The Prevention of Torture An Ecological Approach

There is an urgent need to analyze and assess how we prevent torture, against the background of a rigorous analysis of the factors that condition and sustain it. Drawing on rich empirical material from Sri Lanka and Nepal, The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach interrogates the worlds that produce torture in order to propose how to bring about systemic institutional and cultural change. Critics have decried human rights approaches' failure to attend to structural factors, but this book seeks to go beyond a 'stance of criticism' to take up the positive project of reimagining human rights theory and practice. It discusses key debates in human rights and political theory, as well as the challenges that advocates face in translating situational analyses into real world interventions. Danielle Celermajer develops a new, ecological framework for mapping the worlds that produce torture, and thereby develops prevention strategies.

Introduction; 1. The principal approaches preventing torture; 2. How effective has torture prevention been? 3. The situational conditions of institutional violence; 4. The production of worlds of torture; 5. Agents, structures and the social imaginary of human rights; 6. Taking situational theory to the field; 7. The promises and hazards of practice; Conclusion.

Critics have decried human rights approaches' a failure to attend to structural factors, but this book seeks to go beyond a 'stance of criticism'. It takes up the positive project of reimagining how human rights could attend to the worlds that produce systematic violations like torture so as to prevent it.

Danielle Celermajer is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She received a grant from the European Union to establish a Masters of Human Rights and Democratization in the Asia-Pacific course and a further one to work on the prevention of torture. Her books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (Cambridge, 2009), Power, Judgment and Political Evil: Hannah Arendt's Promise (with Andrew Schaap and Vrasidas Karalis, 2010), and A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (with Richard Sherwin, forthcoming).