International View

«Anyone can become a torturer. And all of us, in some way, already know how to torture»

AP

Why does one person torture another? Only rarely is it to gain information or in response to explicit orders, and almost never because the torturer enjoys violence. Political scientist Jonathan Austin has spoken to dozens of people who tortured others. He says torture is a cultural practice.

Michael Schilliger January 24, 2025 21 min

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Jonathan Austin has interviewed people whom most consider monsters. In Lebanon, he met men who had fled Syria, drank coffee and tea with them, and listened as they told him about torturing – how they had tortured others.

They were often quite ordinary people. Former students, doctors, and police officers, but of course also soldiers or rebel fighters, for whom it had become normal at some point to beat, strangle, or torment people in even more creative ways. What disturbed Austin most was the way the torturers talked about their deeds: sober, matter-of-fact, unmoved.

Jonathan Luke Austin.

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The 37-year-old Irishman, who is a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen and researches political violence, wanted to understand how ordinary people became torturers, became monsters – and what that did to them. After years of research, he is convinced: All of us can become torturers. Torture is a societal norm.

What is it like to sit opposite a torturer and drink tea with him?

At first, I was shocked. In 2014 I was in Beirut. The Arab Spring had ended, Syria was in a civil war, and things looked bleak for Assad. I had studied Arabic literature in Damascus a few years earlier and wanted to talk to people who had fled Syria to understand what was happening there. I wasn’t specifically looking for torturers. But then I found myself sitting with a man who had been conscripted into the Syrian army, and he told me about his work at checkpoints. Very openly, he described «interrogations.» He never used the word «torture,» but he described in detail the techniques he used during these «interrogations.»

What kind of techniques?

Very simple ones: beating, strangling, and so on. He talked about it in a very matter-of-fact way, as if it were just part of his daily life.

Did that surprise you?

I had known that the Syrian intelligence services practiced torture. When I had been in Damascus in 2007, people were disappearing even back then, never to return. Everyone knew that behind certain walls, terrible things were happening. But in my conversations with these seemingly ordinary people, I was surprised by how banal their descriptions of torture were. How it became a routine for them to torment others.

You said at the beginning: «At first, I was shocked.» And then?

Some of these interviewees became something like friends. These conversations began as part of a research project, but over time, you get to know each other better. Eventually, we’d be sitting in cafes, smoking shisha, talking about the problems we were having with our girlfriends or about football – and then suddenly, my brain would kick in, and I’d realize that the person in front of me had tortured someone in a basement with electric shocks just three or four months ago. That’s when I realized how much I had already distanced myself from it internally, how normalized it had all become for me.

You wrote your dissertation based on these interviews and on further research, describing how these torturers are, in fact, ordinary people. You call them «everyday» people.

Before the interviews, I believed that people who torture others must be monsters. But then the people that sat across from me were young men who had studied chemistry, literature – some were even doctors. I couldn’t understand their transformation; I couldn’t grasp how such people became torturers.

You describe this as a transition, a transformation, rather than a conscious decision. Why?

One man who had tortured in Syria – I call him Hamod in my dissertation – told me, «No one wants to do it. Not even when we’re angry. It’s just something that happens.»

The chair is the most common instrument of torture: Torture cell in a Syrian military intelligence prison in Damascus.

Carol Guzy / Imago

That sounds like he’s completely denying responsibility.

At first, I thought it was a very weak excuse. Of course, it makes sense that they would downplay their responsibility. But what struck me was that none of them denied that they had tortured. They willingly talked about what they had done. And the more interviews I conducted, the more often I heard this explanation – that it was just something that happened.

They don’t justify the torture by saying, for instance, that they wanted to extract information from the prisoners?

Some justified their actions ideologically. They felt aligned with the Assad regime and could, in principle, justify violence against the regime’s enemies, even if they didn’t personally enjoy it. But I’m talking about low-ranking torturers, like those at checkpoints, where someone is stopped and then almost spontaneously tortured. Maybe the person said something wrong, maybe the mood among the soldiers at the checkpoint was tense, they were tired, there was pressure from above, or something had just happened in the area. It was rarely about extracting information from the person or obtaining a confession.

Were the torturers afraid of their superiors?

The fear of low-level police officers in the Syrian state was very real. Being too lenient toward the enemy could have serious consequences. This was also why many of them fled, allowing me to meet them in the first place. You could see the effect of this fear now again during the regime’s collapse, when many soldiers shed their uniforms as soon as they could. But we’re mistaken if we think there was a clear chain of command that explicitly ordered torture.

Yet one of the most common explanations for torture is that people follow orders under the right circumstances, even when those orders conflict with their conscience. This was supposedly demonstrated by the Milgram experiment, where participants were instructed by an authority figure to administer electric shocks to another person, increasing the intensity step by step to potentially lethal levels.

