Legal discourses on torture in contemporary liberal democracies: The United States and India

In this dissertation, I explore how the legal discourses in liberal democracies address the question of torture. Western jurisprudence suggests that state authority is based on the imposition of rules rather than the infliction of pain and suffering. Critical scholars argue that the focus on bureaucratic norms masks the ongoing use of violence on modern subjects. I analyze the jurisprudence of interrogations in two liberal democracies, the United States and India, to understand whether the legal discourses allow for, ignore or justify the infliction of torture against its citizens.;In the study, I demonstrate that, even before recent debates on the use of torture in the "war on terror," the laws of interrogation were much more ambivalent about the infliction of excess pain and suffering than theorists have acknowledged. Rather than viewing the post-9/11 developments anomalous, I argue that efforts to accommodate infliction of excess pain are long standing features of routine interrogations in these democracies. Regardless of whether there is consensus that these acts of excess violence constitute torture in all instances, I argue that it is in fact the contentious definition of torture that allows the legal discourse to ignore, accommodate or justify torture in some instances. I conclude that the infliction of excess pain and suffering is more central to democratic governance than is acknowledged in western jurisprudence.