Prevention of Torture

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).

• Introduction; 1. The principal approaches preventing torture; 2. How effective has torture prevention been? 3. The situational conditions of institutional violence; 4. The production of worlds of torture; 5. Agents, structures and the social imaginary of human rights; 6. Taking situational theory to the field; 7. The promises and hazards of practice; Conclusion.

'Torture has been used in most countries, for the powerful to extract information from victims, and to punish dissidents for alleged wrong doings. To begin to understand this form of institutional violence we must realize it is less about aberrant individuals than it is about pathological social situations. In her powerful book, The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach, author Professor Danielle Celermajer has taken this situational hypothesis, and combined it with rich empirical research on the actual situations where systematic torture occurs. Most uniquely, she has devised a new analysis that can form the foundation of effective prevention strategies. This book is theoretically sophisticated, practically oriented and ethically penetrating. It is must reading as a major step forward in how we think about torture globally, and then actually go about preventing torture.' Philip G. Zimbardo, Stanford University, California