Torture

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

Abu Ghraib: imprisonment and the war on terror:

Abstract: The exposure of torture and sadistic treatment of prisoners in US-run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere in the ‘theatre’ of the war on terror has shed light on the nature of military imprisonment today. However, the actions and policies of military prison guards reflect accepted civilian prison norms. Excessive force, civil disability and the loss of internationally guaranteed rights, and indefinite detention are central means by which the wars on both terror and crime (civilian mass imprisonment) are executed. These practices, amounting to a condition of permanent imprisonment, are being pioneered by the US in its super-maximum civilian prisons. Permanent war and permanent imprisonment are not exceptional but increasingly the routine means by which the racial state organises the abandonment of surplus and potentially rebellious populations and attempts to quarantine the effects of global poverty.

Unfinished business : South Africa, apartheid, and truth

Abstract: The first of a series of class-action legal claims against banks and companies that profited from apartheid was launched to a burst of media frenzy in 2002. Triggered by the publication in South Africa of this book, the cases will open up again important questions about what the system of apartheid was about, how and by whom it was run, and to whose benefit - all vital questions concerning the countries unfinished business. Unfinished business abounds in South Africa, largely because its past has still not been properly confronted. Corruption and pockets of poisonous racism remain embedded deep within society. Many of apartheid's most senior agents - within the army, the police, the secret services and the civil service - remain in place. And there are thousands of compromised individuals, many in prominent positions, whose still secret betrayals and abuses leave them open to blackmail and manipulation. Unfinished Business pulls back the curtain of the 'political miracle' of South Africa to reveal some of the hidden history of its apartheid past: how the Afrikaner Broederbond (the secret society to which every president, prime minister, senior military and police officer belonged) operated; the murderous activities of the South African security forces in Transkei; the story of Dumisa Ntsebeza, anti-apartheid activist, torture victim, political prisoner, teacher and human rights lawyer, who was cynically implicated in a massacre in an attempt to derail the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the citation of former president F.W. de Klerk as a defendant in a civil action for murder at exactly the moment he was travelling to Oslo to collect a Nobel peace prize. It also blows open the myth that the Truth and Reconciliation Co0mmission uncovered this hidden history. In fact, most of the thirty-three-year mandate of the commission was ignored. Behind a facade of time constraints and managerial shortcomings, some intended investigations never proceeded, others were bungles. Most importantly, no serious examination was made of the system that gave rise to some of the most horrific racist social engineering of modern times. Seeking to probe where the Commission failed or feared to tread, Unfinished Business prompts questions about how long, without the necessary and proper confontaion of its past, South Africa's miracle might be expected to last.

Ethics and International Relations

Abstract: Preface to the Second Edition. 1. The International Orders. From Vienna to Versailles-The Rise of the Nation State. The Challenge of Internationalism. Sovereignty. Federalism and the International 'State of Nature'. The Law of Nature and Nations. Summary. 2. Realism, Morality and Law. The Hobbesian State of Nature. Realism. National Interest and Moral Responsibility. Moralism and the Domestic Analogy. Factual and Moral Disanalogy. Legalism. 3. War. Christian Attitudes to War. The Case for Pacifism. Just Wars. Justice Ad Bellum. Force and Violence. Justice In Bello. The Principle of Double Effect. 4. Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Argument So Far. Modern Warfare. Consequentialism. Deterrence. Threats, Bluffs and Conditional Intentions. Mutually Assured Destruction. Summary. 5. Humanitarian Intervention. Intervention and the Challenge to Legalism. Autonomy and the Nation State. Non-intervention and States as Persons. Consequentialism and Non-intervention. The Definition of Intervention. Intervention and Just War Theory. Intervention, the Rule of Law and the Duty to Intervene. Summary. 6. Terrorists, Guerillas and War on Terror. The Definition of Terror. Freedom Fighters. Terrorism. Guerilla Warfare. Torture and the War on Terrorism. Summary. 7. North and South, Aid and Trade. Absolute and Relative Poverty. Poverty and Cost/Benefit Analysis. Lifeboat Ethics. Taking Stock of the Arguments. Social Justice and Welfare Rights. Basic Rights, National Boundaries and International Justice. Aid and Trade: the World Bank and the WTO. Summary. 8. Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and the Environment. Globalization. Cosmopolitanism and Subsidiarity. Environmental Disaster. Environmental Ethics. Shallow and Deep Ecology. The Gaia Hypothesis. Globalization, Environment and International Relations. Bibliography. Index

Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism

Abstract: Discipline and the Other Body reveals the intimate relationship between violence and difference underlying modern governmental power and the human rights discourses that critique it. The comparative essays brought together in this collection show how, in using physical violence to discipline and control colonial subjects, governments repeatedly found themselves enmeshed in a fundamental paradox: Colonialism was about the management of difference—the “civilized” ruling the “uncivilized”—but colonial violence seemed to many the antithesis of civility, threatening to undermine the very distinction that validated its use. Violation of the bodies of colonial subjects regularly generated scandals, and eventually led to humanitarian initiatives, ultimately changing conceptions of “the human” and helping to constitute modern forms of human rights discourse. Colonial violence and discipline also played a crucial role in hardening modern categories of difference—race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference. Contributors . Laura Bear, Yvette Christianse, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O’Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward