Torture and the Twilight of Empire
Regular price
€74.99
A01=Marnia Lazreg
Administrative detention
Alcoholism
Algerian War
Anomie
Anti-communism
Anti-imperialism
Anti-intellectualism
Apotheosis
Auschwitz concentration camp
Author_Marnia Lazreg
Basement
Bullying
Burnous
Castration
Category=JKVP
Category=JPVH
Category=JWA
Censorship
Clash of Civilizations
Closed community
Cold War
Colonial war
Conspiracy theory
Corporal punishment
Counter-revolutionary
Critique
Declamation
Decolonization
Decriminalization
Derogation
Desertion
Dictatorship
Duress
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Erectile dysfunction
Extreme poverty
Felony
Forced disappearance
Historical revisionism (negationism)
Hypocrisy
Imperialism
Imprisonment
Incest
Insurgency
Internment
Interrogation
Monopoly on violence
Obsolescence
Plagiarism
Political history
Political prisoner
Politique
Prisoner of war
Psychological torture
Psychological warfare
Punishment
Racism
Reprisal
Revolutionary terror
Search and destroy
Slavery
Subversion
Summary execution
Superiority (short story)
Suspension of disbelief
Terrorism
The Act of Killing
The Politician (book)
Threshold of pain
Torture
Torture (journal)
Total war
Totalitarianism
War
Warfare
Product details
- ISBN 9780691131351
- Weight: 624g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 23 Dec 2007
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Torture and the Twilight of Empire looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture--its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central to guerre revolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements.
Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population--especially women--and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even acceptable. Written by a preeminent historical sociologist, Torture and the Twilight of Empire holds particularly disturbing lessons for us today as we carry out the War on Terror.
Marnia Lazreg is professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her books include "The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question".
