempts to discover how the young women involved really felt about the tradition and a review of the anthropological literature on the significance and impact of these practices. The analysis then examines the international controversy surrounding female genital mutilation and provides an overview of the colonial discourse on female genital mutilation in Africa to expose 1) the origins of justifications for colonial dominance in the dominance of non-Western women by non-Western men and 2) the fact that use of cultural arguments that fuse women and tradition can support culturally-defined power relationships. The article concludes with a consideration of who is qualified to speak out against female genital mutilation given the fact that all women and all debates are the products of longstanding tenacious power relationships.

Liberalism, torture, and the ticking bomb

Abstract: Preface This chapter was published concurrently in its present form and in a more extended version that appeared in Karen Greenberg’s collection The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press, 2005). The latter version included a longer and fuller analysis of the torture memos; I have used the shorter version here because other chapters of this book go into the torture memos in greater detail. The chapter received wide circulation: in March 2006 it was excerpted in Harper’s Magazine and published in translation in the German cultural magazine Die Zeit Kursbuch . Together with the following two chapters, it represents the philosophical core of this book’s analysis of torture and its critique of discussing torture through ticking-bomb hypotheticals. I began writing the chapter when the Bybee–Yoo torture memo became public in the summer of 2004, shortly after the sensational Abu Ghraib revelations. It needs only slight factual updating. At the time I finished it, only two of the torture memos were public. It was not until April 2009 that the Obama administration released the remaining torture memos, all but one of which were shortly republished by David Cole in The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York Review of Books, 2009). The existence of CIA “black sites” – secret prisons in Poland, Romania, and Thailand – had not yet emerged, nor was it clear what interrogation techniques the Justice Department had approved for CIA use. I also wrote before the issue of nonaccountability for torture became salient. By the time the smoke had cleared, only a handful of low-level enlisted personnel had been punished for Abu Ghraib, and, ultimately, none of the 101 potential torture cases investigated by a special prosecutor resulted in criminal referrals. I discuss the issue of nonaccountability in this book’s final chapter.

Respect for Human Rights after the End of the Cold War

Abstract: By directly affecting democratization, globalization, domestic conflict, and interstate conflict, the end of the Cold War was hypothesized to exert an indirect effect on the propensity of governments to respect the human rights of their citizens. The findings for a sample of 79 countries showed that torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings continued at about the same rate even after the Cold War ended. However, after the end of the Cold War, there was significant improvement in government respect for the right against political imprisonment. Contrary to expectations, it was found that governments that decreased their involvement in interstate conflict or experienced decreased domestic conflict did not tend to increase respect for the right against political imprisonment. As hypothesized, it was found that governments that became more democratic or increased their participation in the global economy after the end of the Cold War tended to manifest higher levels of respect for the right of their citizens not to be politically imprisoned. However, a closer look at several recent examples of democratization in Africa suggests that any human rights improvements resulting from post-Cold War democratization may be short-lived. In the cases examined, improved government respect for the right against political imprisonment resulted from short-term manipulations by the leaders of 'illiberal' or 'demonstration' democracies who were not committed to democratization or to the advancement of the human rights of their citizens.