ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the main characteristic features of societies in which torture appears, in terms of their socio-political dynamics and narratives. The torturous power proves a set of characteristic features. H. C. Kelman shows that within torturous systems there is a social need to distinguish 'the innocents' from 'the guilty', who often match with the politically 'uncommitted' and the political opponents of a regime. Torturous society is the realm of multiple separations and arbitrary splits, apparently undertaken in order to detect the 'state enemies'. Another distinguishing feature of a torturous society is the adoption of a better world ideology. Terror and torture seem to have a circular relation: torture needs a widespread terror to be justified and terror is magnified and supported by the spectacle of torture, which is secret but shown. As J. P. Sartre observes the victims status as 'sub-human' – the colonized – is central to the paradigm of torture: colonialism ends by the annihilation of the colonized.
