In an article on the revelations of torture practised by the US military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (‘Torture, the Public Secret’, June 5, 2004), Anupama Rao concludes by emphasising the importance of structural violence in colonial and neocolonial situations, as opposed to the extreme physical violence of torture, and argues that by following the liberal discourse on the rule of law and individual rights, “We run the risk again today of singling out the perpetrators of torture, while ignoring the structural brutality, the profound redefinition of humanity, which characterises the 21st century emergence of a new imperial formation.”
