Abstract
The presence and persistence of violence in our societies and state institutions – and what to do about it – are long-standing concerns of scholars of punishment and society. Torture might sound like a singular type of such violence but the torture with which this book is concerned is of the everyday, mundane variety, a product of prevailing systems, structures and conditions existing in continuity with other forms of violence. Torture is not an individual incident, but a social practice embedded in a multifaceted system of relations. This important book convincingly posits that efforts to prevent torture must understand the dynamics of this system – this ‘ecology’ – and address causes and consequences of violence through an ecological approach.
The cover of The Prevention of Torture tellingly features a compelling image of a leafy tree in blossom. Beneath the tree in the shadow cast by an invisible light source is a vast amount of blood spatter. The image alludes to the notion of ‘the poisoned orchard’, this being a metaphor appealed to by situational theorists of violence to resist the inherently dispositional ‘bad apples’ theory. Violence is not the result of the dispositions of a few deviant apples acting out their own individual pathologies; it is the product of the complex ecological situation of the whole orchard, i.e. the interconnected practices that nourish, nurture and otherwise facilitate the likelihood of a toxic harvest – again and again, and with seasonal variations.
At its most basic level this is a book about the driving and sustaining factors of torture and the impediments to its prevention. Clearly argued and drawing in a range of theoretical insights (from Arendt to Bourdieu to Latour), as well as an equally broad range of empirical studies, it offers a radically situational account of why torture persists and why it is so difficult to inhibit using the legal, universal and punitive tools most commonly applied.
The book draws on lessons learned from and through a multi-faceted, experimental torture prevention project involving the academy, local human rights organisations, and security sector actors in Nepal and Sri Lanka. The project made theoretically informed, contextual analyses of torture causalities. These insights were then used to equip selected security officers to become change agents and begin to think and act on torture prevention. Seeking out the levers that might be expected to make a real difference in practice and daring to experiment by inviting potential perpetrators to design their own preventive pilot activities, the project engaged with and through actors from the police and the armed forces, rather than against them, seeking to facilitate change from within. It failed, as Celermajer honestly reveals. The intervention had to find the balance between accessing the key actors and implementing truly effective activities. In retrospect, this balancing turned out to produce access, but at the ‘cost’ of not effectively addressing core causalities of torture. Nevertheless, it is through a dissection of its failure that Celermajer makes a strong case in support of its logic. The field experience earnestly illuminates and is helpfully drawn upon, including through revealingly reflexive vignettes introducing each chapter, for instance, when Celermajer invites the reader into her experience during the project implementation, when a cold call from a human rights NGO jockeying for a donation generates a troubled reflection on the ways disgust seems to fuel human rights work.
The impassioned discussion and, in turn, its contribution revolve around three fundamental questions: what produces torture?; what understandings and imaginaries have informed the most common prevention strategies?; and, what might prevention look like based on an ecological approach? In traversing this ethically and politically charged terrain, a critical clearing is generated that has the potential to reinvigorate the practice of torture prevention by understanding and addressing local systems, worlds or ecologies of violence. It is a powerful articulation of the situationalist perspective and will speak to all those invested in a just and rigorous social science that can inform the daunting task of bringing about cultural and institutional changes, which aim to prevent torture.
Inverting a common trend to start with the empirical study and theorise on that basis, the book begins with a conceptual discussion of how we might best think about torture and an analysis of the main approaches to its prevention. Celermajer carefully surveys the assumptions and implications of common analyses of the problem. Being aware of what to change, she shows, clearly does not amount to knowing how to change it. She demonstrates how anti-torture practitioners have for the most part (though not only), failed to ground their understanding of the problem of torture empirically and contextually. Interventions have largely been limited to engagements from a distance either through the pursuit of law-oriented reform based on universal standards or awareness-raising via human rights training (where subjects of training are typically abstracted out of their concrete working realities).
The argument is practice-oriented, emphasizing, for instance, how the material working conditions of police officers, rather than immaterial dimensions of their attitudes, enable (read: facilitate, normalise and sustain) the production of torture. A rich and grounded mediation of agency and structure is provided deftly situating the individual actor in an expansive ecology of violence. Practice theories and Actor Network Theory are invoked to explain the dynamics, which at multiple levels – from promotion procedures for senior officers to villagers’ demands for corporal punishment – make possible the persistence of mundane torture.
The thought of Hannah Arendt is present throughout particularly her thesis about the banality of evil. In some ways this is a book about good and evil but one that resists any tendency to dichotomise along those lines. Those who might claim to have good on their side (in the form of human rights) are revealed to do less good than they hope for and those typically positioned as evil are revealed as caught up within institutional dynamics, over which they have little control and fear becoming victims of themselves. While not determining (or excusing) cruel behaviour, these dynamics offer better explanations for torture and other forms of institutionalised violence than individual pathology.
The author treads a delicate balance between idealist critiques that say we cannot prevent torture without changing everything, and legalistic and moralistic approaches that imply if only we can get the legal frameworks in place and the right values inculcated everything will be alright. The limited efficacy of these dominant tracks in anti-torture work, as she points out, is often countered by a ‘we simply need more of the same’ logic – more rules, more training, more oversight. The book opens an alternative avenue and calls for a more thorough diagnosis of the actual causal mechanisms that lead to torture and a more elaborately worked-through set of assumptions about how to disrupt them.
Attention is also drawn to the way the master narratives supporting prevailing schools of prevention have proven to be a tad naïve, fed not by what we know about torture as a practice but by the force of dominant tropes featuring a victim, a villain and a saviour. These narratives fit reality poorly, failing to encompass the multi-directional processes and circuitous and polyvalent positioning that sustain torture and impede its prevention. Perpetrator and victim are not stable categories in practice.
Those of us with an interest in understanding perpetrative institutions and the logics that inform them often stand accused of excusing, trivializing, or justifying evil. Celermajer makes the important point that it is possible to hold the belief that individuals are culpable in a legal and moral sense (and should be sanctioned) and simultaneously question whether sanctioning them is an effective prevention strategy. These are, she argues, two different issues that should not be conflated. Carefully qualified and mindful of the ethical challenges, Celermajer makes a case for distinguishing between punishment and prevention, as well as condemnation and comprehension.
Finally, Celermajer’s book is intense as well as timely. It has the potential to become essential reading for third generation torture prevention theorising and practice, despite the irony that its conceptual apparatus is derived predominantly in the wake of a failed project. Yet, perhaps this, and the call to proceed urgently but thoughtfully through trial (and error), is part of the book’s attraction? The Prevention of Torture sparks a compelling conversation about torture prevention in particular and, more generally, about transnational, cross-cultural efforts to influence institutional and behavioural change directed towards alleviating suffering. As we stand in the tree’s bloody shadow, we are all implicated in ecologies of violence. From our perspective as researchers and practitioners, embedded in an activist and knowledge-based institution, Celermajer’s book gives us pause for thought and grounds for action.
