This side of silence : human rights, torture, and the recognition of cruelty / Tobias Kelly.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kelly, Tobias.

Series:

Pennsylvania studies in human rights.

Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Torture--Moral and ethical aspects--Great Britain.

Torture.

Political prisoners--Abuse of--Great Britain.

Political prisoners.

Political prisoners--Legal status, laws, etc--Great Britain.

Suffering--Political aspects--Great Britain.

Suffering.

Human rights--Great Britain.

Human rights.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (229 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the purposeful infliction of cruelty by public officials, and we assume that lawyers and clinicians are best placed to speak about its causes and effects. However, it has not always been so. The category of torture is a very specific way of thinking about violence, and our current understandings of the term are rooted in recent twentieth-century history. In This Side of Silence, social anthropologist Tobias Kelly argues that the tensions between post-Cold War armed conflict, human rights activism, medical notions of suffering, and concerns over immigration have produced a distinctively new way of thinking about torture, which is saturated with notions of law and trauma. This Side of Silence asks what forms of suffering and cruelty can be acknowledged when looking at the world through the narrow legal category of torture. The book focuses on the recent history of Britain but draws wider comparative conclusions, tracing attempts to recognize survivors and perpetrators across the fields of asylum, criminal law, international human rights, and military justice. In this thorough and eloquent ethnography, Kelly avoids treating the legal prohibition of torture as the inevitable product of progress and yet does not seek to dismiss the real differences it has made in concrete political struggles. Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the problem of recognition rests not in the inability of the survivor to communicate but in our inability to listen and take responsibility for the injustice before us.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Talking about Torture after the Human Rights Revolution

Chapter 2. The Legal Recognition of Torture Survivors

Chapter 3. Clinical Evidence about Torture

Chapter 4. Predicting the Future Risk of Torture

Chapter 5. Prosecuting Torture

Chapter 6. The Shame of Torture

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [177]-211) and index.

ISBN:

9781283896559

1283896559

9780812205237

0812205235

OCLC:

822017880