Torture as Secrecy Logic: News Ways to Study Violence and its Legitimation

• In Event: Empirical Contributions to the Study of Torture

Abstract

Within recent scholarship, torture has broadly been conceived of as a
spectacular act. From studies that (re)examine medieval tortures and executions
to the more contemporary mediatisations of tortures, some leaked some
intentionally broadcast, torture has broadly been conceived of as a practice that
if not directly, at least virtually, takes place in the public square with the intent to
generate fear. This paper, however, proposes to study torture as an act of
secrecy. Despite recent transformations to norms surrounding torture, torture
remains a set of practices conducted principally in secret and with the aim to
reveal secrets (hidden in the body or the body public). Secrecy is an organising
logic of torture. This understanding of torture as a secrecy practice therefore
necessitates a different empirical approach, one that centres secrecy practices
and their productions as the focus of data collection and analysis. Drawing on
literatures from the burgeoning fields of secrecy and ignorance studies, as well
as on a case study of secrecy and torture practices from the Global War on
Terror, this paper will make a case for the need to understand how torture takes
place through and across multi-layered sites of knowledge-making through a
diverse set of secrecy practices, necessitating a different but complimentary
empirical approach in order to more fully understand how torture is understood
and made to make sense politically.

Author

• Elspeth Van Veeren, University of Bristol