In Carlos Liscano's Truck of Fools, an account of his imprisonment and torture in Uruguay between 1972 and 1985, the figure of the torturer is noted to paradoxically be “the same as oneself”. They are someone who usually “speaks the same language [and] shares the same values and prejudices [as us]”, and yet is also utterly Other than oneself.Footnote 1 To this paradox, Liscano asks three questions:
When they go home, what do they [the torturers] tell their wives, their girlfriends, children, parents, and friends? … Where do they come from? How does an individual become that? Footnote 2
This question – how does someone become a torturer? – is the question we ask in this article. It is a question posed by the many survivors of torture themselves – the question of those who have come face to face with the torturer but can still only imagine this figure as an incomprehensible “blank” whose actions mark the “total inversion” of the social world or the “unmaking” of reality.Footnote 3 The torturer is a figure who neither social science nor wider society has yet been able to adequately conceptualize. While many theories do exist seeking to explain this transformation, none quite overcome the sense of “shock” that we all still feel in witnessing that metamorphosis from good to evil.Footnote 4 We still don't know how someone becomes that. Incongruously, the body of the torturer stands in symmetry with that of the tortured in being – to speak with Judith Butler – “unnamable and ungrievable” in her socio-political positionality or – to turn to Giorgio Agamben – an “unnamable and unclassifiable being” in our thought and imagination.Footnote 5 The torturer is that which we cannot reconcile our selves with. To one degree or another, the torturer remains the classic personification of nightmare, monstrosity and evil.
In this article, we attempt to undo this image of the torturer as a radically Other subject. To do so, we lay out a micro-sociological theory of the process of becoming a torturer that demystifies the means by which torturers emerge. This theory draws from recent developments in sociological thought focusing on everyday practices, which ask how sets of actions happen in a very granular sense: in technical terms, this line of thinking seeks to ascertain the quiddity of social practices, whether crossing a road, cutting down a tree or torturing a body. We combine these theories with recent work in the study of consciousness to show how the process of becoming a torturer is rarely entirely purposefulFootnote 6 or decided upon, yet neither is it usually forced. Instead, becoming a torturer is shown to be related – largely – to situational factors that make it possible for anyone to become a torturer in particular circumstances. This situational theory of torture will, moreover, offer new ways to think about preventing torture.
To achieve this, we combine our work to form a holistic portrait of the torturer and their becoming. Specifically, we base our argument heavily on the work of Jonathan Luke Austin, which lays out the theory of torture glossed above in theoretical and empirical depth.Footnote 7 Austin describes torture as emerging through a circulatory system of knowledges (“inscriptions”), materials (“objects”) and humans (persons). He argues that torture emerges because alongside the jus cogens norm against torture – that which is legally codified and/or morally supported – there exists a historically deeper norm of torture, preserved in knowledges, materials and human persons. This norm of torture, Austin suggests, emerges at particular times due to situational dynamics that see individuals just like you or me carrying out torture, very frequently non-purposefully. According to Austin, the idea of torture emerging non-purposefully implies that torture is often an unthought practice, just like dancing, walking or having a conversation. Austin's thought here fits within a wider shift to studying violence through micro-sociological lenses.Footnote 8 This literature, however, has rarely focused on political violences – as Austin does – nor implicated a specifically “global” element into the study of violence and its circulation across borders. Alongside Austin's theory, a central source of empirical material in this paper is derived from Riccardo Bocco's work on memory, violence and cinema, which explores the (cultural) shaping of collective memories in post-conflict environments across Latin America and the Middle East.Footnote 9
Before proceeding, it is important to note that the definition and general understanding of torture used in this article is quite distinct from the legal definitions used in most studies of its violence. We take up a broadly sociological view of torture as one form of violence among many, and which thus cannot be a priori encapsulated in the legal definition found in, say, the 1984 United Nations (UN) Convention Against Torture. That legal definition stresses the importance of torture being understood as an intentionally inflicted form of harm. In this paper, we question the degree to which intentionality can be fully supported from a sociological and psychological perspective. In doing so, our goal is not to undermine the importance of legal definitions and understandings of torture; rather, it is to broaden our perspectives on the pathways by which torture becomes possible.
This paper now proceeds in five parts. First, we describe torture as a global practice that cannot be studied within the borders of a single State or attributed to any “type” of State. This step justifies refocusing our attention on the individual torturer as an object of inquiry, as opposed to assuming her actions to be dictated from above by military or political superiors. Second, we move to describing the conscience and consciousness of the figure of the torturer. We do so by noting how individuals find it very hard to torture – very few people are pathologically predisposed to its use – and that torturers are severely emotionally and psychologically damaged by torturing. Thirdly, we then describe how torturers – in their own words – rarely claim to have “chosen” to become torturers but, rather, that they more often slipped towards torture (with or without explicit orders to take this step). We thus argue that because torture is hard to carry out, is psychologically damaging and is not always ordered or chosen, we must pay greater attention to how these obstacles are overcome. In other words, we need to understand the “non-purposeful” emergence of torture. We do so by turning to state-of-the-art insights from the study of consciousness and noting how it is now recognized that subconscious knowledges are often enacted by individuals without them choosing or desiring to do so. It is this, we suggest, that often lies behind the non-purposeful phenomenon of torture today.
In the fourth section, we offer a detailed outline of Austin's theory of the material-semiotic emergence of torture in particular situations. Austin's theory focuses on seeing torture – or any social practice – as emerging through the webs of “relations” in which torturers, objects used in torture, and knowledge about torture are enmeshed. Essentially, Austin's theory focuses on what makes torture possible – in a practical sense – rather than the specific cause of torture in any one case (its “why”).Footnote 10 This approach incorporates a consideration, for example, of the growth in electrical torture in the twentieth century not only in terms of its capacity to hide bodily sequela of torture (a reason why it is used) but also in terms of how electric torture makes violence in general more possible by reducing contact between perpetrator and victim and providing a simple script for inflicting violence that makes torture “easier” than it would otherwise be.Footnote 11 We suggest that Austin's theory of torture compels us to see the becoming of a torturer as involving not a “decision” point of action but, rather, a “transition” point of slow transformation. The section closes by noting how this non-purposeful transition towards becoming a torturer can also create a cultural spiral of torture which, although being more evident in non-democratic States, is possible in all polities.
The final section discusses the practical implications of Austin's theory of torture and argues that we must construct a global ergonomics of care that alters the situational, material and human elements that lead to torture's non-purposeful emergence. This is complemented with a discussion of how to end cultural spirals of torture and a detailed description of a project of which the present authors are a part, the Violence Prevention Initiative, which seeks to operationalize Austin's theory and its novel mode of prevention.Footnote 12 We conclude by discussing the ethical and political implications of this jarring demand to care for the torturer.
