Until 2000, scholarly knowledge about and interest in the politics of torture was scant at best. But in recent years this has begun to change. In the introduction to their edited volume, Tracy Lightcap and James P. Pfiffner begin with the observation that “[o]f the three great evils that states can perpetrate on those they control—genocide, slavery and torture—only one has positively thrived into the twentieth century: torture” (p. 1). Lightcap and Pfiffner close their introduction with the hope that their volume will “inspire and help guide further research on torture and state repression in the future” (p. 9). I am confident that the volume, which is available both physically and as an ebook, will achieve that goal.

Examining Torture has seven chapters, some of which present new research and others of which provide an augmented distillation of theory and evidence from books by the author of the chapter. I have assigned two of the chapters to the students taking my undergraduate International Human Rights course, and I suspect many others will find one or more chapters that will make a valuable addition to their course syllabi.

The first two chapters explore public opinion about torture, one in the United States and one cross-nationally. The next three explore the emergence of torture in government agencies where it had not been a routinized practice and its effectiveness; they include case studies of the French and/or U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The final two chapters examine the prospects for, and consequences of, reform to dramatically reduce, if not eliminate, the institutionalized practice of torture, one providing a cross-national statistical analysis and the other a series of comparative case studies.

Peter Miller, Paul Gronke, and Darius Rejali extend and augment a previously published article of theirs that provides a review of survey polling data of Americans’ views about torture, covering the years 1942–2012. Among the interesting things we learn is that they can find no polls asking Americans about torture between the years 1946 and 1980, and then again between 1993 and October of 2001. We also learn that prior to 2001, the highest recorded level of support for torture among Americans prior to the 9/11 attacks was 40% in favor of torturing Adolph Hitler in 1944. Hitler was a special case: prior to 1945 only two percent of Americans favored torturing “Nazi leaders,” and prior to 1944 only 3% of Americans supported torturing Hitler.

Miller, Gronke, and Rejali then review the results of some 32 polls taken between October 2001 and the end of 2012. They find that the rate of support rose almost 50% between 2004 and 2012, but that growth is largely due to Republican partisans, many of whom are presumably responding to President Barack Obama's pledge to reverse the Bush administration's approach. The difference between Americans’ support for torturing Nazi leaders and contemporary support for torture is jarring, though the major take-away from the essay is that it simply is not true that a majority of Americans supported torture during the Bush years.

Jeremy Mayer, Naoru Koizumi, and Ammar Malik contribute a cross-national analysis of the survey results from 21 countries in 2008, and propose three hypotheses about what might impact national levels of support: number of terror attacks, political freedom, and economic development. To test their hypotheses, they use a multilevel statistical model that permits inferences about the impact of country characteristics upon public opinion, which is precisely the sort of statistical analyses one wants to see for such a project. The authors seem a bit disappointed in their results—only the political freedom variable has an impact—but I find the study valuable “brush clearing” that establishes a baseline for future research.

The next three chapters address the question: How does torture become established in national security bureaucracies in which it was not standard operating procedure? Lightcap builds on the work in his book The Politics of Torture (2011) where he argues that informal institutions that violate the Convention against Torture (CAT) can develop when the political projects of regimes become threatened. He conducts two case studies to illustrate how that process unfolded in France (Algeria) and the United States (War on Terror). His central argument is, in effect, a variant of the “militaries fight the last war” maxim. While I do not find the theoretical mechanism especially compelling, Lightcap provides interesting process-tracing narratives about the informal legalization of torture in post-Vietnam France and the United States.

Pfiffner contributes two chapters to this section, the first of which is very timely given the moment of national discussion about responsibility and the rule of law in the wake of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's December 2014 report. That chapter lays out the case for the reasons that senior administration officials in the Bush administration are culpable for pressing a reluctant military command to violate the law on torture. Pfiffner begins with the concept of command responsibility and documents the resistance of several uniformed officers and some civilian bureaucrats to the Enhanced Interrogation Program. The chapter is especially attractive because it gathers this material in a single efficient essay (for a fully developed version, see his 2010 book Torture as Public Policy).

Pfiffner's second chapter summarizes what we know about the efficacy of torture as a tool to generate actionable intelligence. Torture produces information, but the interrogator is unable to determine the value of the information. Mark Danner's discussion of Guantánamo Diary (2015) in the January 20, 2015, edition of the New York Times lucidly captures the argument that “information” is not “actionable intelligence” unless or until it becomes verified. Pfiffner's chapter on efficacy pulls together material I have only seen scattered across a variety of publications and is now my “go to” piece to recommend to people who are curious about the topic.

The final section contains two chapters that address reform efforts: whether the “naming and shaming” efforts of international actors work, as well as an exploration of the variation in democratic countries' efforts to drive CAT violations from the behavior of their agents of coercion. The first chapter, by Courtenay Conrad and Jacqueline DeMeritt, is a cross-national statistical analysis using original data they have collected on naming and shaming efforts by the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees and Commission on Human Rights from 1995 to 2011. The authors conceive of physical integrity violations as a set of related policies, and propose that shaming is likely to reduce the shamed practice but stimulate a rise in an alternative form of abuse. They find no evidence that states increase their respect in response to UN shaming of torture, but do find that states' respect for Empowerment Rights drops in response to torture-shaming efforts of the UN. Like the Mayer, Koizumi and Malik chapter, this one is a useful brush-clearing exercise.

The final chapter, by Henry Carey, is primarily a condensed version of his 2012 book, Reaping What You Sow: A Comparative Examination of Torture Reform Efforts in the United States, France, Argentina and Israel. Carey distinguishes two types of democratic regimes—those that comply with international law (compliant) and those that take exception to international law (expectionalist)—and describes why the former have made more progress than the latter in reducing, and moving toward eliminating, torture. Carey's work can be read as arguing that the international human rights regime will work if fully implemented. But we learn little about why some democracies engage the international regime rather fully while others engage it in limited ways.

In closing, I was surprised that Lightcap and Pfiffner did not write, or commission, a chapter that pulls the pieces together. The reader will have to reflect on the implications of what we learn about the politics of torture by considering the arguments and evidence in conjunction. To my mind, that is a missed opportunity that, if well executed, would have increased the value of this appealing volume, and might have even become an important essay that served as a focal point for researchers studying the politics of torture for years to come. All the same, this volume is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the politics of torture.