Book Review: Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023013482800 |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Studies in Indian Politics, 1, 1 (2013): 109–126
Book Reviews 123
Jinee Lokaneeta, Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India. New
Delhi: Orient Blackswan. 2012. 291 pages. ` 725.
DOI: 10.1177/2321023013482800
This book contests a fundamental assumption in liberal political and legal theory that violence occupies
a secondary and tightly regulated place within the law’s frame of rational rules and norms. Through an
engagement with the discourse on custodial torture in the United States and India, it demonstrates a
continued accommodation by law of ‘excess violence’—violence the law claims not to require but
cannot/will not do away with.
Lokaneeta argues for understanding torture in terms of ‘law’s struggle with violence’, i.e., even as it
continues to deploy violence, the law struggles to ‘forget’ this violence, distantiate it as a question of
implementation, and distinguish it from non-state violence as subordinate to judicial interpretation. She
focuses on the space that judicial interpretation itself provides for excess violence.
Thus, the narrative of routine/normal jurisprudence in both countries shows that a preoccupation with
physical forms of torture and an acceptance of the inherent coercion of interrogation have served to elide
the existence of a problematic space of unauthorized psychological violence stretching between these
poles. This pervasive ambiguity has been further exploited in extraordinary contexts such as within the
jurisdiction of the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay in the US context, and through the Terrorist and
Disruptive Activities Act, 1985 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 (POTA) in India. In
the former case, the government employed an ‘aggressive hyperlegality’ to exploit ambiguities in the
Federal Torture Statute to radically narrow definitions of torture, exempting all but the most egregious
forms of brutality. In the latter context, these laws broke with a long legal legacy to allow senior police
officials to record confessions in cases of terrorism, despite a continuing concern about custodial torture
and deaths. In both cases, Lokaneeta shows, the responses of the Supreme Courts indicated an inability
or unwillingness to assume interpretive responsibility over these issues, deflected with a studied silence
in the American case, and a deference to Parliament’s legislative supremacy in the Indian case.
These narratives highlight contingent advances and reversals in a jurisprudential struggle against
custodial torture, underwritten by a structural lack that fails to prevent recourse to such violence.
However, in conceptualizing this violence as ‘excess’, Lokaneeta’s theorization fails to fully confront the
structural lack of the law itself. This is better understood by considering Lokaneeta’s reading of Michel
Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ideas alongside her description of the troubling tendentialities of
Guantánamo Bay.
Lokaneeta argues that Foucault’s focus on disciplinary and governmental mechanisms ignores the
continuing presence of excess legal violence and hence the state’s continued centrality as ‘a primary
mode of control through its monopoly over legitimate violence’. However, Foucault’s work does not
argue for a stagist conception of the disappearance of torture, but points to how legal violence is recon-
ceptualized and reinserted into larger economies of violence. One such instance appears in the new
psychological techniques of interrogation operative in Guantánamo Bay described by Lokaneeta. Here,
strategies such as environmental manipulation and sleep deprivation were justified on the basis that such
deprivations are part of everyday lives in lower intensities; affect interrogators as much as detainees;
have been applied in training American armed forces personnel; and have been applied under medical
supervision to ensure the safety of the detainee. Thus, the attempt is not only to bend the rules of torture
safeguards without breaking them, but to bring the coercion of interrogations within a general economy
of discipline and conduct. This gradation follows a similar logic to that which Foucault describes in
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