The globality of torture
Torture is a global phenomenon.Footnote 13 We can see this by aggregating together all types of torture. In doing so, we move away from focusing attention on accusations of torture and ill-treatment made by “people held in connection with armed conflict and other situations of violence”.Footnote 14 Particularly in the twenty-first century, restricting our focus to such cases of detention risks creating an assumption that torture (or the most serious kinds of torture) is carried out principally within the borders of non-democratic States in the global South. This assumption tends to lead to this correlation (torture often occurs in non-democratic States) being mistaken for a causal mechanism that sees the emergence of torturers attributed to regime type. Political scientists, for example, have spoken of non-democratic States as being “pro-torture” regimes that use this violence strategically as a means of solidifying power by crushing opposition and spreading terror amongst a wider population.Footnote 15 However, if we broaden our scope to include all allegations of torture, irrespective of whether or not the State in question was peaceful, engaged in armed conflict (at home or abroad) or somewhere in between, we reveal the true globality of the practice of torture. To do so, we can take the recently created Ill-Treatment & Torture Data Collection Project dataset, which codes Amnesty International data on the incidences, perpetrators, motives, and judicial responses to torture and ill-treatment allegations.Footnote 16 As the map shown in Figure 1 suggests, it would appear that “all major states engaged in torture at some point between 1995 and 2005”.Footnote 17 Visualized spatially, these data thus reveal both the remarkable scope of torture allegations and practice across borders and that the occurrence of torture is not necessarily correlated with regime type. Democracies and dictatorships both produce torturers. Of course, there are possible structural differences between democracies and dictatorships that affect how torture specifically emerges, is authorized and/or is allowed to continue over time. Nonetheless, there remains a striking symmetry to justifications for torture, as enunciated by State or military leaders, whether democratic or autocratic. This is not to say, of course, that there is an equality in the frequency of torture as it is carried out in democratic or autocratic States. Indeed, as Austin puts it, it appears that democratic States more frequently “oscillate” in their employment of torture – seeing the practice returning in jumps and starts, over time – whereas autocratic States are often more “endemically” afflicted with torture, as it becomes part of everyday politics.Footnote 18 But given that torture is employed in both types of political structure, it is likely that these differences relate to something other than State type. And we see this possibility, also, in the frequency of torture in other diverse sites, such as care homes for the elderly or children.
Figure 1. Global Amnesty International torture allegations, 1995–2005.
More than this, Austin has demonstrated how torture is also global at a “micro-practical” level. Across the world, very similar torture techniques are employed. These are sometimes grouped into patterns or clusters of techniques favoured in one area of the world or another, but even taking this into account, “whatever the circumstances, whatever the culture, the words” of both victims and perpetrators “are astonishingly standard”.Footnote 19 Austin gives the example here of stress positions, noting how one technique described by the United States as the “prolonged stress standing position” can be found in identical form in the prisons of North Korea, albeit there being known as the “pigeon torture”.Footnote 20 . Similar patterns are evident with regard to torture practices such as waterboarding and the use of electricity, among many others.Footnote 21 Torturers across the world, and across regime types, draw on a very narrow repertoire of techniques to cause harm: a global convergence in torture practices thus exists, with most States not only employing torture but also frequently employing the same types of tortures. And this is especially surprising because, as Darius Rejali notes, and contrary to what is commonly thought,Footnote 22 “there is little evidence of top-down systematic training in specific techniques in the history of modern torture”.Footnote 23
Torture is, then, a globalized phenomenon, and this fact is critical to understanding the local production of torturers. The globality of torture means we cannot solely explain the “becoming-torturer” in terms of her training, indoctrination or being ordered to torture by a chain of command within “bad” political regimes. This is not to deny that concrete instances of torturers claiming to have been ordered to torture exist. Indeed, in some cases – the post-9/11 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) extraordinary rendition programme, the “five techniques” used by the British Army, the torture carried out by the Khmer Rouge, etc.Footnote 24 – the emergence of torture was hierarchically structured. Nonetheless, assuming that torture is always ordered from above is not tenable given that political leaders often claim to have also been following orders themselves, and many torturers note the reasons for their actions to have been unclear even to themselves (see below).Footnote 25 Assuming torture always to be ordered would rely on seeing certain political leaders as intrinsically bad in the means they are willing to employ. For democratic States, this is often seen in terms of “exceptionalism” whereby a state of emergency leads political leaders to employ torture.Footnote 26 Nonetheless, it is generally not believed that this “exceptional” employment of torture reveals anything larger about the validity of democratic forms of political rule.Footnote 27 Paradoxically, however, this belief is contradicted by the popular (even scientific) view that autocratic States are intrinsically predisposed to torture and are led absolutely from a centre of power commanding its subordinates’ every action.Footnote 28 It is notable, however, that reports on torture in autocratic States are rarely able to find evidence of the direct ordering of torture. For example, one UN Human Rights Council report on torture and deaths in detention in Syria notes how “the entrenched systematic nature of violations taking place within Government detention centres” makes “the giving of … orders superfluous”.Footnote 29 This begs the question, explored further below, of why or how it is possible that orders are superfluous. In addition, the frequency of torture's emergence in the military, police, and prison services of democratic States where such an “entrenched” torture culture does not exist in the same manner poses the same problem: why or how it is possible that torture emerges without orders in these contexts, and why – so often – are the same techniques used in these cases as in non-democratic ones? These are the questions with which we start our own inquiry now.
Torturers, conscience and consciousness
Questioning the centrality of the State or the party or the organization or the leader as the figure who ultimately decides on when and where torture will occur creates an immediate problem. Because torturers have previously been studied only at a distance, we lack a firm understanding of the torturer as an individual herself. The general public, social scientists and wider civil society have tended to consider the minds and bodies of those who become torturers as being in a subordinate role to superiors. Removing those superiors as the sole analytical variable thus returns us to “square one” in finding an explanation for how someone becomes a torturer –and so we are compelled to analyze not the torture system of any particular country or type of State but, rather, individual torturers themselves. Much as we cannot explain racism, patriarchy or socio-economic inequality without considering both systemic (macro)-level factors and individual (micro)-level factors, so the lack of attention to the figure of the individual torturer and her task is a key obstacle to our understanding of this issue.
