Moves to Torture by Liberal Democratic Countries: The United States and the United Kingdom

Date Presented:

February 8

Abstract:

While torture is often thought of as one of the most degrading and brutal treatments as well as violations of human rights, it has been regularly practiced by liberal democratic governments throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in a wide range of contexts. My thesis examines moves to torture in democracies and aims to conceptualize and refine existing models, explicit or implicit in the current scholarly literature, on how and why democracies turn to torture. I will also lay other potential models for these moves, including an unsettling model in which politicians explicitly decide on these policies, a possibility that has not been discussed adequately in the scholarly literature but surfaces in more journalistic accounts. I consider two primary cases of democratic torture, those of the United States and the United Kingdom, but make reference to a number of other historical cases. Finally, I hope that my discussion of democratic turns to torture will suggest one important limitation in some of the secondary literature on torture: a tendency to accept uncritically certain assumptions about the efficacy of torture, in part due to the paucity of large-scale data on this point. Here, my account will consider mythology built and transmitted around torture by examining tactical and strategic examples of torture. Assumptions of efficacy are important on a number of levels, as they are implicit not only in scholarly articles but in most governmental decisions to utilize torture techniques.