Publications

Book: Torture and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2007) Is torture compatible with modern democracies, and if so, how? I focus on new techniques designed to leave little evidence of brutality, techniques that have an affinity for democracies, rather than dictatorships.

Book: Approaches to Violence (Forthcoming Princeton University Press, 2011) I present the main qualitative orientations to the study of violence and examine how these orientations shape the ways researchers fashion answers in the study of particular kinds of violence.

Book: Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). Paperback, 1994. Selected for Questia E-Book, 2000; See http://www.questia.com. Reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement, Middle East Journal, Journal of Contemporary Asia, The Historian, The American Anthropologist, and Contemporary Sociology. Feature review in the Persian language Irannameh, which is the main intellectual journal in the Iranian diaspora; reprinted in two Persian language magazines with circulations of over 20,000 in Europe, North America, and Australia. Portions translated into Farsi, Portuguese, and Spanish. Reviews are available at the following URL: http://www.reed.edu/~rejali/

Article: “Friend and Enemy, East or West: Political Realism in the work of Usama bin Ladin, Carl Schmitt, Niccolo Machiavelli and Kai Ka’us ibn Iskandar.” Historical Reflections 3 (2004). [How does one choose one’s friends and identify enemies? A critique of modern realists using classical realist thinkers.]

Article: “Torture as a Civic Marker: Solving a Global Anxiety with a New Political Technology.” Journal of Human Rights 2:2 (June 2003): 153-171.

Article: "Electric Torture: A Global History of a Torture Technology," Connect: art.politics.theory.practice (June 2001): 101-109

Article: "Studying a Practice: An Inquiry into Lapidation" Critique: Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (Spring 2001): 67-100 [Critical study of legal, cultural, and religious explanations of stoning, offering an alternative explanation for its origins and persistence today.]


Article: "Ordinary Betrayals: Conceptualizing Refugees Who Have Been Tortured in the Global Village" Human Rights Review (July-September 2000): 8-25. [Critical study of ways in which lawyers, psychologists, states and the United Nations conceptualize torture victims.]

Chapter in Book: "Whom Do You Trust? What Do You Count On?" in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (Princeton University Press, Forthcoming 2004) [Orwell and How to Resist Torture.]

Article and Book Chapter: "After Feminist Analyses of Bosnian Violence" Peace Review (September, 1997). Republished in The Women and War Reader. Edited by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin. New York: New York University Press, 1998. (Paperback 1998) [Critically examines explanations of ethnic rape.]

Chapter in Book: "How Not To Talk About Torture: Violence, Theory, and Problems of Explanation" in Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays in Extralegal Violence, ed. Martha K. Huggins (New York: Praeger: 1991), pp. 127-144.

Short Articles and Entries

Book Reviews

Editorials and Magazine Articles