This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty

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 p...