Nonetheless, there is a difficulty in understanding the mind and body of the torturer. This problem was alluded to earlier, along with our focus on how torture has been seen as something alien to most people. The problem here is what Lawrence Keeley has described as the psychic unity of humanity:
All members of our species have within rather narrow limits of variation the same basic physiology, psychology, and intellect. This concept does not exclude individual variations in temperament or even the various components of intellect, but finds that such variations have no value in explaining social or cultural differences between groups. … Anthropologists have long recognized that the many and profound differences in technology, behaviour and political organization, and values found among societies and cultures can be best explained by reference to ecology, history, and other material and social factors.Footnote 30
One central aspect of this psychic unity is what Keeley calls a universal distaste for violence.Footnote 31 Violence is (almost) everywhere, but it is also seen as a bad thing (almost) everywhere. Moreover, very few people find it easy to be violent. Only 2% of soldiers will shoot their guns to kill, for example, without extensive military drilling of this action.Footnote 32 Most people shoot to miss, in order to avoid killing – and this is true even with a highly dehumanized (or radically “Othered”) enemy.Footnote 33 This general distaste for violence has been extensively empirically evidenced by microsociologists. As Randall Collins writes, “[m]icro-situational evidence … shows that violence is hard. No matter how motivated someone may be, if the situation does not unfold [in a certain way,] violence will not proceed.”Footnote 34
Most people do not want to torture others, even if they might hypothetically support it. The act is somehow incomprehensible, and hence the figure of the torturer is always radically Othered. It is thus the case that once the State or leader is removed as a causal variable ordering violence, most explanations turn towards finding psychological pathology within individuals. This is what occurred at Abu Ghraib, for example, where perpetrators were seen as “bad apples”.Footnote 35 But there is no evidence that interrogators, guards and soldiers who torture in detention facilities are uniformly pathological.Footnote 36 The great majority are born normal in their disinclination to violence. Indeed, the pathology explanation is folklore.Footnote 37 If this is the case, however, then torture should be impossible. If torturers are not pathological, nor always ordered and find it hard to torture, torture should not happen. But, of course, it does. To understand how torturers emerge, we therefore suggest, we now need to consider them first as fully human subjects who, at one time, were exactly like you or me. We need to listen to their voices and understand how normal people become torturers. So let's begin listening.
Conscience and the torturer's voice
Following Austin,Footnote 38 two main types of statement reoccur in the voices of torturers. First, an extreme psychological derangement of the torturer once they begin torturing is evident. This includes the expression of an array of contradictory, and always negative, emotions: fear, envy, despair, etc. For example, victims often remark of their torturer:
How little he values himself. He envies the prisoner for his ideas, his relationships, his political loyalty. He envies his knowledge, his culture, the books he's read. He envies the woman who is his partner and also in prison.Footnote 39
In extreme cases, where the torturer is forced to live alongside his victims, this lack of self-worth extends into a substantial disruption of his wider life. As one Argentinian torturer is reported to have stated to his victims, with whom he was living in close quarters and met on a daily basis, coming to communicate with them more frequently than his own family:
Don't you realize that you are to blame for the fact that we don't want to go to our homes? With you one can talk about cinema, theatre, it is possible to talk about any topic. It is possible to talk about politics … You are the women that we believed would exist only in novels or in films, and this has destroyed our families!Footnote 40
These personal emotional and psychological difficulties in coming face to face with the victims of torture are found in many fictional and documentary cinematic accounts emerging from Latin America. In Carne de perro, for instance, we follow the life of a former torturer during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile as he searches for a new “identity” after the erasure of becoming a torturer.Footnote 41 This fictional account echoes the documentary El mocito by Marcela Saïd, which follows a man looking for redemption after serving in an illegal detention centre while a very young man and having worked closely with torturers.Footnote 42 Beyond the more banal feelings of frustration, envy and alienation from ordinary life, torturers can be dramatically affected in other ways. Frantz Fanon, for example, wrote of the mental disorders created by the predations of colonial violence within their perpetrators. He spoke of a European police inspector who smoked five packs of cigarettes a day and had recurrent nightmares. The inspector was involved in the daily torture of Algerians, but what troubled him was the way in which that violence escaped the interrogation room and saw him start to beat his wife and children. The inspector was seeking treatment from Fanon “to help him [continue to] torture Algerian patriots without having a guilty conscience”.Footnote 43 Violence here is shown not to be containable “in the mold of an instrument” but instead as bleeding “beyond the limits imposed by a given task and [becoming] a reality, an opacity or inertia that inevitably saturates all relations”.Footnote 44 This finding is unsurprising, of course, if we consider the similar mental illnesses suffered by regular soldiers carrying out legitimate forms of violence (shooting, bombing, etc.).Footnote 45 And these disturbances also echo those of the survivors of torture: in clinical terms, being tortured often results in psychological dissociation, “a structured separation of such processes as memory, identity, emotions, and thoughts” punctuated by “intrusions of horror in which [victims] experience themselves as detached from the self” and from reality “in unreal or distorted ways”.Footnote 46 It is the case, then, not only that doing violence is hard, but also that it works to profoundly traumatize the perpetrator: it destroys the world of tortured and torturer alike.
The second recurrent type of statement found in the voices of torturers is a self-perplexed confusion over how torture began. Take the words of an interrogator who admitted to torturing detainees in US-occupied Iraq, and who described a
[m]echanism of many interlocking parts that pushes the thing forward. It grows like an ink stain and spreads like a disease, and along the way its face changes, so you end up in a place totally unlike where you started.Footnote 47
Alternatively, consider Kenneth Bell, a US Army platoon leader operating in Afghanistan in 2008. Bell describes how “on the ride home after a particularly long mission, we drove into a near ambush that killed my gunner and left me bloody and shaken. Going on with life was the hardest thing I ever did, but the mission demanded it.”Footnote 48 A few days later, Bell received information from an informant that he believed identified the man responsible for that ambush. He planned a raid on the village where the man was thought to be. Bell notes that although he “was long used to the mechanics of these sorts of operations”, “[e]verything happened so quickly once we arrived at the village that there was no time to stop and consider where I really wanted the mission to end”.Footnote 49 Finally coming face to face with his suspect outside the suspect's home, he details his emotional state as he began questioning the man:
I felt the bile of hatred rising … inside of me. I slowly realized what I had wanted to do all along. I was tired of playing by the rules. He was in my grasp and with him the facts about the local attacks. … My interpreter and I could find a way into the home with the suspect, and he could either tell me everything about the networks in the area or he could bleed. … The bold words that I had long ago spoken to my soldiers about the importance of morality in combat were forgotten. … Just as I turned to my interpreter to suggest that we dip inside the home for a private chat with our host, my hatred caught in my throat like a bone. In that pause, I scrambled for the right reason to make a decision. Torture. Don't torture. Where there should have been an answer there was only darkness. It would be wrong to say that I made a choice. Footnote 50
Choice does not produce torture here; choice or decision is, in fact, entirely absent. Torture always seems to “make no sense” to the torturers themselves. Instead, a whole set of as yet unknown elements seem to constitute that “mechanism of interlocking parts” propelling individuals into the act of torture. In Algeria, conscripts described this process in terms of a glissement – a slippage – towards violent interrogation:
We let ourselves slip [on se laissait glisser]. And then we became indifferent, the slaps, the insults, the blows we inflicted on the prisoners, it didn't affect us anymore. We were caught in a dirty game, everything seemed natural.Footnote 51
Such glissements are not what we usually think about when torture occurs. But they appear to agree with the earlier mentioned fact that torture does not need to be ordered but, rather, is often like a habitual reflex that people “slip” towards. Again, however, describing torture in terms of glissements poses a problem. If neither the individual torturer nor the system of which they are but one part necessarily decides to torture (in many cases), how does torture occur nonetheless? Where does the figure of the torturer emerge from if she herself does not desire to become this figure? Coming to this question now requires us to move away from the conscience of the torturer and towards her consciousness.
