Torture

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

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

Abstract: THE LEAST OF ALL POSSIBLE EVILS: HUMANITARIAN VIOLENCE FROM ARENDT TO GAZA by Eyal Weizman New York: Verso, 2011 (218 pages, index, illustrations) $26.95 (cloth)In that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the use of torture, and even some conflicted torture opponents, affirmed the consensus view that torture is unequivocally bad. But, they opined, if torture was necessary to elicit vital information to keep Americans safe, it would be a justiflable lesser evil in the service of national security. Nowadays, drone strikes have supplanted torture as the popular lesser evil.Eyal Weizman begins The Least of All Possible Evils with a history of lesser-evil thinking. "The principle of the lesser evil," he explains,is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. ... Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is taken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds. (6)Weizman's work is a profound and empirically rich engagement with developments in contemporary "humanitarianism," which, he argues, has evolved into various technocratic collusions among those who work to aid the vulnerable and those who mete out state violence in the name of security. He names this lesser-evil collusion "the humanitarian present."Weizman dates the start of the humanitarian present to the 1980s, specifically the "humanitarian crisis" in Ethiopia and the role Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) played there. The "crisis" was not the devastating famine in East Africa. It was rather the ways in which Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime co-opted MSF's relief work to seize and relocate starving people who came from rebel-controlled regions to the food distribution centers, ultimately leading to thousands of deaths.Weizman traces the contemporary history of humanitarianism to French left-radical politics in the late 1960s and the influence of Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. Anti-totalitarianism supplanted revolutionary leftism, and activism shifted from proletariats and capitalists to the "passive quasi-religious dialectics of victims and perpetrators" (37). This elevation of victims as the focus of humanitarian concern and action congealed as a politics of compassion and a practice oriented to the humanitarian culture of emergency. The humanitarian ethic, in the words of Bernard-Henri Levy, was the utilitarian objective to "make the world a little more livable for the greatest number of people" (38). The nexus of compassion and practice found its infrastructure in humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, such as MSF.The logic of principled compromises can be seen in MSF's promotion of "humanitarianism in its minimalist form, ... as the practice of 'lesser evils' ... [to sustain] life without seeking to govern or manage populations, [or to make] political claims on their behalf, [or to seek] to resolve root causes of conflicts" (54). Weizman compares this willingness to compromise for the goal of keeping people alive to that of the world's most preeminent humani- tarian organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, where access to prisoners is traded for the promise not to publicize what is learned.Such political agnosticism involved a three-part move: creating humani- tarian spaces separate from the political spheres of armies or regimes, adhering to a logic of humanitarian minimalism to sustain life, and believing that the people whose lives were saved would create their own politics, someday. …

The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence

Abstract: Since the early days of photography, critics have told us that photos of political violence - of torture, mutilation, and death - are exploitative, deceitful, even pornographic. To look at these images is voyeuristic; to turn away is a gesture of respect. With "The Cruel Radiance", Susie Linfield attacks those ideas head-on, arguing passionately that viewing such photographs - and learning to see the people in them - is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes our capacity for cruelty. Contending with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns - and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China's Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts - Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book's concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress, and asks how photography has - and should - respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare. A bracing and unsettling book, "The Cruel Radiance" convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it - and to do that, we must begin to look.

The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States

Abstract: In the summer of 1996, the Nike Corporation was buffeted by claims that it mistreated its workers in Asian countries. This was part of a string of such complaints all against corporations with headquarters in the United States, Canada, or western Europe but with work forces stretching around the globe. Nike responded by agreeing to sit down at the White House and negotiate international labor standards. Sitting at the negotiating table were representatives from Nike, other clothing manufacturers, the Clinton administration, and international labor unions. Also present were representatives from two human rights organizations: the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the Center for Human Rights of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center. While the setting as a whole is worth an essay, I want here to draw your attention to the human rights groups. Why were representatives of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights or the Kennedy center, without a dollar of their own capital in play and unelected by anyone in the whole sweet world, sitting at the table of what potentially were some of the most important international negotiations of the day?1 The answer has to do with the emergence of a politics of human rights in the last third of the twentieth century. For the first time since the early 1900s, a set of private organizations has been founded to reshape global practices. And this international civil society is not only interested in the labor policies of corporations like Nike. Human rights claims now challenge the exclusive control of nations over immigration policy. They have been instrumental in reawakening the world to the continued practice of torture. They have been used to attack customs such as female circumcision. Human rights claims have contributed to the delegitimation of Communist East Europe, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's Iran, and South American military dictatorships. By shifting the focus from the sovereignty of the people to the rights of individuals "regardless of nationality," Saskia Sassen notes, human rights are becoming "a force

The treatment of prisoners under international law

Abstract: Preface to the Second Edition General Introduction 1. The Response of the United Nations General Assembly to the Challenge of Torture 2. The Legal Prohibition of Torture and Other Ill-Treatment 3. What Constitutes Torture and Other Ill-Treatment? 4. The Legal Consequences of Torture and Other Ill-Treatment 5. International Remedies for Torture and Other Ill-Treatment 6. Extra-legal Executions 7. The Death Penalty 8. 'Disappeared' Prisoners: Unacknowledged Detention 9. Conditions of Imprisonment or Detention 10. Corporal Punishment 11. Guarantees Against Abuses of the Human Person 12. International Codes of Ethics for Professionals 13. General Conclusions - An Agenda Appendices