While torture and assassination have not infrequently been used by states, the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ waged by the US has been distinguished by the open acknowledgement of, and political and legal justifications put forward in support of, these practices. This is surprising insofar as the primary theories that have been mobilized by sociologists and political scientists to understand the relation between the spread of human rights norms and state action presume that states will increasingly adhere to such norms in their rhetoric, if not always in practice. Thus, while it is not inconceivable that the US would engage in torture and assassination, we would expect these acts would be conducted under a cloak of deniability. Yet rather than pure hypocrisy, the US war on terror has been characterized by the development of a legal infrastructure to support the use of ‘forbidden’ practices such as torture and assassination, along with varying degrees of open defence of such tactics. Drawing on first-order accounts presented in published memoirs, this paper argues that the Bush administration developed such openness as a purposeful strategy, in response to the rise of a legal, technological, and institutional transnational human rights infrastructure which had turned deniability into a less sustainable option. It concludes by suggesting that a more robust theory of state action, drawing on sociological field theory, can help better explain the ways that transnational norms and institutions affect states.
AgambenG., (2005), State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2.
AnsorgeJ. T., (2012), ‘Between policy and law: an intellectual history of FM 27–1’, paper presented at 2012 conference of Social Science History Association, Vancouver BC.
3.
AradauC. and van MunsterR., (2009), ‘Exceptionalism and the war on terror: Criminology meets international relations’, British Journal of Criminology, 49: 686–701.
4.
BellamyA. J., (2006), ‘No pain, no gain? Torture and ethics in the war on terror’, International Affairs, 82: 121–148.
5.
BorgwardtE., (2007), A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6.
BourdieuP., (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
7.
BourdieuP., (1990), The Logic of Practice, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
8.
BourdieuP., (1993), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press.
9.
BrooksC. and ManzaJ., (2013), Whose Rights? Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
10.
BryskA. (ed.), (2013), The Politics of the Globalization of Law: Getting from Rights to Justice, New York: Routledge.
11.
BurkeR., (2010), Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
12.
BushG. W., (2010), Decision Points, New York: Crown Publishers.
13.
CheckelJ. T., (1998), ‘The constructivist turn in international relations theory’, Journal of World Politics, 50 (2): 324–348.
14.
ClarkA. M., (2001), Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
15.
ColeW., (2012), ‘Human rights as myth and ceremony? Reevaluating the effectiveness of human rights treaties, 1981–2007’, American Journal of Sociology, 117: 1131–1171.
16.
DannerM., (2005), ‘We are all torturers now’, New York Times, 6 January, at A27.
17.
DayanC., (2011), The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
18.
DezalayY. and GarthB. G., (2006), ‘From the Cold War to Kosovo: The rise and renewal of the field of international human rights’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2: 231–255.
19.
FarissC. J., (2014), ‘Respect for human rights has improved over time: Modeling the changing standard of accountability’, American Political Science Review, 108: 297–318.
20.
FootR., (2006), ‘Torture: The struggle over a peremptory norm in a counter-terrorist era’, International Relations, 20: 131–151.
21.
GoJ., (2008), ‘Global fields and imperial forms: Field theory and the British and American empires’, Sociological Theory, 26: 201–229.
22.
GocekF. M., (2015), Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23.
GoldsmithJ., (2007), The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
24.
GregoryD. and PredA. (eds), (2007), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, New York: Routledge.
25.
Hafner-BurtonE. M., (2013), Making Human Rights a Reality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
26.
Hafner-BurtonE. M. and TsutsuiK., (2013), ‘Human rights in a globalizing world: The paradox of empty promises’, American Journal of Sociology, 110: 1373–1411.
27.
Hafner-BurtonE. M.TsutsuiK. and MeyerJ. W., (2008), ‘International human rights law and the politics of legitimation: Repressive states and human rights treaties’, International Sociology, 23: 115–141.
28.
HajjarL., (2010), ‘Lawyers, litigation, and the us anti-torture campaign’, American Political Science Association Annual Meeting.
29.
HajjarL., (2011), ‘The legal campaign against American torture’, Jadaliyya, 5 July.
30.
HannahM., (2006), ‘Torture and the ticking bomb: The war on terrorism as a geographical imagination of power/ knowledge’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96: 622–640.
31.
HuntL., (2007), Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
32.
IgnatieffM., (2003), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
33.
IpJ., (2009), ‘Two narratives of torture’, Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights, 7: 35–77.
34.
JoasH., (2013), The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
35.
JohnsF., (2005), ‘Guantanamo Bay and the annihilation of the exception’, European Journal of International Law16: 613–614.
36.
JonesC. A., (2015), ‘Lawfare and the juridification of late modern war’, Progress in Human Geography, 16 March, 1–19.
37.
KeckM. E. and SikkinkK., (1998), Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
38.
KellyT., (2012), This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty, Philadelphia: Univeristy of Pennsylvania Press.
39.
KeysB., (2014), Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
40.
KhaliliL., (2008), ‘On torture’, Middle East Report, 249: 32–38.
41.
KiriakouJ. and RubyM., (2009), The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the Cia's War on Terror, New York: Bantam Books.
42.
KrauseM., (2014), The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief Ngos and the Fragmentation of Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
43.
LevinsonS. (ed.), (2004), Torture: A Collection, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
44.
LevyD. and SznaiderN., (2006), ‘Sovereignty transformed: A sociology of human rights’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57: 657–676.
45.
LubanD., (2006), ‘Liberalism, torture, and the ticking bomb’, in GreenbergK. J. (ed.), The Torture Debate in America, 35–83, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
46.
McCoyA. W., (2006), A Question of Torture: Cia Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt and Company.
47.
MertusJ. A., (2008), Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy, New York: Routledge.
48.
MeyerJ. W.BromleyP. and RamirezF. O., (2010), ‘Human rights in social science textbooks: Cross-national analyses, 1970–2008’, Sociology of Education, 83: 111–134.
49.
MoonC., (2012), ‘What one sees and how one files seeing: Human rights reporting, representation, and action’, Sociology, 46: 876–890.
50.
MoynS., (2012a), The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
51.
MoynS., (2012b), ‘Substance, scale, and salience: The recent historiography of human rights’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 8: 123–140.
52.
MudgeS. L. and VauchezA., (2012), ‘Building Europe on a weak field: Law, economics, and scholarly avatars in transnational politics’, American Journal of Sociology, 118: 449–492.
53.
MyersR. B. and McConnellM., (2009), Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security, New York: Simon and Schuster.
54.
PfiffnerJ. P., (2010), Torture as Public Policy: Restoring U.S. Credibility on the World Stage, Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
55.
PressE., (2003), ‘In torture we trust?’, The Nation, 31 March.
56.
RumsfeldD., (2011), Known and Unknown: A Memoir, London: Sentinel.
57.
ScheipersS., (2015), Unlawful Combatants: A Genealogy of the Irregular Fighter, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
58.
ShorE., (2008), ‘Conflict, terrorism, and the socialization of human rights norms: The spiral model revisited’, Social Problems, 55: 117–138.
59.
SikkinkK., (2011), The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
60.
SteynJ., (2004), ‘Guantanamo Bay: The legal black hole’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 53: 1–15.
61.
van MunsterR., (2004), ‘The war on terrorism: When the exception becomes the rule’, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 17: 141–153.
62.
YooJ., (2006), War by Other Means: An Insiders Account of the War on Terror, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
