Examining Torture: Empirical Studies of State Repression. Edited by Tracy Lightcap and James Pfiffner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 218 pp. $105 cloth.

Examining Torture: Empirical Studies of State Repression. Edited by Tracy Lightcap and James Pfiffner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 218 pp. $105 cloth.Torture is a difficult subject to research. Perpetrators almost always attempt to hide their acts, making any kind of systematic data collection challenging. If one is able to gather data, research on such a subject is often received with ambivalence. Raising the question of whether torture "works" can run the risk of seeming to justify the violence, as can inquiries into the reasons states and their representatives engage in torture. Still, it is of great importance to glean what is possible about why torture occurs and how it might be prevented. Makes a significant contribution to that aim.Many of the studies refute common assumptions. Rejecting the claim that an American majority supports torture, Peter Miller and his colleagues show that this has rarely been the case. Support for torture did increase, however, among Republicans during the Obama Administration, which the authors argue indicates the effect of elite messages on public opinion. Jeremy Mayer and his colleagues find that terrorism does not increase support for torture, contrary to what many researchers assume, but that the degree of political freedom in a country is inversely related to such support. A study of anti-torture advocacy by Courtenay Conrad and Jacqueline DeMeritt fails to show any positive effect of naming and shaming for government practices, and in fact shows that such efforts are associated with increased government repression in other areas. The authors seem to regret this finding, and express the hope that naming and shaming is effective in ways not captured by their study. These studies call readers' attention to the ways in which common assumptions, such as about the factors that influence support for torture and the measures that prevent it, are not always supported by evidence.Other chapters provide further empirical and theoretical support to conclusions that are more prevalent or intuitive. Henry Carey points to a country's reliance on international alliances and corresponding willingness to uphold international agreements as key to whether a government engages in torture. Tracy Lightcap shows that governments are more likely to torture when there is an asymmetrical war that threatens the stronger regime's position or projects. James Pfiffner makes a strong argument in two chapters that torture has undermined both the moral authority and strategic interests of the United States, and that it is ineffective at producing good intelligence.The authors address distinct but interrelated questions, and synthesizing their findings or at least considering them in light of each other would be illuminating. For example, drawing on a previous study he conducted on torture reform in the United States, France, Israel, and Argentina, Carey concludes that a government's willingness to engage in reform depends on perceived national security threats. In another chapter, however, Miller and colleagues find that the actual level of threat does not predict the use of torture by a government. What might explain this discrepancy? Should the reader conclude that the level of real or perceived threat from acts of terrorism is not sufficient to induce a government to begin using torture, but that a government that already uses torture will be unwilling to change its practices as long as the threat prevails? …