Description: There is an urgent need to analyze and assess how we prevent torture, against the background of a rigorous analysis of the factors that condition and sustain it. Drawing on rich empirical material from Sri Lanka and Nepal, The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach interrogates the worlds that produce torture in order to propose how to bring about systemic institutional and cultural change. Critics have decried human rights approaches' failure to attend to structural factors, but this book seeks to go beyond a 'stance of criticism' to take up the positive project of reimagining human rights theory and practice. It discusses key debates in human rights and political theory, as well as the challenges that advocates face in translating situational analyses into real world interventions. Danielle Celermajer develops a new, ecological framework for mapping the worlds that produce torture, and thereby develops prevention strategies.
Brief description: Danielle Celermajer is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She received a grant from the European Union to establish a Masters of Human Rights and Democratization in the Asia-Pacific course and a further one to work on the prevention of torture. Her books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (Cambridge, 2009), Power, Judgment and Political Evil: Hannah Arendt's Promise (with Andrew Schaap and Vrasidas Karalis, 2010), and A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (with Richard Sherwin, forthcoming).
Review Quotes: 'Torture prevention is especially difficult to study because torture almost always happens in the shadows ... Danielle Celermajer, by contrast, is determined not only to build an academically rigorous theory of change about how to prevent torture ... but also to test it in the field by taking a project team into the heart of torturing institutions in Nepal and Sri Lanka ... an important contribution in and of itself ...' Sonya Sceats, International Affairs