Law and Torture

Widening the Apertures from the Doctrinal to the Critical

Ergün Cakal (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

244 Seiten

2025
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-009-71945-2 (ISBN)

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Legal books on torture have failed to ask fundamental questions as to its practice and research – particularly on the factors informing how torture comes to be defined and how torture victims should appear. This book arms readers with questions in critically exploring these factors.

Contemporary understandings of torture are ruled by a medico-legal duopoly: the language of law (regulating definition and prohibition) and that of medicine (controlling understandings of the body in pain). This duopoly has left little space for contextual conceptualisation – of ideological, emotional and imaginational impulses which function in readily recognising some forms of violence and dismissing others. This book challenges the rigour of this prevailing duopoly. In its place, it develops a new approach to critique the central scripts of 'law and torture' scholarship (around progress, violence, evidence and senses). Drawing on socio-legal and critical-theoretical scholarship, it aims to 'widen the apertures' of the dominant dogmas to their interconnected social, political, temporal and emotional dimensions. These dimensions, the book advances, hold the key to more fully understanding not only the production of torture's definition and prohibition; but also its normative contestation – to better grasp whose pain gets recognised and redressed and why.

Ergün Cakal is a researcher at the University of Copenhagen's and formerly a legal advisor at the Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY). He has worked as an anti-torture lawyer since 2016, focusing on conceptualisation, prevention and documentation of torture. He holds master's degrees in the sociology of law from Lund University and in international law from the University of Melbourne and a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen.

Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Doctrine and its (dis)contents; 3. Progressive impulses; 4. Exceptionalising suffering; 5. Substantiating suffering; 6. Sensing suffering; 7. Conclusion.

Erscheinungsdatum	10.12.2025
Reihe/Serie	Law in Context
Zusatzinfo	Worked examples or Exercises
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Gewicht	500 g
Themenwelt	Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
ISBN-10	1-009-71945-9 / 1009719459
ISBN-13	978-1-009-71945-2 / 9781009719452
Zustand	Neuware