Staff Writer Jake Tibbets attended the Just Violence panel last night, held at Teacher’s College, talking about modern morals in the practice of torture by police officers in India. Dr. Rachel Wahl, the author of the event’s namesake book Just Violence: Torture and Human Right in the Eyes of the Police had a lot to say about the perceived standard of equality and justice. 

On Thursday, April 12, in Grace Dodge Hall at Teachers College (which is not to be confused with Dodge Hall at Columbia University, which is where the event was said to be taking place on the Institute for the Study of Human Rights’s Facebook page), Dr. Rachel Wahl, an assistant professor in the Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, spoke about her new book, Just Violence: Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police, a case study detailing how police officers and military officials in India are able to make sense of the human rights violations that they regularly and openly commit. The event was small and intimate; including myself, the speaker, and two facilitators, there were only fourteen people in the room. The modest setting, however, made it easier, in many ways, to digest the complex ideas that Wahl was bringing to the table (and I mean that literally—most attendees sat at one of four tables in the room, which had been arranged into a square). Even in the company of a relatively small number of people, Wahl was able to deconstruct human rights terminology, social contract theory, the modern moral order, and liberalism as a whole in just as eloquent and intriguing a manner as an academic in a more “high-key” setting would have been able to.

Thankfully, the location of the event was listed correctly on this flyer. If it weren’t, I would have spent my afternoon searching for Room 359 in Dodge Hall, which doesn’t exist.

After she was introduced by someone from the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, which organized the event, Wahl jumped right into her talk. Aided by a slideshow presentation that she had designed, Wahl began by briefly discussing how she came to become interested in this somewhat niche topic. During graduate school, she explained, she had become interested in Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s conception of a “modern moral order.” According to Taylor, this modern moral order is predicated on the assumption of a fundamental good centered around the prevention of suffering. Making this a bit more easy to understand, Wahl explained that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is representative of this order. Wahl, motivated by Taylor, wanted to explore what may be being displaced by this modern moral order. Her studies, like Taylor’s, would be rooted in a certain philosophical anthropology; in other words, she believed that it would be impossible to know an ethic until she saw it enacted. She also operated under an assumption of the primacy of moral orientation. To her, to know who you are is to know where you are oriented in moral space. What she intended to do through her studies was to get to the bottom of what she calls the “social imaginary,” a set of values, institutions, symbols, and laws through which we imagine our “social whole.” To do this, she thought that it would be worthwhile to study the beliefs and actions of police officers and military officers in India during an era in which human rights ideology is almost ubiquitous. In summary, she said, she wanted to study how ideas are lived and what happens when the ideas by which people live are challenged, particularly by forces who seek to change things through education and activism.

Why India? Wahl addressed this question almost immediately. To Wahl, India is a site of great theoretical and practical importance. On a theoretical level, it is one of few places that exists almost entirely outside of the realm of influence of contemporary liberalism. Moreover, ideas are regularly confronting one another in India, a country in which both Marxists and right-wing populists wield some level of political power (alongside some more moderate forces). On a practical level, India is, according to Wahl, the “largest democracy” in the world. Furthermore, human rights violations committed by agents of the state, including torture, are pervasive in India. For her study, she conducted over one hundred interviews, most of which were with police officers and military officials. In the interviews, she asked open-ended questions, many of which were centered around the definition of justice. She made sure to never bring up the question of human rights unless it was brought up first by her subject—and it regularly was. According to Wahl, one of the most frequent responses to her first question, “What are some challenges that you encounter on the job?”, was, quite simply, “human rights activists.”

Through these interviews, Wahl was able to assemble a picture of these officers’ conceptions of justice. To them, equality is a falsehood that undermines justice. Justice, in their eyes, should be based upon merit. People, they argue, are fundamentally different, and in order to uphold justice, it is necessary to harm the right people for the right reasons. This conception of justice, however, breaks down in practice, says Wahl. These officers, she found, were often forced to use violence against more individuals than they believed that they should. They never felt that the act of torture in itself was wrong, but many did feel that their reasons were using torture were at times insufficient. If they could avoid it, they wouldn’t use torture against those who have been accused of corruption and inefficiency, but often times, they don’t feel as though they have an option. In other cases, however, they view torture or even extrajudicial killing as necessary. When discussing false encounters, in which officers assassinate suspects and frame their deaths as accidents, these officers argue that they had no choice. If they were to merely arrest repeat offenders, many of whom are well-connected, they would simply be released and go on committing crimes, and, as a result, faith in the judicial system would decline dramatically.

