Current Issue
Volume 16, Issue 1 (2025)
From ‘War on Terror’ to War on Palestine: Torture, Political Imagination and the Animality of War
Salman Hussain
This paper examines ‘viral atrocities’ of the Israeli soldiers in the war
on Gaza (2023-ongoing), and suggests examining the ‘political imagination’ (Kahn
2007) lurking behind these violent transgressions. Making parallels with the U.S. ‘war
on terror’, it further suggests that both cases show that behind all acts of political
violence, including torture, there lies an imaginary that first de-humanizes ‘the enemy’
and frames them as ‘torturable populations’.
Debates over the legal definition of torture generate important questions about human
rights, international law, and the conduct of war, but they limit our analytical and
ethical horizons. These efforts bracket off torture as an ‘individual pathology’ or a
‘legal violation’ and do not consider the broader political and historical context in
which it is practiced, justified, as well as recognised as torture or escape recognition
as such. When we acknowledge and analyze torture as a ‘political phenomenon’, only
then can see how the violent transgressions that constitute torture create and nurture
‘political meaning’ about oneself, the others and the nature and the use of violence
against those others.
