Book Reviews

The presence and persistence of violence in our societies and state institutions – and what to do about it – are long-standing concerns of scholars of punishment and society. Torture might sound like a singular type of such violence but the torture with which this book is concerned is of the everyday, mundane variety, a product of prevailing systems, structures and conditions existing in continuity with other forms of violence. Torture is not an individual incident, but a social practice embedded in a multifaceted system of relations. This important book convincingly posits that efforts to prevent torture must understand the dynamics of this system – this ‘ecology’ – and address causes and consequences of violence through an ecological approach. The cover of The Prevention of Torture tellingly features a compelling image of a leafy tree in blossom. Beneath the tree in the shadow cast by an invisible light source is a vast amount of blood spatter. The image alludes to the notion of ‘the poisoned orchard’, this being a metaphor appealed to by situational theorists of violence to resist the inherently dispositional ‘bad apples’ theory. Violence is not the result of the dispositions of a few deviant apples acting out their own individual pathologies; it is the product of the complex ecological situation of the whole orchard, i.e. the interconnected practices that nourish, nurture and otherwise facilitate the likelihood of a toxic harvest – again and again, and with seasonal variations. At its most basic level this is a book about the driving and sustaining factors of torture and the impediments to its prevention. Clearly argued and drawing in a range of theoretical insights (from Arendt to Bourdieu to Latour), as well as an equally broad range of empirical studies, it offers a radically situational account of why torture persists and why it is so difficult to inhibit using the legal, universal and punitive tools most commonly applied. The book draws on lessons learned from and through a multi-faceted, experimental torture prevention project involving the academy, local human rights organisations, and security sector actors in Nepal and Sri Lanka. The project made theoretically informed, contextual analyses of torture causalities. These Punishment & Society 2021, Vol. 23(3) 436–451 ! The Author(s) 2020