It’s important to emphasize that «obedience to authority» operates on several levels. In the case of torture in Syria, for example at checkpoints, such authority figures could simply be a more dominant personality within a group of soldiers – someone with a few more months of experience or someone respected for some reason. «Authority figures» don’t need to wield great power to influence others to torture. Moreover, they themselves are often under pressure from higher-ups. This creates a chain of authority where it becomes difficult to pinpoint a single person who is «fully» responsible.

Concentration camp guards or former SS officer Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis often defended themselves in court by claiming they were just following orders.

In most cases we study today, there’s no direct order for someone to be tortured. Of course, there are exceptions, like after 9/11 when the CIA believed they could extract information through torture – for example, in Guantánamo. But those involved – as far as we know today – were about 200 detainees. A tiny number compared to the widespread, everyday torture that happens around the world, often spontaneously. We don’t need someone to order us to torture. However, the phrase «We were just following orders» remains significant.

Prisoners at the Camp X-Ray prison on the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: The prisoners were held in open metal cages, exposed to the elements and deprived of their privacy.

Andres Leighton / AP

Why?

In the situations torturers find themselves in, it often seems logical for them to feel as if such an order existed. Imagine you’re a Russian soldier in Ukraine, and you’ve been told repeatedly that Ukrainians are all Nazis acting as NATO’s vanguard to colonize Russia. When this narrative is drilled into you, it creates a framework of permission in which many things become possible. You don’t necessarily need an explicit order – it’s often read between the lines.

So, we’re not forced to torture, but under certain circumstances, ordinary people become torturers. Is that because we are inherently violent?

No, quite the opposite. For example, during World War II, psychologists studied U.S. Army soldiers and analyzed how many felt no internal resistance when ordered to kill. Only 2% of the soldiers were uninhibited and not traumatized by their wartime experiences. According to psychologists, many of these 2% exhibited an aggressive, psychopathic personality structure with little discipline. Similar studies conducted on Israeli soldiers in the Lebanon War during the 1980s yielded nearly identical results. One must also consider that shooting someone from a distance is a relatively detached form of violence. Torture is much more direct. On one hand, the enemy does not attack you; on the contrary, they sit helplessly in front of you. Justifying the act of torturing someone defenseless is very difficult. On the other hand, it is an incredibly intimate form of violence.

You call torture the most sensory form of violence.

You have someone in front of you, someone who is helpless. Then you do something to them, and you hear them scream.

Armies train soldiers to reduce their aversion to violence. Soldiers learn to shoot automatically at the right moment and to suppress conscious thought. Is torture also trained?

No. There is hardly any evidence that systematic torture training exists, where any organization deliberately trains people to torture and works to reduce their inhibitions.

But there are manuals from the Soviet Union and the CIA that describe torture techniques.

Yes, we know that the CIA ran a program where they studied certain techniques and analyzed their effectiveness. But globally, the number of people tortured by the CIA is relatively small. When you look at the worldwide extent of torture based on the number of victims, the vast majority are tortured in much more unsystematic situations, by people who were never trained for it. For example, in small police stations or at checkpoints in war zones.

OK, in most cases, there’s no explicit order to torture, no training for it, and people generally don’t enjoy tormenting others. So why is there so much torture in the world?

One answer lies in the origins of specific torture practices. Many of them are accepted forms of violence outside of war – they reflect certain cultural practices. For example, beating the soles of the feet was once a common method of punishment and torture worldwide. In the Middle East, this is still known as «falaka.» In some places, it’s even today seen as an acceptable way to discipline children.

So society is accustomed to violence.

Exactly. Take Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as an example. Many of the torture methods used there can be traced back to practices common in football or rugby. For instance, forcing prisoners to form a human pyramid – a reenactment of the «scrum» we know from football or rugby. Or initiation rituals in fraternities, often involving abusive dares or small torture rituals. One example might be forcibly stripping someone and taping their genitals – a practice known to cause extreme pain. Some such rituals have even resulted in fatalities. These are techniques embedded in our culture. We know them; we may have experienced them ourselves. That familiarity seems to give people a form of justification: If this violence was used against me, I can use it against others.

Lynndie England, then 21, with a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The photos from Abu Ghraib documented a torture regime that shook the self-image of the U.S.

Washington Post / AP

That feels like a leap. We might all know how to inflict violence or pain, but there’s still a big step between that and actively torturing someone who’s sitting helpless in front of us.

Of course, this cultural knowledge is only a prerequisite. Two other factors are needed. The first is context: war, or any situation where we are under pressure. This shows up in even very banal scenarios. We know from experiments that, for instance, if you’re dumped by your girlfriend, you’re more likely to drink and drive. Group pressure is also a significant external force. It’s very rare for someone to torture alone.

Even though the others could later betray them as witnesses?

That’s why it’s so crucial that everyone in the group participates in the torture in some way or another. Everyone becomes complicit. For my research, I watched countless torture videos. There was a time when these videos were easily found on YouTube if you searched in Arabic. The videos were fascinating.

Fascinating?

They showed how most groups followed very similar steps – how the torture was ritualized. Who was allowed to smoke and when. How people would turn away from the victim to avoid making them the center of attention. The kinds of jokes they made – all of this served to create distance from the situation. This is the second factor that enables us to become torturers: our innate human ability to forget, in such moments, what we are actually doing.

