The 'Shock' of Torture: a Historiographical Challenge

When images of abusive and sexually-degrading behaviour by United States and British troops circulated globally in 2004 and 2005, leaders of the 'war on terror' expressed deep shock, then enlisted military justice to assign responsibility to rogue soldiers. Many on the Left have criticized such action and argued that torture enacts racist neo-colonialism, unleashed in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Few critics apply a wider historical frame of reference, however.

Historians have written extensively about torture in totalitarian regimes, former colonies, and the distant past of 'horrible history' yet our analyses of the recent history of physical abuse in liberal democracies remain rare. Debate over the apparent resurgence of torture would benefit from deeper historical knowledge and understanding of the body as an object of pain, humiliation, and death – not in foreign wars and military operations, but in the context of domestic, civil punishment, where determining the limits of sanctioned violence, rather than removing violence from penal repertoires, has been a matter of persistent deliberation in modern democracies. If the critically engaged historian's special burden is to keep present the pasts we prefer to forget, we might do more to shift the West's 'shock' into the nagging pain of self-knowledge.