How Torture Became Speakable

Lisa Stampnitzky’s current book project, How Torture Became Speakable, aims to explain the puzzle of why the post-9/11 war on terror has been characterized by the open justification of practices that violate human rights norms, such as torture and assassination. While the literature on human rights predicts that states will sometimes fail to abide by the norms they rhetorically affirm, it is expected that this will manifest as hypocrisy, rather than open defiance of such norms. The puzzle, then, is why the US has chosen to openly justify the practices of “harsh interrogation” and “targeted killing,” rather than rely on a strategy of denial.