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"We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the needless 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"--Provided by publisher

AbstractThis article explores the political implications of opposition to war, focusing on the example of conscientious objection to military service. Conscientious objection is often treated as a fundamentally ethical issue; however, this article argues for centering questions of justice in analyses of responses to war. There is a risk that starting with ethics takes for granted the social significance of ethical responses and overlooks particular ethical practices in the reproduction of wider inequalities. More specifically, when an issue is narrowly framed in terms of ethics, it can have implications for who is allowed to speak and what they can speak about. Thinking about war as an issue of justice—in the sense of how society allocates the things that it values—allows the broader issues of hierarchy, distribution, and recognition to be in the foreground. The article focuses on the example of an Indian subject of the British Empire who applied for exemption from military service during the Second World War. The valorization on conscience by the British state prioritized a limited form of opposition to bloodshed grounded in personal moral scruples, to the exclusion of anti‐imperial self‐determination, and turned the war into an issue of individual ethics rather than global inequality.

AbstractFreedom of conscience is widely claimed as a central principle of liberal democracy, but what is conscience and how do we know what it looks like? Rather than treat conscience as a transcendent category, this paper examines claims of conscience as rooted in distinct cultural and political histories. I focus on debates about conscientious objection in Second World War Britain, and argue that, there, persuasive claims of conscience were widely associated with a form of "detached conviction." Yet evidence of such "detached convictions" always verged on being interpreted as deliberate manipulation and calculation. More broadly, I argue that the protection of freedom of conscience is necessarily incomplete and unstable. The difficulties in recognizing individual conscience point to anxieties within liberal democracy. Not only strangers are suspect and mistrusted, but also those who claim to stand most strongly by the principles of liberal citizenship.

This article examines the assessment of claims about torture in the British asylum process. It is compassion in the face of suffering that underlies much of the ethical objection to torture. Yet, at the same time, torture survivors, as with asylum seekers more broadly, are subjected to widespread suspicions about the genuineness of their claims. This article argues that the very process of imagined identification found in compassion can lie behind suspicion. Anthropology has largely treated otherness as a cause of fear and suspicion. However, the denial of another's suffering is not always about a failure to recognize mutual humanity. It can also be a product of a sense of fundamental similarity, based on assumptions about the mutual capacity to dissimulate. Ultimately, though, scepticism is on just as shaky ground as belief, as it is filtered through the lens of imagined identification. Denial is just as vicarious as acknowledgement.

Although human rights practitioners are often seen as being distinguished by their dogmatic claims or their technical fixations, there is a danger of ignoring the hesitations and confusions that also mark much human rights work. The article focuses on human rights NGOs as they engage with the UN Committee Against Torture. In doing so it examines their doubts about the causal connections that would link their legal interventions with their ethical commitments. However, doubt should not be confused with cynicism or despair. To doubt means to be in two minds. Instead of bringing the whole edifice tumbling down, a sense of doubt means that new avenues are always sought out, as practitioners move between an emphasis on the legal and the ethical. Rather than a source of crippling anxiety, doubt can keep the human rights project moving.RésuméLes défenseurs des droits de l'homme sont souvent perçus comme dogmatiques ou crispés sur des aspects techniques, au risque de méconnaître les hésitations et les confusions qui marquent souvent leur action. Le présent article se concentre sur les interactions des ONG œuvrant pour les droits de l'homme avec le Comité contre la torture des Nations Unis. Il examine les doutes de ces organisations sur les relations de causalité qui pourraient faire le lien entre leurs interventions judiciaires et leur engagement éthique. Il ne faut pas pour autant confondre le doute avec le cynisme ou le désespoir. Douter, c'est être partagé dans son opinion. Au lieu de faire crouler tout l'édifice, le doute conduit à rechercher sans cesse de nouvelles perspectives, dans un mouvement de va‐et‐vient entre droit et éthique. Au lieu d'être une source d'anxiété paralysante, il peut être un moteur des projets pour les droits de l'homme.

Focusing on the Committee Against Torture, this article argues that human rights monitoring can hide as much as it reveals. In particular, monitoring should be understood as a "second order" process that displaces the discussion of the causes and consequences of violence in favor of a focus on the systems that are supposed to monitor cruelty. In this process, measurements, monitoring, and prevention are in danger of becoming merged. As such, the ways in which the Committee Against Torture produces and assesses information serves simultaneously to create a depoliticized conception of violence and to reproduce political inequalities between states.