Author Meets Critics Book Panel -- Just Violence: Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

This proposal is for an “author meets critic” roundtable that will promote a robust, critical discussion of my new book on human rights education. The book, Just Violence: Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press (see http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25811).

The book addresses issues that are central to the field of comparative and international education: most broadly, it examines the use of education to promote justice, and more specifically, it probes how violent state officials respond to human rights education designed to reduce their violence. I conducted twelve months of fieldwork in India for this book, which included 60 in-depth interviews with law enforcement officials who were participating in human rights education as well as 35 in-depth interviews with human rights educators and other reformers. I transcribed all interviews and coded them with multiple categorical codes using the software program Dedoose. I analyze this data by drawing on international relations theory on the diffusion of international norms. Education is implicit in theoretical work on how norms spread between and within states, but rarely is this process investigated explicitly in terms of how direct educational efforts shape the spread of new norms.

Human rights educators conduct trainings with police and military personnel with the hope of changing their beliefs and behavior. Chief among educators’ aims is the prevention of the most egregious forms of rights violations, such as torture and other forms of extrajudicial violence. Few studies however examine in depth how officers respond to the messages they receive. I examine the obstacles to changing violent behaviors through education, and suggest ways of mitigating these obstacles. I find that police express conceptions of justice and perceptions of their environment that support their belief that torture is sometimes both right and necessary. They then respond to their human rights course not by rejecting its messages but by appropriating them and adapting them to their own conceptions of right action. This is not a tension between local and global norms, as is often theorized, but reflects intense normative competition at both the local and global levels. The book concludes with a discussion of the tension between activism and education, and the ethical, political, and pragmatic dilemmas of attempts to change the behavior of violent state officials.

The discussion of the book will be lead by three critics who are widely respected in the field of comparative and international education, specifically for their work on the global spread of ideas (Francisco Ramiriz); the ways in which those ideas are translated in local settings (Kathryn Anderson-Levitt); and the relationship between education and efforts to promote a more inclusive society, particularly in India (Ratna Ghosh). Dana Burde, an expert on the relationship between education and violence in conflict settings, will serve as Chair. The session will include approximately 10 minutes of comments from each of the critics, to which I will respond before turning to a discussion with the audience.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Peace Education

Chair

• Dana Burde, New York University

Discussants

• Francisco Ramirez, Stanford University Graduate School of Education

• Kathryn M Anderson-Levitt, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

• Ratna Ghosh, McGill University

• Rachel Wahl, University of Virginia