Torture and the Twilight of Empire

From Algiers to Baghdad

Marnia Lazreg (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

368 Seiten

2016
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-17348-1 (ISBN)

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Torture and the Twilight of Empire looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture--its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central to guerre revolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements.
Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population--especially women--and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even acceptable. Written by a preeminent historical sociologist, Torture and the Twilight of Empire holds particularly disturbing lessons for us today as we carry out the War on Terror.

Marnia Lazreg is professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her books include The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question.

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Part I: Imperial Politics and Torture Chapter 1: Revolutionary-War Theory 15 Chapter 2: Militarization of the Colonial State 34 Chapter 3: Psychological Action 61 Chapter 4: Models of Pacification: From Nietzsche to Sun Tzu 87 Part II: Ethnography of Torture Chapter 5: Doing Torture 111 Chapter 6: Women: Between Torture and Military Feminism 145 Part III: Ideology of Torture Chapter 7: Conscience, Imperial Identity, and Torture 173 Chapter 8: The Christian Church and Antisubversive War 191 Chapter 9: Fanon, Sartre, and Camus 213 Part IV: Reflections on Torture Chapter 10: Moralizing Torture 237 Chapter 11: Repetitions: From Algiers to Baghdad 253 Notes 271 Glossary 309 References and Selected Bibliography 311 Index 323

Erscheinungsdatum	08.12.2016
Reihe/Serie	Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity
Verlagsort	New Jersey
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 235 mm
Gewicht	510 g
Themenwelt	Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
ISBN-10	0-691-17348-6 / 0691173486
ISBN-13	978-0-691-17348-1 / 9780691173481
Zustand	Neuware