Wahl then discussed how these officers responded to education related to human rights and to activism carried out in the name of human rights, and how those responses differed. Interestingly, they didn’t outright reject human rights education. Instead, they tried to apply the lessons that they had learned to situations involving people that they see as vulnerable and deserving of protection—namely the elderly, children, and refugees. During one interview, Wahl asked the officer whether he agreed with the Jefferson quote about how the God who gave us life also gave us liberty. The officer didn’t reject the quote on its face, agreeing that God gave life and liberty. He did, however, make the point that God introduced a check on liberty by allowing people to choose one person or group of persons who would protect rights. Furthermore, he argued, human rights dialogue has benefitted the wrong people, as it has allowed those who violate the rights of others to carry on with impunity. This is particularly interesting for one key reason: Instead of pushing back against human rights language with another mode of thought, this officer is using the terminology of the human rights movement to contest it. This officer is merely describing Hobbesian social contract theory and the notion that total liberty can and should be sacrificed in the name of protection from harm. To him, though, human rights dialogue prevents this social contract from being carried out. He questioned how someone who violated human rights could be said to have human rights. To put it simply, this officer sees himself not as a violator of the rights of criminals but as a protector of the rights of those who have been harmed by criminals.

The response of officers to activists, however, was much different. There was no engagement with the content of the arguments made by the activists; instead, they attacked their character. These activists were called “indecent,” “biased,” and “woefully uninformed.” Does this mean that the tactic of naming and shaming is ineffective? Not according to Wahl. Even if these officers reject the moves made activists, she argues, they still alter their behavior. They may not agree with the points that the activists are making, but people who are watching them do, and any continued violations of rights might trigger a crisis of confidence among the public. Even though activism had a different surface-level effect than education, it still resulted in change.

Wahl then moved on to a discussion of the relationship between international and local norms and values. Instead of rejecting international values, these officers worked within frameworks provided by them. They didn’t see any conflict between these values and their religion or their country. Instead, they saw a conflict between these values and their roles as officers. They also noticed conflicts regarding these values at the international level. They wondered, for example, how American NGOs can call for an end to extrajudicial punishment when the United States military carries out extrajudicial killings frequently. They used this hypocrisy in part as a justification for their actions.

To conclude, Wahl remarked that these trends are reflective of both the fragility and the pervasiveness of the modern moral order. There is a strong competition among ideas related to human rights, but the discourse of human rights pervades all sides of these arguments. These officers never mentioned caste, or birthright, or the Hindu religion. Instead, they proposed that perhaps they were doing more to protect rights than they were getting credit for. When ideas confront one another, terms are adopted by different sides and the meanings of those terms shift. Competitive ideas tend to come from within far more often than from outside. Wahl also made the point that we should keep in mind the words of Hannah Arendt, who once said that we shouldn’t think of “evil” people as simply having failed to think.

After discussing future research topics, including a study of American police officers and a study of university students with differing political opinions, Wahl took questions from the small crowd. A first member of the audience asked whether any critical perspectives about human rights were presented when officers received education. Wahl said that this wasn’t the case. Most of the education was didactic, but that may have had more to do with the nature of long-distance learning than anything. A second attendee asked two questions: First, he asked how officers reacted when they perceived that narratives  threatened their identity. Wahl argued that they never “faked it” and instead used the newly acquired language to justify what they had done. She said that she’s still trying to figure out how people can cling to their own narratives under conditions of duress. Second, the attendee asked whether there were any noticeable parallels between situations in India and America. Wahl said that in America, cops tend to resort to “inner practices” as means of coping with threats to identity. The same, she said, is true of university students here. Evangelical students, for example, are very willing to change their views, as they have been taught that their prime responsibility is to live in harmony with others. They don’t view it as their role to get into political arguments—to them, God is the only one who needs to serve as a political agent. They are willing to give up control, and Wahl is interested in learning more about how we can work that tactic into a secular outlook. A third person asked whether the implications of Wahl’s work have more to do with how human rights educators are trained or how education is carried out. Wahl said that her previous work has more to do with the latter, while her current research is centered around the former. Finally, a fourth audience member offered an alternative hypothesis related to the case of the evangelical students: Is it possible that they don’t react negatively because they don’t view their political beliefs as being central to their identity? Wahl argued that this wasn’t so much an alternative hypothesis as it was a reformulation of what she had said. Security in one aspect of one’s identity, she said, enables receptivity in others. While conservative evangelical students aren’t asked to put their entire identities on the line, liberal secular students often are, explaining their comparative resistance to the possibility of altering their views.

Walking into the event knowing only the title of Wahl’s book and the basic methods she used to conduct her research, I was quite intrigued by some of the conclusions to which she came during the course of her talk. Her observation that opponents of a popular social movement found themselves using the language offered by that movement to stand against the movement, though not necessarily groundbreaking in and of itself, carried quite interesting implications about the state of liberalism as we know it. As she mentioned, liberalism is being challenged from what, at times, seems like all sides, and its fragility is slowly being revealed. The fact that, even in India, liberalism is primarily being contested with arguments that are rooted in liberal notions of the social contract and natural rights, however, proves that fragile as this ideology may be, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Wahl is fairly new to the academic scene, having received her Ph.D from that other Manhattan school only five years ago, and I sincerely look forward to seeing where her research about how beliefs about human rights, justice, and morality relate to dialogue and discussion ends up taking her.

Just Violence via Columbia University