Tell us about your education background. Where and what did you study?
I received my BA in Philosophy from Swarthmore College, Philadelphia, PA in 1981 and my MA (1983) and Ph.D (1987) in Political Science from McGill in Montreal, Canada.

What are your responsibilities within Reed College?
I am a professor of political science and chair of the department of Political Science. Reed is an exclusively undergraduate college with a strong sense that teaching is the most important thing we do. Many of my research questions arise and develop in the context of teaching and discussing materials with my students.

What is the Human Rights Review? What sort of work do you do for it?
Human Rights Review is a scholarly journal that was founded in 2001 and now is issued through Springer Science and Business Media, a European based publishing house. It is an interdisciplinary effort that aims at providing a scholarly forum in which human rights issues and their underlying theoretical and/or philosophical foundations can be developed and debated. The goal is to publish theoretically informed analyses of critical human rights issues. The journal focuses on articles from all academic areas, articles and essays that address the moral and political interpretation and application of human rights legislation in the international community, questions regarding terrorism and genocide, issues related to sovereignty, globalization, cultural diversity and gender, human rights issues in health care and economic development, and any of the other many human rights-related issues that concern, or ought to concern, the world today. I serve on the editorial board with some thirty other colleagues, all professionals in the human rights field. My responsibilities include reviewing occasional submissions, writing articles or book reviews as time allows, and advising the editor of the journal on policy questions.

How did your initial interest in torture arise? What led you in pursuing research into such a topic?
I was interested in the concept of power as a student, and the work of Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that the costly violent tortures of the past were replaced by more modern disciplinary techniques, which constrained without violence. Prisons replaced torture, basically. This seemed odd, since the Iranian experience pointed to the fact that discipline and torture could work together. Certainly in the period after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, it seemed fairly clear to many that this was true. The violence of the Islamic Revolution drew many Iranians such as myself to the question of violence. Foucault’s approach to the study of power was hard and unique. It was a great intellectual challenge. I set out to use his work to think about power in Iranian politics. His work on punishment drew my attention to Iranian penal history, and the history of torture more generally. My first book, Torture and Modernity, discussed the interrelationship of torture and the modernization process. Although it is based on my graduate work, it went farther and though well-beyond Foucault to the broader social scientific questions that pertain to the history and analysis of violence.

Tell us about Torture and Democracy (Princeton, 2007). What is the ultimate purpose of this book?
It would be difficult to give the ultimate purpose of an 880-page book. The general thesis of the book is that democracies, not dictatorships, have been the main driving force behind the development of modern torture, and the tendency has been increasingly towards torture techniques that leave few marks (clean not scarring torture).  This is hopeful in its way because the tendency to cleanliness in torture is the effect of increasingly effective human rights monitoring. When we watch, states become careful and sneaky.

But, Torture and Democracy is a much broader book than this thesis suggests. In general, I set out to do several things: to offer a reliable history of modern torture as carefully documented as possible; to use this history to make surprising claims about what drove modern torture, that is, to reassess certain social scientific claims about modern torture; to offer a reliable source book for the human rights community so that they may do their work more effectively; to identify the dangers and consequences of torture for societies; and to offer a careful evaluation and riposte to torture apologists who believe torture can be effective policy for gathering intelligence.

You have recently received the award of Human Rights Book of the Year, 2007, by the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association. Could you tell us a bit more about that? What does it mean to you? Did you ever imagine when drafting Torture and Democracy that it would receive such an award?
I am of course gratified, and as I said at the award ceremony, there are few things more important than the recognition of one’s peers. My first work was reviewed favorably by many journals in the humanities, history and anthropology. This work has drawn attention of political scientists and sociologists. It all underlines the fact that my work is deeply interdisciplinary but with a strong commitment to recognizing and applying well the methods of each discipline. For me, interdisciplinarity means the detailed application of each discipline’s standards, not an excuse for sloppiness.  It is gratifying now that political scientists too count me as one of their own. One can’t satisfy every discipline with every book, and if the worst that can be said of my work is that the new one bows more to political science, then I am content. One cannot write a book for every discipline at the same time, or else it is likely going to be a very bad book.

As to whether I would have imagined it, frankly I cannot imagine how my life is going to change in six months. I seem to have fresh intellectual challenges and opportunities every six months, and I cannot imagine how my life will change. I think my main concern though has always been quality; I assume recognition would follow quality. I was always confident that Torture and Democracy would be a unique work of scholarship, and that its value would be appreciated over time, though I was not certain that events would be as they are. I began this research in 1995 long before the war on terror, but with a deep concern for the changing world of torture and the fact that most of us were groping in the dark. The timing is rather remarkable and I am of course pleased by it.  The attention it has been receiving has been phenomenal; the reviews in major American newspapers are unusual for such an incredibly big book.

Tell us about your nomination as a Carnegie Scholar. What work are you undertaking as such a scholar? How do you feel about this nomination?
The way I understand the Carnegie award is that it was an acknowledgement that my work was good, but that I could make a difference in the world if I had more time. The award weighs not just scholarship but the ability to change and shape public policy. The gift of the huge award that Carnegie provides is that it frees up time for reflection and writing, and in my case it gave me a year and a half of research time. I finished Torture and Democracy as well as the manuscript for my current book, Approaches to Violence.  This book is, like Torture and Democracy, both a scholarly work, and designed to be of assistance to those who wish to combat violence but who are searching for conceptual and rigorous tools with which to make their case.  In many ways, it is the toolkit I used to write Torture and Democracy.

