Paradox in Preventing and Promoting Torture: Marginalising 'Harm' for the Sake of Global Ordering: Reflections on a Decade of Risk/security Globalisation

• Main Author: FINDLAY, Mark
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: torture; universal rights; risk; security; Human Rights Law; Law and Society
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/2048; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sol_research/article/4000/viewcontent/ParadoxPreventingTorture_2012_IJHR_afv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The ultimate result of globalisation is that as the world setting is compressed there is an intensification of consciousness towards global interests, such as selective ordering, running parallel with strongly influential autonomous interests of the nation state and regional concerns. However, as risk and security disproportionately motivate globalisation, dominant nation state interests (which are at the heart of what operationalises global hegemony) become the prevailing measure of global ordering. Attitudes to ‘harm’ converge around these sectarian interests from the local to the global. As such, the need to torture, it is logically and even ‘legally’ argued, to better ensure domestic security will, if consistent with hegemonic interest, bring about both domestic and global ordering as a consequence. This article argues that globalisation has created a number of paradoxes where global ordering and governance are dictated by the dominant political hegemony and rights become secularized, not universal. Those who seek to contest the views of the hegemony, such as terrorists, are placed outside the global order and international protection and thus are subjected to the one-sided appreciation of harm that has been constructed by the hegemony in attempts at global ordering.