Consciousness beyond the autobiographical self
When considering torturers, attention is normally focused on studying their autobiographical self. The autobiographical self “is the narrated self, which is created, recognised and confirmed through social performances” and which appears “in the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves and to others.”Footnote 52 It is from these stories that most analyses of the figure of the torturer have derived. Broadly speaking, these narratives create explanations for torture that do not require a focus on the individual themselves. For example, the frequent use of dehumanization as an explanation for torture connects an individual's actions to an ideological discourse held by wider society.Footnote 53 This ideology is posited to enable torture because victims are not regarded as human.Footnote 54 While there is surely truth in this assessment, it does not follow that dehumanization is a sufficient cause for torture. As we saw above, microsociological evidence of violence demonstrates that people are unwilling to be violent against even highly dehumanized populations. Likewise, Austin has shown the same for torture by analyzing videos of its use.Footnote 55 While dehumanization may make demonized groups vulnerable, it is doubtful that it alone is sufficient to lead directly to violence. Beyond dehumanization, one usually finds “strategic” explanations for torture as also being enunciated by the autobiographical self of torturers. These strategic explanations are usually interrogational in form and draw on tropes like that of the “ticking time bomb” as justifications for torturing in the name of a greater good.Footnote 56 Again, these micro-level strategic explanations (“I tortured him in order to get information”) are echoes of macro-level State or military policy (“We torture only in order to get information”). They are based on abstractions away from studying the individual torturer and her practices. Most commonly, these autobiographical explanations for action are given by wider society or individual torturers when they are asked why they did something and are given time to reflect on this and build a self-reassuring narrative. But when pressed, or not given time to reflect, as we saw above, the equally common answer is: “I don't know.”Footnote 57
The puzzlement of torturers at their own actions must be explored, therefore, beyond the autobiographical self. Today, both neuroscientists and philosophers are coming to the firm conclusion that the autobiographical self is only one part of a broader set of “inter-communicating layers” that make up human consciousness and – therein – determine how practices are carried out with greater or lesser levels of “deliberation” (i.e., “decision”).Footnote 58 The autobiographical self is the last level of human consciousness, and many of its explanations for what the body actually does in practice are made post-hoc. They are self-justifications for action rather than being reliable indicators of the causes of violence or other social practices. Typically, by the time – for example – a criminal reaches a courtroom, they have established a more-or-less plausible and more-or-less consistent narrative that will, if not justify, at least mitigate their actions. But their statements immediately following a crime or violent incident are usually far more confused: they are non-linear, fragmentary and often without clear justification.Footnote 59 An analogy can be drawn here with police shootings in the United States, which will help “de-dramatize” our claims by distancing us from the socio-political complexities of torture. In one recent police shooting, an African-American man named Charles Kinsey was non-fatally shot by police while assisting an autistic man whom police incorrectly feared was holding a gun and had thus surrounded. Kinsey recounts:
I thought it was a mosquito bite, and when it hit me I had my hands in the air, and I'm thinking, “I just got shot!” I'm saying, “Sir, why did you shoot me?”, and his words to me were, “I don't know.”Footnote 60
The policeman who shot Kinsey is reported as also having been asked by another officer, “Why did you shoot this guy?”, to which the shooter replied again, “I don't know.”Footnote 61 However, police later claimed that the officer shot because the autistic man was not obeying commands and that the officer had fired in order to “save Kinsey's life”.Footnote 62 This later explanation is that of the autobiographical self: it creates a justificatory narrative. And that narrative is not necessarily (though it may be) deliberately imagined with malfeasance but is, rather, a cognitive necessity for any individual to understand their actions in and on the world and to provide a coherent narrative of self. To remain with the answer “I don't know” is to potentially dramatically undermine a person's sense of self. Nonetheless, the theory of consciousness we are outlining here echoes, in some ways, the basic idea of psychoanalysis that many of our actions are dictated by an “unconscious” element of which we are rarely cognitively aware.Footnote 63 The very point of “therapy” or “analysis” is, indeed, to introduce an awareness of this unconscious into our autobiographical self and allow it to be productively molded into part of our self-identity. Today, this perspective has support from neuroscience and, indeed, we sometimes act before thinking or act without knowing why.Footnote 64 Sometimes, “I don't know” is the correct answer to a question. The answer is correct because the autobiographical level of consciousness – which manifests our self-identity – is often not the source of action. Instead, it is another of those “inter-communicating” layers of consciousness which prompts action. Specifically, these more basic layers of consciousness often prompt human action through what are called “somatic markers”. As Erik Ringmar explains:
A somatic marker attaches an affective value to an event, a person or a situation, telling us not what the event, person or situation mean in general but what they mean to us. Once provided by an affective marker, the green marzipan coating on a creamy bun can suddenly recreate the memory of a visit to a fashionable café as a child in the last century. Our bodies rely on such madeleine effects for the “anticipation of situations, previewing of possible outcomes, navigation of the possible future, and invention of management solutions.”Footnote 65
A somatic marker is a cue for action, but these cues operate without conscious deliberation. They result in non-deliberative action. They are thoughtless, resulting in actions without decisions. The self simply does not know what is happening when these cues (somatic markers) are activated. A simple example:
Consider the proverbial case of a theater in which a fire suddenly breaks out. In this state of emergency there is no time to think but luckily we do not have to. Instead of interpreting the situation we react to the mood of panic which quickly spreads throughout the building. We begin by acting, as it were, and only later will we become consciously aware of what we are doing.Footnote 66
The examples of torturers slipping towards violence cited earlier are, we want to suggest, evoked through similar cues, similar non-conscious – or, rather, pre-conscious – forms of action, that see violence merge non-purposefully at particular times and places. And this, we argue, is key to understanding how torture often begins. Several questions emerge from this claim, however. The first and most problematic is the difficulties it poses to legal understandings of torture that recognize it as an intentional act under the 1984 Convention Against Torture. For some, speaking of torture as non-purposeful in form will risk occluding individual or collective responsibility for its emergence. While this is a real concern, we refer our readers back to the introduction of this article and the important caveat that our discussion focuses, broadly speaking, on a general sociological definition/understanding of torture distinct from the concerns of legal definitions and fields of practice. Although we acknowledge that taking such a definition is not unproblematical, we believe its use serves to productively make the picture surrounding our understanding of political violences like torture more complicated and – potentially (see below) – allows for new understandings of preventing political violence that cannot be obtained through ideational or legal approaches.Footnote 67 However, the question remains: where do cues for violence come from, and in which situations are they activated to produce a torturer in action?
