Banishing brutality

During the past decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US Army has kidnapped, detained and tortured prisoners, most of them Muslims, including some US citizens, held as 'enemy combatants'. Not only have these detainees been confined without any well-defined charges, the Military Commissions Act in 2006 has stripped them of their right to habeas corpus as well. And while the CIA maintains secret prison camps abroad, it continues to spy on its own citizens for reasons of 'national security'. Inside the US today many Muslim citizens are either detained as 'material witnesses' or 'entrapped' in what are called 'home grown terrorism' cases. Despite the change in regime with Barack Obama's presidency, the policies enacted soon after the 11 September 2001 attacks – the so-called war on terror – have continued forms of repression worldwide.

In the name of curbing terrorism, draconian laws and measures are being implemented throughout the world, in countries as large as India and as small as Sri Lanka. It is this escalation of repressive state power that contextualises Jinee Lokaneeta's outstanding work on torture. An activist and scholar herself, Lokaneeta analyses the relationship between state and law and violence mostly by examining works of activist-intellectuals and legal theorists and historians. Apart from philosophies and theories, buttressing her analyses are numerous post-9/11 cases relating to torture, custodial deaths and disappearances in both the US and India, which Lokaneeta studies through the eyes of legal history spanning the last century.