Torture as a Political Technology: A Socio-Political Analysis of the Widespread Use of Torture

This is an impactful cross-disciplinary research into the use of torture as a political technology. It will be conducted in collaboration with an international civil society organization (the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel - PCATI), and with two universities in the UK (SOAS and QUB).

Events of the last two decades show that torture cannot be regarded as a relic of the past, underscoring the importance of investigating its operation and internal logics. We do so focusing on Israel as a case-study. In common with other colonial and post-colonial regimes, Israel uses torture not as the rare exception, but systematically.

Independent human rights experts estimate that approximately 50% of Palestinians have been exposed to torture by Israeli security agencies, either directly or indirectly. Israel therefore provides a paradigmatic case study for investigating the effects of the widespread deployment of torture. Firstly, our research explores what the systematic application of torture aims to do to the communities thus targeted.

Framing the deployment of torture as a political technology (Foucault 1975), we examine whether and how it seeks to shape subjects, communal ties, and political relations. We therefore examine torture as a phenomenon that extends beyond the exertion of brute violence, and should rather be considered as a colonial technology of population control. Second, we examine the effects of the prolonged and widespread use of torture on the society which facilitates its use, by mapping and analysing the interfaces between the security apparatuses and civic infrastructures that enable this deployment of torture.

We do so with a particular focus on the healthcare system. Healthcare is not only most directly implicated in sustaining torture; as a system predicated on the ethics of care, its convergence with the violence of torture is most striking. However, unlike most literature to date, our research does not focus on the ethical codes of the medical profession as a normative set of principles that are being compromised, eroded, or violated in this convergence (see Research Context).

Rather, we examine how ethics is institutionalised and operationalised as a set of practices and procedures used to mitigate and mediate the incongruity between the rationales of torture and medical practices of care. Extensive archival research, coupled with interviews, will enable us to reconstruct the infrastructures, effects and rationales of torture.

Our research is based on the exclusive access this research team has been granted to the archive of PCATI. The PCATI archive provides a rich and highly valuable source of data documenting torture practices implemented by Israeli security agencies. Most significantly, the archive includes depositions provided by more than 5,500 Palestinian victims of torture.

These depositions were all conducted with lawyers, usually shortly after the conclusion of the interrogations and while the victim was still incarcerated. The nature of these depositions, as well as their sheer volume, is, in and of itself, an invaluable wealth of knowledge whose scholarly significance cannot be overstated. The archive further includes tens of thousands of documents, ranging from medical records and social worker reports to official responses to appeals and correspondence with government offices.

Together, these afford direct access to first-hand accounts of the practice of torture. The access granted to the PCATI archive therefore presents a unique opportunity for investigating the systematic use of torture. The project will consist of the processing (digitisation, rationalisation, database construction) of the archive, and a close and detailed investigation into its data to expose facets of torture which thus far have remained hidden.