Book Review: The Prevention of Torture

Does torture prevention work? This is a pithy question but also a somewhat misleading one. Like “does torture work?” it presupposes a straightforward relation between an end, torture prevention, and the means to get to it. It directs us to think instrumentally about what tools we might craft and use to this end; what measures might “work” to address proximate causes. The answers we get may not be altogether wrong, but they are likely to be muddled. That is because, as Danielle Celermajer shows in The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach, the question of whether or not torture prevention works does not help us to disentangle conditions that produce torture from the strategies needed to prevent it.