1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910463885303321

Autore

Kelly Tobias

Titolo

This side of silence [[electronic resource] ] : human rights, torture, and the recognition of cruelty / / Tobias Kelly

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2012

ISBN

1-283-89655-9

0-8122-0523-5

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (229 p.)

Collana

Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

Disciplina

364.6/7

Soggetti

Torture - Moral and ethical aspects - Great Britain

Political prisoners - Abuse of - Great Britain

Political prisoners - Legal status, laws, etc - Great Britain

Suffering - Political aspects - Great Britain

Human rights - Great Britain

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [177]-211) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Talking about Torture after the Human Rights Revolution -- Chapter 2. The Legal Recognition of Torture Survivors -- Chapter 3. Clinical Evidence about Torture -- Chapter 4. Predicting the Future Risk of Torture -- Chapter 5. Prosecuting Torture -- Chapter 6. The Shame of Torture -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the purposeful infliction of cruelty by public officials, and we assume that lawyers and clinicians are best placed to speak about its causes and effects. However, it has not always been so. The category of torture is a very specific way of thinking about violence, and our current understandings of the term are rooted in recent twentieth-century history. In This Side of Silence, social anthropologist Tobias Kelly argues that the tensions between post-Cold War armed conflict, human rights activism, medical notions of suffering, and concerns over immigration have produced a distinctively new way of thinking about torture, which is saturated with notions of law and trauma. This Side of Silence asks what forms of



suffering and cruelty can be acknowledged when looking at the world through the narrow legal category of torture. The book focuses on the recent history of Britain but draws wider comparative conclusions, tracing attempts to recognize survivors and perpetrators across the fields of asylum, criminal law, international human rights, and military justice. In this thorough and eloquent ethnography, Kelly avoids treating the legal prohibition of torture as the inevitable product of progress and yet does not seek to dismiss the real differences it has made in concrete political struggles. Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the problem of recognition rests not in the inability of the survivor to communicate but in our inability to listen and take responsibility for the injustice before us.