Description
How can we explain the state’s decision to develop legal justifications for torture, and to engage in (quasi-) open justification of the practice, in the U.S. “war on terror”? This paper traces the rise and (partial) fall of “plausible deniability” as the central mode to governing knowledge about human rights violations. It identifies three key shifts which altered both the possibility, and the desirability, of secrecy as the dominant mode of managing knowledge about “forbidden practices” such as torture. These are, first, the increased documentation of state violence over the course of the twentieth century, occasioned by both the increased legal regulation of state violence, and the rise of a transnational field of human rights practitioners and organizations, one of whose primary activities was the documentation and exposure of torture and other violations; second, socio-technical shifts, such as the rise of the internet, which made the keeping of large-scale secrets more difficult; and third, geopolitical shifts, particularly the end of the cold war and its attendant contest of moral positioning, including over human rights policy, with the Soviet Union.
