Torture has been a key trope through which Britain has related to the rest of the world, caught between the self-imposed duty to “save” distant others from suffering, and the desire to “protect” its own citizens from seemingly threatening outsiders. In the United Kingdom, a history of colonial expansion and retraction has given the word torture its very own political and ethical connotations. In the early twenty-first century, as the concept of torture moves between the laws of war and asylum, the tension within Britain’s international relationships are laid bare. These contradictions can be seen most clearly in its relationship with the citizens and states of the broad arc from North Africa to Central Asia. On the one hand, the human rights and refugee principles to which the British government has committed promise to save people fleeing from torture in Iraq, Algeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. On the other hand, British security policy toward many of those same states can sit uneasily with ethical injunctions against any involvement in torture. Binyam Mohamed, for example, had come to the United Kingdom claiming protection but ended up suing the British state for its complicity in his torture.
At this stage, it is important to make it clear what I am not trying to do. I am not investigating the complicity of UK officials in torture. Although the issue is important, an anthropologist is probably not the best person to carry out such a project. I am also not exploring the different definitions of torture. Again, such a project is best left to a philosopher or lawyer, and there are numerous impressive examples.10 Furthermore, I am not attempting to examine whether torture can ever be justified. Once more, not only is an anthropologist not the best person for this job, but there is already a vast literature on this issue.11 Finally, I am not attempting to examine the impact of torture on survivors. I am neither a doctor nor a psychologist and am not in any way qualified to make such an evaluation. Rather, I am investigating the ways in which legal processes classify, sort, and prioritize different forms of suffering and cruelty, in order to bring the processes they label “torture” into view.
Understanding Torture
What do we talk about when we talk about torture? We might take it for granted that lawyers have a special place in the conversation, but this is far from inevitable. In this section, I will outline five different but related ways of understanding torture—the ethical, the political, the therapeutic, the sentimental, and the legal—before explaining why this book focuses on the last. The distinctions are not hard and fast, and the different understandings play an important role in informing one another. However, the distinctions can serve as a useful heuristic device, as they highlight the ways in which different types of intervention create alternative notions of victim, perpetrator and remedy.
The ethical objection to torture rests on two legs: suffering and cruelty. It is an abhorrence of the deliberate infliction of pain, in a direct infringement of another person’s dignity, which lies at the heart of the objection to torture. As philosopher Henry Shue has argued, torture is inflicted on the defenseless, forced on those who cannot fight back (2004). Equally important, the objection to torture is based on an abhorrence of the particular intent of the perpetrator. As Judith Shklar has implied, torture is the worst form of cruelty (1984). It was, for example, the fact that the photographs from Abu Ghraib showed the soldiers enjoying their brutality that was particularly disturbing.
Along with such ethical claims, the argument against torture can also take a political shape. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the campaign against torture was used to mark opposition to the ancien régime in the name of the values of enlightened liberalism (Peters 1996, 75). Voltaire, for example, turned the judicial torture of Jean Calas, a French Protestant convicted of killing his son, into a cause célèbre, standing for all that was wrong about intolerance, arbitrariness, and unnecessary cruelty (1764). Similarly, the Italian philosopher and politician Cesare Beccaria’s polemic On Crime and Punishment became a central text in campaigns for penal reform from the late eighteenth century (1778). In his short book, Beccaria condemns torture, as well as the death penalty, as historical anachronisms. As a utilitarian philosopher, Beccaria’s principle objection to torture was not simply that it caused suffering, but rather that it was outdated and inefficient. He wrote, for example, that “by this method the robust will escape and the feeble be condemned” (1778, 64). For Beccaria, torture was above all an issue of due process. In late eighteenth-century Europe, campaigns against judicial torture therefore brought into focus a wider critique of the legal and political regime.
In the twentieth century, an aversion to torture was used to mark opposition to totalitarian forms of government, from both left and right. Torture was seen as standing in absolute opposition to liberal democracy, and its presence was a key, and often problematic, marker of distinction between modern democracy and authoritarianism. Amnesty International, for example, wrote, “Torture has by all indication increased over the last few years … [I]ncreasing perpetration is accounted for by states who use torture as a means of governing. Torture in those countries plays an integral role in the political system itself” (1973, 17). Furthermore, in 1970s North America and Western Europe, as the numbers of refugees from totalitarian regimes in Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as in South America, grew, opposition to torture became a way of expressing solidarity with political exiles. Crucially, as both eighteenth- and twentieth-century political understandings of torture were aimed at reforming the state, emphasis was placed on state officials as perpetrators, significantly narrowing the ethical objection to torture as an infringement on human dignity. It is this emphasis on state officials that has run through the human rights campaigns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
A third way of understanding torture treats it as a particular type of trauma, and therefore an issue of therapy. Although a focus on suffering may grow out of an ethical objection to torture, for the eighteenth-century anti-torture polemicists torture was not a distinct experience; rather, it was part of a broader process of irrational punishment. Indeed, much of Beccaria’s concern was with the coarsening effects of torture on those who witnessed it rather than on the victims themselves. However, from the mid- to late twentieth century, there was growing emphasis on the unique nature of the pain and suffering experienced by torture victims. The presence of large-scale refugee populations in Europe and the United States, with their own vulnerabilities and health needs, also saw an increasing emphasis on torture as a physical and psychological problem (Pupavac 2008). Medical doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts became central figures in the production of knowledge about torture. In many places, the anti-torture movement became a torture rehabilitation movement, focused on providing therapeutic services—rather than political or legal reform—to those in need. There was also therefore a potential, although not always fulfilled, move away from an emphasis on state officials as perpetrators. If torture is a unique and specific form of suffering, it can seem irrelevant if the perpetrator is a police officer or a former boyfriend.
Along with ethical, political, and therapeutic notions of torture lies what might be called a “sentimental” understanding (Peters 1996; Rorty 1993). In the early twenty-first century, the word torture is widely used to describe intolerable and objectionable forms of pain and cruelty inflicted on people. In 2009, when two boys aged eleven and ten beat two other boys to death in northern England, the ordeal