A01=Darius Rejali
Abu Ghraib
Adviser
Affidavit
Algeria
Algerian War
Allegation
Amnesty International
Author_Darius Rejali
Authoritarianism
Category=JPQ
Category=JPR
Category=NHW
Cattle prod
Coercion
Counter-insurgency
Crime
Cruelty
Defendant
Detection
Detective
Electric chair
Electric shock
Electricity
Electroconvulsive therapy
Electrocution
Electroshock weapon
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
False confession
Flagellation
Foot whipping
Gas mask
Gestapo
Handcuffs
Henri Alleg
Hostility
Humiliation
Informant
Internment
Interrogation
Intimidation
Kempeitai
Law enforcement
Law enforcement in the United States
Lawyer
London Cage
National security
Nazi Germany
Nazism
Noam Chomsky
Picana
Police
Police officer
Political prisoner
Politician
Prison
Prosecutor
Psychologist
Regimen
Scientist
Sensory deprivation
Show trial
Slavery
Sleep deprivation
South Vietnam
Stalinism
Stress and duress
Taser
Technology
The Battle of Algiers
The Other Hand
Torture
Torture chamber
War crime
Water torture
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780691143330
- Weight: 1219g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jun 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks.
Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
Darius Rejali is professor of political science at Reed College and an internationally recognized expert on modern torture. He is the author of "Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran".