Becoming a torturer
The process of unintentionally becoming a torturer can now be unpacked. Following Austin, torture emerges through the entanglement of an individual in material-semiotic webs of relations that activate – at particular points in time and space – latent cues (somatic markers) for action which we all possess to one degree or another.Footnote 68 The term “material-semiotics” is a specialized one drawn mainly from the field of science, technology and society studies, where it is commonly employed in order to study social practices in action and to ascertain the “quiddity” or “just-whatness” of those practices.Footnote 69 As John Law puts it, material-semiotic approaches “treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located”.Footnote 70 The perspective stresses that no individual person (or material object) can be said to have an essence which dictates their actions. There is no “natural” torturer. Instead, the tendencies of individuals are generated through our relationships with other individuals, material objects, and forms of knowledge. These relationships give us certain capacities to act in one way or another,Footnote 71 and among those tendencies and capacities, Austin argues, is torture. Indeed, Austin goes so far as to describe there being a norm of torture that sits alongside the norm against torture.Footnote 72 This norm, he asserts, is founded on the relationships that all humans maintain with knowledges and objects that circulate across borders and preserve the global possibility of torture, in spite of a human tendency to find violence difficult. These theoretical specificities aside, Austin also lays out this material-semiotic theory of torture in simpler terms by constructing a model of torture made up of (1) situations, (2) materials and (3) knowledges.Footnote 73
Let's start with situations and begin by considering the individuals most likely to carry out torture in contemporary society. A majority of these individuals – guards, soldiers, interrogators, etc. – are already engaged in forms of legitimate violence. To prepare them to use legitimate violence, these individuals are trained in ways that, to some degree, reduce the general human disinclination to violence. As Françoise Sironi has shown, a pédagogie noire is employed here.Footnote 74 This involves processes of desensitization and rituals of violence amongst groups of violence workers themselves (e.g. initiation rituals for new recruits) that increase their capacities for acting violently against others.Footnote 75 Importantly, however, while such a pédagogie noire might be a necessary condition for torture, it cannot be said to be a sufficient one. Again, it is important here to recall the globality of torture and that torture frequently is not carried out by violence workers subjected to such a pédagogie noire. It is not claimed, for example, that all members of the US military tortured bodies in Iraq or Afghanistan, despite all being subject to a pédagogie noire. The question becomes – as Sironi would no doubt agree – what pushes individuals subjected to this pédagogie noire into carrying out violence at any particular time.
It appears – when we turn to psychology – that it is a combination of a pédagogie noire and situational dynamics that leads to torture. A situation can be considered in material-semiotic terms as a particular context or setting in which an individual comes to be related with new objects, environments and people.Footnote 76 Because situations are constantly in flux, it has long been known that being placed in certain situations can prompt unexpected behaviour. The classic example here is the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which “ordinary” university students were placed in a mock prisoner–guard scenario and where the guards very quickly began acting cruelly towards the prisoners.Footnote 77 It appeared that it was the situation that was driving behaviour, rather than decision, thought or psychological traits: situations create unexpected behaviours by providing “cues” for types of actions. Violence workers like soldiers or intelligence professionals are often placed in such scenarios, and particular situational dynamics within these settings may encourage torture. Such dynamics might include a lack of hierarchical oversight (command structure), a lack of communicative capacity between violence workers and a population (e.g., nobody speaks the same language), or an intensity of emotion (anger, desire for vengeance etc.). These factors can overcome normal “ethics” training against human rights abuses and lead to torture even when it has not been ordered. However, situations alone are not enough to explain how someone “becomes” a torturer without explaining how these situational cues are converted into “appropriate” scripts for action (i.e., torture). The question becomes how people know how to torture once they are placed into a particular situation. Indeed, the situational perspective is often – in psychology – placed in contrast with a “trait theory” perspective, discussed above, which implies that people are more or less inclined towards violence. However, the situational perspective itself relies on implying “universal” traits for human beings when placed in particular situations. The reason? If a particular situation acts as a cue for certain actions, individuals must know what those actions are when prompted, and because most situational theories of violence do not specify the origins of those scripts, it is implied that these are somehow “natural” to human beings.
It is thus that Austin's second focus is on materials (or “objects”).Footnote 78 Austin has shown how the presence of particular material objects in a situation can encourage or discourage torture. To understand this point, Austin draws on a different, more readily relatable form of violence. Opponents of gun control in the United States claim that “guns don't kill people, people kill people”. By contrast, advocates of gun control argue that the simple presence of a gun increases the likelihood of violence in certain situations. This so-called “weapons effect” can be applied to torture.Footnote 79 Austin draws on several examples here, but the most compelling is that of electrical torture. The spread of portable objects like the Taser stun gun or cattle prods has resulted in electrical torture becoming one of the most common forms of torture across the world.Footnote 80 These objects “encourage” violence in two ways. First, they make torture easier by reducing its infliction to the press of a button. This form of torture is not fatiguing and does not require the perpetrator to touch the victim. Second, the device intrinsically provides a script for action to be followed when a particular situational cue makes torture more possible. Because the device is intended – in legitimate settings – to produce harm, it already provides a script of “how to torture” that is readily available to violence workers. Another example provided by Austin is that of the chair.Footnote 81 Chairs are commonly used in torture across the world. This practice is referred to in Syria as the “German Chair”, in Brazil as the “Dragon Chair”, and in Iran as the “Apollo Chair”.Footnote 82 Most commonly, chairs are used in order to construct specific stress positions whereby the victim will be placed in a chair in a particular way that hurts their spine, their arms or another part of their body. The presence of a chair in an interrogation situation can be said to encourage torture, Austin says, because – like the Taser – it makes torture easier by aiding the construction of stress positions that do not require intervention from the torturer or contact with the victim's body. When it comes to the chair, however, which is an everyday object, it is not immediately clear per se where the script for its use in this manner comes from. While a situation may cue torture (i.e., act as a somatic marker), and the chair may provide a material direction or capacity for action, a more precise “script” for action is still required to make torture possible. It is for this reason that Austin's model for the becoming of a torturer has its third element: what he refers to either as “inscriptions” or, more simply, “knowledges”.
