Documenting Torture Proposal

Documenting Torture: The Social Fate of Suffering
Proposal for Dissertation Research

Bishnu Pokhrel

Introduction
Torture is neither civilian nor military, nor is it specifically French; it is a plague infecting our whole era. – Jean-Paul Sartre

Despite global monitoring efforts that reveal the systematic use of torture in democratic and authoritarian states (Peters 1986:160) and despite current controversies surrounding its use during America’s Global War on Terror, torture remains an understudied ‘social problem’ (but see Brown 2005; Einolf 2007; Gordon 2005; Lazreg 2007 for notable exceptions). Indeed, sociology has failed to attend to Sartre’s diagnosis of his era - a twentieth-century barely half-made - as infected by torture.
According to Cohen, official denial of torture is likely to take at least one of three forms: literal denial, interpretive denial, and implicatory denial; sometimes, these are employed in sequence: “if one strategy does not work, the next is tried” (2001:103).

(1) Literal denial – Literal denial involves the claim that “nothing happened.” Cohen views these as most effectively employed by authoritarian regimes, who operate “without accountability and insulated from external scrutiny” (2001:104). However, this strategy can also be employed by democracies, as Cohen and others have observed (Cohen 2001; Rejali 2007). According to Cohen, this strategy typically involves challenges to the veracity of those accusing a government or regime of wrong-doing (2001:116).

(2) Interpretive denial – It is difficult to deny that anything happened given “greater international visibility and transparency” (2001:105); it is also difficult to deny that anything happened if compelling evidence indisputability documents that something happened. Interpretive denial involves a denial of the particular interpretive framework through which critics of a government or regime view the documented
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