Publisher's Synopsis
Investigating torture in Iran, this book puts to the test the principal explanations of modern torture offered by four groups - human-rights activists, modernization theorists, state-terrorist theorists such as Noam Chomsky, and post-structuralists, especially Michel Foucault. The author's findings lead him to reconsider the very writing of Middle-Eastern and European history, and to question cherished assumptions about state formation, modernization and postmodernism.;The book contains both graphic verbal accounts and an extensive photographic essay, and places the practice of Iranian torture within the history of punishment, looking at what happens not only in prisons, but also in families, hospitals, factories, schools and military institutions.