Scripts for torture emerge, Austin notes, from culture.Footnote 83 Let's return to the Stanford Prison Experiment, which has been very heavily criticized amongst psychologists for the inclusion of extensive “demand characteristics” in the set-up of the experiment.Footnote 84 Essentially, the scientists told the subjects of the experiment how to behave. As one later claimed:
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona [of a “bad cop” or torturer]. I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another personality before you step out on the stage.Footnote 85
Being cued by the experimental situation towards acting violently, the subject of this experiment constructed a torturous personae based on scenes he had seen in the then recent film Cool Hand Luke that involved torture.Footnote 86 And while this individual claimed to have done this deliberately, Austin notes how this also occurs very frequently within torture as a non-deliberative process.Footnote 87 Cued into action by situational and material dynamics, individuals follow scripts that may be fictional, scientific or otherwise constructed. These scripts are peripheral knowledges that are not absorbed into the store of information held by an individual consciousness as directly related to torture per se, but when cued towards torture by particular situations or objects can be drawn upon as direct knowledge of “how to” torture.Footnote 88 As Sironi has noted, some of these scripts come from the pédagogie noire of violence workers – but they can also be more basic. The famous images of Abu Ghraib, for example, include naked detainees placed in the intrinsically violent American football positions that many perpetrators had learned from playing the sport and/or forms of violence found in frat party hazing rituals.Footnote 89 Likewise, amongst the most common forms of torture across the Middle East is the falaqa (also known elsewhere as the bastinado), which involves foot whipping. This form of torture is simply an intensified version of corporal punishment commonly used against children in the region.Footnote 90 Experiencing this form of punishment creates a peripheral script for action that can be employed when the individual is cued to do so by situational dynamics. Consider another description given by Austin drawing on a story told by a Lebanese fighter of his actions during the civil war:
We had barely started shaving. We were children in love with war. We copied the style of shooting in films like Gun Smoke, and Rin Tin Tin films, and Westerns. We thought people would get back up again. We didn't understand that we'd really killed them.Footnote 91
In this example it is – again – cinematic scripts for violence that individuals draw upon when placed in particular situations, and indeed, others have reported the same phenomenon in conflicts across the world.Footnote 92 Beyond cinema, Austin notes how similar scripts are derived from texts including training manuals describing techniques that are prohibited, fictional novels, scientific articles, and personal memoires of violence workers, as well as from television and paintings, alongside what he terms cultural knowledges, including – yes – children's games, sporting activities and initiation rites.Footnote 93 These sources of knowledge are all mundane and banal. They are sources of knowledge of “how to” torture that are possessed by torturers and non-torturers alike. But when placed into a situation that provides a cue for violence, alongside material objects that encourage and provide capacities for its enaction, these knowledges come to be instantiated in the real world, often thoughtlessly and automatically. And, importantly, both these knowledges and the aforementioned material objects circulate across borders. It is this, Austin suggests, that has led to the globalization of torture in terms of its second component: the convergence in torture practices across borders. Because many materials used in torture are either everyday objects, like chairs, or objects that can be legitimately circulated, like stun guns, and because many knowledges used in torture are not designed for that purpose, like films, books, novels or scientific texts, they flow unobstructed around the world and lead to the emergence of very similar torture practices across time and space. It is, then, this dynamic between situations, materials and knowledges that, according to Austin, frequently leads an individual to first becoming a torturer, without intention, purpose or any decision point.
To conclude our discussion of this model, let us consider another example – one which neatly contains each of its elements within a single story. It begins with a US soldier called Chris who is deployed to Iraq.Footnote 94 Quickly, he realizes that abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees has become normalized. He recounts his first instance of becoming involved in such torture as occurring when his squad was sent on an intelligence-gathering assessment intended to capture a suspected insurgent and question him. His squad was told to use any means necessary to capture the insurgent. A target was located after a sustained firefight with the suspect and others inside the house where he was captured:
The man was bound to a chair and interrogated. During the course of the interrogation the team beat him, shocked him at various places on his body with the electrical cord torn from a lamp. That technique was suggested by a squad member who claimed to have seen it used in a movie.Footnote 95
Within this story we find (1) a situation that “cues” torture – a lack of hierarchical oversight, a command to meet the objectives by any means, and a sustained firefight resulting in high emotional tension; (2) a material object with the capacity to be used for torture (the lamp) and which suggests a particular (electrical) script for torture; and (3) a script for torture derived from a popular-cultural cinematic source that employs the aforementioned material object. This particular example comes from an individual who was initiated into these events entirely by “surprise”.Footnote 96 He was – before going to Iraq – a normal individual who became a torturer through the dynamics described by the model we are introducing in this paper. And the consequences for his self-worth and psyche were substantial: he describes how, whilst in Iraq and after his return to the United States, he “kept telling [him]self it was somebody else [who tortured], it wasn't me … I just kept believing that it was somebody else that did it”, because “I … thought that they [that second person] were a monster. (Pause) That that person had no place back in the States. I had no place back in the States.”Footnote 97
Becoming such a monster, in this case and those described earlier, as well as countless others, did not involve a specific decision to do so, or a specific order to do so. Instead, this model of torture compels us to think about the process of becoming a torturer in terms of transition points. One becomes a torturer through a transition that occurs when a situation cues the possibility of torture through a somatic marker, torture is encouraged through the presence of particular material objects, and appropriate scripts fitting these situations and material objects can be found within the peripheral knowledges of individuals. This completed model is depicted in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Model for non-purposefully becoming a torturer. Reproduced from J. L. Austin, Small Worlds of Violence, above note 7, p. 394.
Beyond the basic version of Austin's model depicted in Figure 2, it is important to add a further human element to this discussion. In one way, this model can be seen as an “ideal-type” in which the (re-)emergence of torture in societies in which it does not exist can be understood and envisaged. The closest real-world case to this model is a democratic, wealthy and stable State that has no recent history of torture (examples would include certain Scandinavian states, perhaps). In these States, torture is most likely to occur through this model: legitimate violence workers are placed into a situation that provides a cue for torture alongside supporting materials and knowledges that provide scripts for action. In such cases, torture can emerge entirely without decision, desire or thought. In most cases, however, there is already likely to be a culture of torture – to some degree – that further encourages the emergence of torture at a very human level. It is thus important to understand that the process of becoming a torturer outlined here is one of a non-deliberate initiation into this act. Once enough people have been thusly initiated, however, it becomes critical to think of a continuum of types of torturers in terms of their level of experience in this activity. Austin thus distinguishes between initiates and specialists in torture.Footnote 98 Specialists in torture are those who “innovate” in this practice and deliberately think through specific ways to torture and/or are able to use the procedure for more or less strategic ends. Importantly, such specialists also circulate across borders quite freely. For example, it is reported that many interrogation and/or torture techniques used by the Syrian State were “imported” by a man named Alois Brunner. Brunner was an Austrian Schutzstaffel (SS) officer during the Second World War and is believed to be responsible for thousands of deportations of European Jews to gas chambers as part of the Holocaust. He fled to Syria after the war and resided in Damascus, where he is reported to have collaborated with the mukhabarat (intelligence agencies) on interrogation practices.Footnote 99 For a more recent example, in 2004 US Colonel James Steele was sent as a civilian adviser to US-occupied Iraq, where he trained paramilitary units of the Iraqi security forces. Previously, Steele had served in Vietnam and as an “adviser” during the Dirty War in El Salvador. He is personally implicated in torture in Iraq, and in training Iraqis to torture.Footnote 100 Similar stories of such “specialists” circulating knowledge can be found in French Algeria, wider Latin America, the Soviet Union and far beyond. Here, it is humans who are spreading knowledge across borders.Footnote 101
When considering such specialists in torture, however, it must be kept in mind that they are very likely to have begun torturing much as any other torturer: without intending or wanting to. The capacity to become such a specialist in torture might be seen, for example, in the European police officer serving in Algeria that Fanon described. This officer recounted how torture – for him – became “a matter of personal success” and how among torturers “we're sort of competing” because “you need to use your head in this kind of work. You need to know when to tighten your grip and when to loosen it. You have to have a feel for it.”Footnote 102 This kind of “feel” for torture comes after long years of practice in its form and results in the kind of “competition” and “pride” in the activity that the officer demonstrates. But this does not negate the overall psychological harm it causes to the perpetrator: the officer was visiting Fanon for his services as a physician in order to help him go on torturing because he felt that the violence he was exercising was getting out of control. Indeed, specialists in torture must be seen as psychologically damaged individuals, as being afflicted by an illness and needing care. This is the point made by Françoise Sironi and buttressed by Austin's theory which suggests that first “becoming” a torturer is only rarely a conscious choice. But more than care for the torturer in and of himself, this act of care is also critical for wider society: as Sironi notes, and Fanon's example of the officer beating his wife and children demonstrates, even when war or hostilities provoking torture in a particular setting halt, these specialists continue to exist in society (only rarely are all held accountable for their actions), exercising forms of violence on different subjects – their families, domestic prison populations, etc. Caring for the torturer is thus part of caring for wider society as a whole, and indeed, failure to do this often results in what Austin terms a cultural “spiral” of torture taking hold.Footnote 103 Because specialists in torture continue life as normal after periods of high political conflict, they can infect or transmit their knowledge to other initiate torturers and so make torture even more likely to emerge amongst other individuals. This additional model of the cultural spiral of torture is seen in Figure 3, which shows how as time progresses, more and more individuals become caught in the spiral and are initiated into torture. It is, then, both this spiral and the wider transition points which lead to people becoming torturers that we need to disrupt in order to prevent torture. And so we now move to describing how caring for the torturer is, perhaps jarringly, the best way to prevent torture.
