ABSTRACT
In recent decades there has been a gradual shift from methods of torture based on physical pain and the breaking of the will through the claudication caused by that pain, to much more subtle and complex techniques based on directly attacking the conscious self. Decades of shared knowledge and training have been exchanged through the torture and interrogation schools of each of the international geopolitical powers. This has produced a corpus that, despite local idiosyncrasies, is essentially the same across countries. Over time, a more or less fixed set of techniques has been established and is recognisable in the history of recent decades.
