Book Review: Torture and Torturous Violence: Transcending Definitions of Torture by Victoria Canning
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231166495 |
| Author | Ergün Cakal |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
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Victoria Canning, Torture and Torturous Violence: Transcending Definitions of Torture. Bristol: Bristol
University Press: 2023; 186 pp: 9781529218428, £24.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Ergün Cakal, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
How we define violent acts and experiences matters—equally for redressing past and
preventing future wrongs. It informs what we look for, where we look and what we do.
This is most apparent in what is often associated with the label of ‘torture’or ‘tortur-
ous’. Although international human rights law may well celebrate the adoption of uni-
versal definitions, because this is no small feat of recognition at least politically, it has
produced important exclusions as notably observed by feminist scholars. As Rob
Boddice (2017, p. 44), a prominent scholar on the social histories of pain, puts it:
‘pain has been defined, delimited, and determined by a legion of people not so
much in pain as in power’. Indeed, pain has long been the province of academics,
advocates and adjudicators rather than those who bear the brunt of it. In her recent
book, Victoria Canning takes important steps in articulating and grounding the con-
testation and configuration of torture’sdefinition, and argues that torture is not as
straightforward as it seems.
Significantly, Canning raises several oft-neglected questions in the existing literature.
How do practitioners (and the organisations in which they work) help define the violence
with which they work? What about the survivors of violence: how do their views inform
official definitions and organisational operations? How much should those on the ground
be bound to top-down legal definitions? Canning identifies what the law generally serves
to exclude: the point of view of victim-survivors and their advocates through the reitera-
tive top-down nature of looking to legal authorities in defining and delimiting what they
feel and think. Canning pushes for a fuller reflection than that offered by the ‘law and
torture’scholarship—to empirically (so as to conceptually) unpack and understand the
construction and consequences of narrow definitions. Much is implicated in Canning’s
reckoning: state-centricity; fixity on men; (re)production of the public/private dichotomy;
hierarchical logics; individualisation of torturers and ignorance of their structures;
primacy of physicality; orthodox legalism; exceptionalism; silencing through stigma
and shame; and the gendered exclusions of sexualized violence, sexualized torture and
sexually torturous violence. These are represented as important interlocking pieces of
the puzzle. Their consequences are symbolic (recognition and representation of lived
realities) as well as material (access to protection, prevention, rehabilitation and redress).
Canning organises her deep empirical study through a three-pronged typology of how
anti-torture actors frame the violence before them: orthodox legalism; legalist hybridity;
Book Reviews519
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