Figure 3. The cultural spiral of torture. Reproduced from J. L. Austin, Small Worlds of Violence, above note 7, p. 287.
Towards a global ergonomics of care: Prevention without intention
Traditionally, efforts to prevent torture have followed one of several rights-based approaches. Generally, these approaches follow what Hagan, Schoenfeld and Palloni describe as “largely separate lines conceived in terms of health and crime”.Footnote 104 For example, claims of torture resulting from psychological pathology (the “bad apples” thesis) have led to a desire to prevent individuals so afflicted from taking up positions of authority in political or military institutions.Footnote 105 By contrast, security sector governance programmes have sought to improve State, society and military relations by following a modified Hippocratic oath to “do no harm while promoting human rights” and so to restore the health of the chronically abuse-prone non-democratic or otherwise afflicted State institution by promoting democracy, accountability, transparency, legal compliance, public legitimacy and so on.Footnote 106 Likewise, the wider human rights literature sees instilling respect for rights and norms against violence in political and military institutions as eventually leading to the internalization of these ideas to the degree that the possibility of abuse reduces.Footnote 107 These basic ideas – institutional reform and the dissemination of norms – are at the centre of most peacebuilding and conflict prevention schemes.Footnote 108
In addition, rights-based approaches supplement their focus on institutional health with prosecuting the crime of abuses that do emerge, thus giving teeth to their ideational components. Kathryn Sikkink, for example, has theorized the emergence of a global “justice cascade” whereby human rights prosecutions substantively reduce the potential for further abuses by increasing costs on political and military leaders.Footnote 109 The threat of being held to account for the crime of violent human rights abuses is postulated to gradually lead to prevention, and States and organizations working in this field are thus encouraged to implement mechanisms of human rights monitoring and accountability.Footnote 110 By way of practical example, attention has recently been focused on Nepal, where advocates of the rights-based approach have developed a novel means of creating a financial disincentive to carrying out torture among the State's security forces. By pushing for the improved vetting of police and military forces who serve in UN peacekeeping missions, to which Nepal and other States are large contributors, and excluding all those who have been implicated in torture and other human rights abuses, the claim is that the prospect of losing the (relative to national standards) high wages of serving in a peacekeeping force will deter perpetrators from carrying out abuses at home.Footnote 111
These rights-based models of prevention, as depicted in Figure 4, can be described as relying on conceptualizing a decision point of violence at which a non-torturer becomes a torturer. Particular push factors for this decision might include pathology, emotion, dehumanization or ideology. Preventive measures are thus designed to push back against these factors by introducing disincentives (i.e. punitive punishments), legal prohibitions, human rights monitoring, etc., so as to prevent a decision to become a torturer being made. At first glance, the model of becoming a torturer that we have sketched above may well seem worrying for advocates of this preventive model. If torture can emerge without being ordered or desired, or without any decision being taken, then prevention might seem impossible. We should therefore clarify that we do not deny that torture is sometimes decided and ordered, and that the rights-based approaches are critical in these cases. Moreover, the rights-based approach is critical in dismantling the cultural spiral of torture described above. Nonetheless, Austin argues strongly that the rights-based approach alone is insufficient in tackling the norm of torture that he identifies as surrounding its non-purposeful emergence.Footnote 112 Indeed, if much torture besides these intentional instances is in fact non-intentional, then we require an entirely different and complementary mode of prevention. For example, while it would be desirable to see legal repercussions for the US government and CIA officials who authorized the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme, it is notable that less than 200 people were detained by the CIA, and only a fraction of those tortured, whereas – by contrast – there are thousands of allegations of torture against US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq whose actions were not contained within this decisionist framework of action but, instead, seemed to occur without any deliberate purposefulness.Footnote 113 Likewise, torture in many settings other than war or conflict (domestic prison systems, police stations, etc.) is more likely to occur through this non-purposeful means than to be ordered or desired. We may go so far as to suggest, then, that without a new kind of preventive strategy for torture we are “missing the target” vis-à-vis the social origins of a majority of cases of torture. The challenge then becomes imagining a form of prevention operating outside intention, deliberation and/or desire – that is, prevention without intention.
Figure 4. The classical model of preventing torture. Reproduced from J. L. Austin, Small Worlds of Violence, above note 7, p. 392.
