This Side of Silence

Tobias Kelly teaches social anthropology at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, and is coeditor of Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

• IntroductionChapter 1. Talking about Torture after the Human Rights RevolutionChapter 2. The Legal Recognition of Torture SurvivorsChapter 3. Clinical Evidence about TortureChapter 4. Predicting the Future Risk of TortureChapter 5. Prosecuting TortureChapter 6. The Shame of TortureConclusionNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments

"This Side of Silence approaches the problem of torture in an unconventional and illuminating way. Human rights scholars and students will relish its clarity and insightfulness. As for human rights campaigners, they will find in it a warning about the inherent limitations of the legal process and thus an invitation to think more deeply and imaginatively about when and how to use legal means in order to oppose the blight of torture and, indeed, other injustices too." (Human Rights Quarterly) "Tobias Kelly's critical, historically informed, and carefully researched book on the evolving concept of torture is an exciting and useful addition to the ongoing new wave of critical scholarship on human rights in political and legal anthropology. Kelly's work demonstrates the best of where anthropologists of human rights have arrived in the past ten to fifteen years and yet remains a unique contribution," (PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review) "This Side of Silence is an engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly analyzed account of the rise of torture as one of the dominant legal and moral categories of our time. The meaning and use of the term 'torture' has undergone profound changes, and Tobias Kelly expertly charts how it has been shaped by recent developments in international law and medicine, media representations of the body and suffering, and the vagaries of the politics of human rights since 1945. This Side of Silence is an indispensible and compelling account of the new ethical prioritization of torture that pushes the boundaries of the anthropology of law and human rights and deserves to be read widely." (Richard A. Wilson, Professor of Anthropology and Law and Director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut) "Where does our sense that torture is wrong come from? When do we find torture established? What harms committed by whom escape our attention and why? Probing the actions of doctors, lawyers, and judges in the UK, Tobias Kelly shows how the denunciation of torture succeeds only in limited circumstances. Ethically disturbing but politically necessary, his original, clear, and excellently informed account is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight against torture and/or the defence of human rights." (Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, University of Sussex) "This Side of Silence is innovative, thought-provoking, and superbly written, a standout among the plethora of books on torture that have appeared since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Tobias Kelly analyzes the meaning of torture as a cultural and legal category. He demonstrates empirically, rather than conceptually or theoretically, that torture is 'a notoriously slippery subject' at every step of defining, documenting, diagnosing, recognizing, and prosecuting it." (Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Utrecht University)