Book description
We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the needless 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.
"This Side of Silence is innovative,
thought-provoking, and superbly written, a standout among the plethora
of books on torture that have appeared since the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal. Tobias Kelly analyzes the meaning of torture as a cultural
and legal category. He demonstrates empirically, rather than
conceptually or theoretically, that torture is 'a notoriously slippery
subject' at every step of defining, documenting, diagnosing,
recognizing, and prosecuting it."-Antonius C. G. M. Robben,
Utrecht University
Tobias Kelly teaches social anthropology at the School of Social and
Political Science, University of Edinburgh.