Imagine a traffic accident. One thinks of one or more vehicles, in a collision, with deaths or injuries; crumpled crash barriers, ambulances and so on. Note, first, how unlike vis-à-vis torture, our thinking about the context of such a traffic accident already includes preventive measures; that is to say, we may think of the crash barrier or the deployed airbags, or any number of other safety features used by modern vehicles. Those elements represent an entirely different type of prevention to the classical (rights-based) one outlined above. Consider, for example, the case of a
4 A.M. [car] crash that was classified by police as caused by a drowsy driver. Yes, if the driver in question did not drive past his or her “bedtime” (driver factor) the crash would not have occurred. However, the crash could have also been prevented by a drowsy-driver detection system (a vehicular factor), a road-departure warning system (a vehicular factor), or an effective rumble strip that alerts the driver if leaving the lane (environmental factor).Footnote 114
Preventing deaths in traffic accidents involves both an ideational component (countering the view that it is socially acceptable to decide to drive excessively fast, fatigued or intoxicated) and the introduction of material and semiotic elements (crash barriers, clearly legible road signage, etc.) that prevent harm without relying on tackling (human ideational) causes per se. The ideational component here involves affecting human decisions: do not decide to drive while drunk. The material and semiotic elements represent a form of “indirect” or “non-causal” prevention that will operate irrespective of any human decision and so also work to prevent (or at least reduce the harm caused by) traffic accidents that are not caused by any decision. These “indirect” means of prevention are, in essence, forms of care. Crash barriers “care” for the general public passively, in the background, and in a way we don't notice, as do technologies built into cars over the years to increase their safety during crashes. All these factors form part of the ergonomics of safety. Ergonomics is about the study and design of products, systems, processes or structures that manage the interactions between objects and structures in the most functional, comfortable and safe manner possible. The lids on medicines are ergonomically designed to prevent children opening them, for example. Ergonomics is a form of care.
At the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, a new research project entitled the Violent Prevention (VIPRE) Initiative is working precisely to develop a global ergonomics of care vis-à-vis violent human rights abuses and, more specifically, torture.Footnote 115 This model was designed based on Austin's theory of torture and the model of prevention he lays out for that theory.Footnote 116 If we return to Figure 2, above, which depicts Austin's model of the non-purposeful emergence of torture, we can now identify two sites of intervention into the ergonomics of torture that were not previously noticed. Specifically, the challenge becomes finding ways of actively intervening in and preventing the situational cues of torture and/or the material directions and knowledge scripts that make up the transition (as opposed to decision) point of torture. The approach to this task taken by the VIPRE Initiative is to identify entry points into what Tim Ingold has described as the taskscape of violent practices.Footnote 117 This concept is drawn in analogy to that of a landscape, and affirms that:
One of the outstanding features of human technical practices lies in their embeddedness in the current of sociality. … Just as the landscape is an array of related features, … the taskscape is an array of related activities. And as with the landscape, it is qualitative and heterogeneous.Footnote 118
Ingold makes this claim to counter the idea that “tasks are suspended in a vacuum” and argues that we must not separate “the domains of technical and social activity”.Footnote 119 For the VIPRE Initiative, this notion of a taskscape serves as a holistic means of combining the situations, materials and knowledges that Austin's theory conceptualizes as leading to the non-purposeful emergence of torture. The concept suggests that we must connect human motivation with a whole landscape of other supporting elements. In doing so, the VIPRE Initiative model of prevention proposes that we may be able to locate elements in this taskscape which can be altered so as to stop the emergence of violent human rights abuses. This novel understanding of preventing State-led violence is schematized in Figure 5, which depicts Austin's more technical model of the trajectories by which an individual “becomes” a torturer. In this model, the taskscape of any military or intelligence practitioner likely to carry out torture is depicted in the right-hand two quadrants of the schematic. These two quadrants effectively double, as compared to the classical model outlined in Figure 4, the social spaces that must be of both scientific and public policy concern – but in doing so, they also double the effective length of the flow of time between a person transitioning from a “non-torturer” to a “torturer”. This doubling of time provides the possibility of constructing a set of potential preventive measures against violent human rights abuses (the question marks in the top right-hand quadrant), the present-day absence of which from training regimes, human rights discourse and wider policy-making discourses is – the VIPRE Initiative and Austin contend – one of the principal reasons for the continued (re-)emergence of torture and other violent human rights abuses across borders. These question marks, we suggest, are the points at which a kind of “road traffic safety scheme” for political violence must be built; a set of material and semiotic preventive measures. It is thus that rather than marking the distinction between prior or pre-existing causes of violence (ideology, pathology, etc.) and the moment of becoming a torturer as a decision point, Figure 5 describes it as a transition point. This transition point marks the start of a practical sequence of acts that in the majority of cases do not begin with the decision “I will torture.” Instead, the taskscape of the emergence of violent human rights abuses like torture may begin with an innocuous task – such as manning a checkpoint – or using a legitimate violence – interrogating a prisoner, for example. The presence of particular situational dynamics, peripheral (subjectifying) knowledges, material objects and many other aspects may then render the taskscape more or less likely to enable the emergence of violent human rights abuses.
Figure 5. The VIPRE model of preventing torture. Reproduced from J. L. Austin, Small Worlds of Violence, above note 7, p. 393.
The VIPRE Initiative takes as its challenge reducing these risks by seeking to construct a global ergonomics of care for the person becoming a torturer. This act of care is currently focused on drawing on the insights of the Initiative in order to radically reframe human rights training within advanced military forces. The training model being developed by the VIPRE team does not focus on disseminating rules, ideas or laws about human rights or legal obligations to violence workers; rather, it draws on Austin's theory of prevention in order to increase the ability of violence workers to “resist” the pull of situational cues that lead to torture and the use of knowledges found in popular-cultural artefacts as scripts for torture. In addition, the project seeks to ergonomically redesign particularly problematic military material objects – handcuffs, blindfolds, etc. – in ways that reduce their capacity to be used for torture.Footnote 120 In short, the project envisages refocusing the attention of humanitarian and human rights organizations away from being placed entirely on rights-based approaches and towards building up an invisible form of care for the figure of the “not-quite-yet” torturer that will, slowly but surely, reduce the number of people making that transformation.
Closing the cycle of torture
Let us conclude where we started, with Carlos Liscano and his personal reflections on the figure of the torturer. Liscano remarks:
There is the soldier who follows orders one after another …. The soldier is not responsible, his superiors are the ones who turn him into a villain. But one can find a soldier doing things that were not ordered. The hooded prisoner is always led, so sometimes as a joke, a soldier has a prisoner run head-on into a wall …. The soldier says, “Ah, pardon.” … One asks, therefore, why does the soldier do what was not ordered, what is not even torture for information, but plain evil, with no point, no objective …. One has been used to thinking that all human beings are alike, and now has to ask, how is it that this particular human being, the soldier, can make a totally defenseless individual bang his head against the wall? … That is also the human being.Footnote 121
A torturer is, first and foremost, a human being, like you and me. In this article, we have shown how torturers nonetheless often become Other than ourselves without choosing or desiring to do so. Torture, we have suggested, is often non-purposeful. Drawing on Austin's theory of the material-semiotic emergence of torture, we have described how this becomes possible through cues and scripts for action that are embedded in situations, material objects and knowledges. But, more than this, we began by discussing the psychological impact of “becoming a torturer” for the torturer themselves and noting how this impact is substantial and deleterious. It is thus that the model of prevention we have outlined here is founded on an ethic of care: care for the fact that torturers are human beings who express – yes – the dark side of humanity and civilization, but who nonetheless might be recovered as fully human subjects or prevented from making that transformation if we approach the topic with a willingness to overcome our traditional demonization of these figures. The challenge is to be open to the prospect of caring for torturers across the world.