Tell us a bit more about Approaches to Violence. What is it about?  When will it be published?
It is not a “theory” of violence, as I think we are a long ways away from having anything close to that. But it seems to me, as a practitioner, that despite differences, different kinds of researchers use very similar tools. Thus whether we work on genocide, or violence against women or torture, we have to ask some fundamental questions like: how do we decide when testimony is true? What is novel or important in the kind of violence we are studying? What varieties of approaches to victims have to bear the violence they suffer? What are the different ways to think about why people do violence? These are what I call tools, not theories, just things like the hammers and screwdrivers of the business of studying violence. But they have not been available in an accessible way. This is especially important because they did not find most of the kinds of violence scholars study or politicians pass laws about.  Rather ordinary citizens were the ones who first drew attention to them, and scholars and politicians responded. Approaches to Violence makes the toolkit we use broadly available to citizens so that they can do what they do best, identify and combat the violence of our times. That is beyond what a scholar can do. All a scholar can do is provide the means for others to talk about and act on cruelty intelligently.  If all goes well, it will be out in a couple of years.

What do you think of the current use of torture by the United States?
I think the cost of these policies will last for years. Torture typically leaves a twenty-year shadow and changes of government do not deal with the deeper organizational damage that torture leaves behind. To mention a few, when soldiers are trained to torture, they return home and take jobs as civilian police or security, and not surprisingly in several cases, they bring their torture techniques with them. The torture that happens “out there” comes back to a neighbourhood near you. There is no sharp line between military and domestic torture. Secondly, unless the whole government tortures, torture creates a split between intelligence professionals and pro-torture advocates, and the professionals in the American case (whether FBI, CIA or Military JAGS) have left and often chosen retirement, leaving a badly twisted intelligence community. It will take years before Americans can have an effective intelligence community again.

What was the most challenging moment of your career?
I think anyone who undertakes to study torture must expose themselves to human suffering on a scale few people can imagine.  I wish I could say that there was a moment – when I stared down politicians or fought hard won debates or struggled to publish – but the reality is that all these things pale by comparison to the daily effort it takes to work in this area. Unlike many people, I am able to go into dark places and come back with thoughtful stories and come back relatively undamaged, but remaining that way requires constant work and care of the self. I can always spot when another person is traveling the same road, as I am when the first question they have for me is “how do you take care of yourself?” Only people who take this work seriously know that that is the most important question to be answered.

So, how do you take care of yourself? How do you manage to come back from the dark places that you mentioned? Does it not take tremendous effort to study human suffering?
It’s not superhuman work if that’s what you mean. And to say that would be to make this the work of angels, which it is not. All violence is decidedly human, human beings do it and so human beings can understand it. We are not alien to ourselves, and we would be in serious trouble if we lost touch with that. Even torturers are humans, though that might be hard thought to acknowledge. But to lose sight of compassion for the violators is to lose sight of your humanity.

Caring for oneself is not something one talks about; it is something one shows to others by the life one leads. There is a huge difference between talking and showing and there are no rules for caring for yourself. If caring for oneself could be told in a set of rules, then it would be a science that it is not. It is always deeply personal, and no one I have met has had the same approach.  For myself, I would simply suggest reading the Preface to Torture and Democracy. The reviewer for the Times Higher Education Supplement I think said it best when he identified that passage as critical for understanding the author.

“Darius Rejali is an Iranian-American Shia Muslim Calvinist, as he describes himself, and a pleasure-loving professor of political science to boot. He is cosmopolitan and ecumenical, learned and grounded - an almost ideal combination for the task at hand - a dedicated surfer, an enthusiastic accordionist, a multilingual conversationalist, with a penchant for a snifter of scotch. He has an acupuncturist, the euphonious Peggy Rollo, who keeps a close eye on his carpal tunnel. He has at least three doctors, six nephews and nieces, numberless cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, sponsors, mentors, provenders, readers, listeners, Xeroxers, editors, translators and technical advisors, not to mention Kristin’s cats and Quillan the Hungarian vizsla.

And yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that torture is Rejali’s life’s work. Torture and Democracy immediately lays claim to be the most compendious and the most rigorous treatment of the subject yet written. Saul Bellow used to say that we are constantly looking for the book it is necessary to read next. On torture, this is it.”

What advice would you give to students wishing to follow a career path similar to yours?
In a way, I have already answered it.  Those who are drawn to the study of violence as a vocation need to know what their story is and how they got there. Human need and suffering is so great that if you don’t know why you are going into the darkness, you can easily get overwhelmed by everyone else’s agendas, problems and demands.  I tell my students to write down their stories, and if one day they are confused, they should take out the story and read it, and have them explain to themselves why they are there. I find this helps everyone find their way home.  Hades is a dark place, and the only light you have there is your heart. Lose that, or burn it up, and it will not be an easy road home.

Professor Darius Rejali and Professor Philippe Sands will give a lunchtime seminar at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law on the 27th November 2008 from 1 to 2 p.m. on the theme of Torture and Democracy.