Events of the last two decades show that torture cannot be regarded as a relic of the past, underscoring the importance of investigating its operation and internal logics. This project does so focusing on Israel as a case study. In common with other colonial and post-colonial regimes, Israel uses torture not as the rare exception, but systematically. Israel therefore provides a paradigmatic case study for investigating the effects of the widespread deployment of torture.

This research is based on the exclusive access the research team has been granted to the archive of PCATI. The PCATI archive provides a rich and highly valuable source of data documenting torture practices, including, most significantly, depositions provided by more than 5,500 Palestinian victims of torture, in addition to medical records and legal documents. The project consists of the digitisation of the archive, and a close and detailed investigation into its data to expose facets of torture which thus far have remained hidden.

This research first explores what the systematic application of torture aims to do to the communities thus targeted. Framing the deployment of torture as a political technology (Foucault 1975), and seeing it as a colonial technology of population control, it examines whether and how it seeks to shape subjects, communal ties, and political relations.

Second, it investigates the effects of the prolonged and widespread use of torture on the society which facilitates its use, by mapping and analysing the interfaces between the security apparatuses and civic infrastructures that enable this deployment of torture, by focusing on the healthcare system. Predicated on the ethics of care, the convergence of healthcare with the violence of torture is most striking. This project examines how ethics is institutionalised and operationalised as a set of practices and procedures used to mitigate and mediate the incongruity between the rationales of torture and medical practices of care.