Dissociation ...

... and these rituals help facilitate that dissociation. The rituals themselves can be traced back very far in history. Even the act of filming the torture gives it a performative quality. It’s as if it’s not real because it’s being filmed. In the videos, you can see torturers acting for the camera, walking up to it, cracking jokes for the audience. This creates a sense of levity. Even in antiquity, torture was practiced as a kind of performance before an audience.

How did the torturers explain their actions to their families?

Most didn’t tell their families what they were doing. Of course, this still led to significant problems in their family lives. Sometimes they spent months in this extremely violent world, and then they would return home, and the alienation became very real. This is a general problem with wars, not just torture. But with torture, shame adds another layer. Torturers feel a certain degree of shame about what they do. That’s why so few talk about it and why there are so many linguistic contortions surrounding it. People talk about «enhanced interrogation techniques» instead of torture. Prisoners to be tortured were called «The Mail» in Syria, and «the welcome party» was the torture session upon arrival at the prison. There’s nothing heroic about torturing someone, about hurting a defenseless person who may not have even attacked you.

How many expressed regret for what they had done?

Very few. In one interview, Yassir, a Syrian torturer, described the so-called German Chair – a specific torture technique where the victim is tied to a chair, and the backrest is manipulated to exert extreme pressure on the spine. Yassir said, «It’s very simple, as long as you have a chair at hand. It’s a good technique if you use it properly.»

That doesn't sound like much regret.

No, often it was more regret for themselves. I saw them as deeply traumatized individuals who were trying to understand why they had done what they did. Sometimes they regretted helping to crush the revolution, which had ultimately drawn them into the system. Some told me about specific victims they had tortured – often young men who reminded them of themselves or of certain family members.

You’re describing very different people from, say, the torturers in Saidnaya Prison near Damascus or Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. For example, Lynndie England, the American soldier photographed smiling next to a pyramid of human bodies, later denied all responsibility during her trial. In an interview with the Daily Mail, she said she had no sympathy for the people she tortured. In the photos, she looks like she’s enjoying the situation.

Of course, there are people who are inclined to feel no inhibition when inflicting violence – for whatever reason. They may even be drawn to such contexts. Lynndie England was already a prison guard before. Her then-partner, who was her superior at Abu Ghraib and whom she later accused of forcing her to torture, also had a biography marked by violent excesses. So there is certainly a degree of self-selection at play: People volunteer for these roles, in part because they have a predisposition for it.

Abu Ghraib was, paradoxically, planned as a kind of civilizing project: a place where the U.S. could demonstrate good prison management.

Abu Ghraib is fascinating for several reasons. The violence that occurred there was often a rearticulation of hazing rituals common in U.S. football training.

Rearticulation or imitation?

I deliberately say rearticulation because this is something that breaks out from within us – it’s something we carry inside, not consciously. We know it because we’ve experienced it somewhere or seen it somewhere. We carry it within us, but it’s not a deliberate decision to imitate. Instead, in the given situation, we unconsciously draw on things we already know – things we intuitively understand will have a certain effect. Think of hazing rituals or humiliations that are common among adolescents, for example. Consider how Lynndie England and her group forced prisoners to masturbate in public. Then there’s also an imperial component. In Syria, you sometimes had literal neighbors torturing each other. In Abu Ghraib, it was U.S. soldiers who had been sent to the Middle East after Sept. 11. What image did they have of the people there? They didn’t speak the same language, they didn’t understand what was happening locally, and they held a view of Muslims in Iraq that painted them as uncivilized. All of this impacted their ability to empathize. And then Abu Ghraib was temporarily situated in an active combat zone – a high-stress environment where the prison itself was essentially part of the battlefield. None of this, of course, justifies their actions.

So structural and individual factors converge.

Exactly. A kind of prototypical situation. And then there were the photos. This was the era of the first digital cameras with poor quality, but even so, the photos clearly showed what was happening. Abu Ghraib tore apart the innocence of the United States, its self-image as a humane, civilized society.

The fact that torture happens in war, and that even the U.S. tortures, isn’t really news.

No, we already knew that from the Vietnam War. But with Abu Ghraib, we now had documentation that showed how a society that claimed to be fighting for civilization against a brutal dictator ended up losing its own civility.

You state clearly: Anyone can become a torturer.

Yes, anyone can become a torturer. And all of us, in some way, already know how to torture.

Do all states practice torture? Or just the powerful ones?

(Laughs) Yes, we have evidence of torture in nearly all states, though with varying degrees of intensity.

That’s not something the Swiss like to hear.

Switzerland still doesn’t have a clear, direct ban on torture, which has been criticized by the U.N. and human rights groups for years. Cases of brutal and degrading police actions are also well-documented here.

Does more torture occur in autocratic states than in democracies?

Certainly. But history shows us that democracy is a fragile construct that can shift towards autocracy. Therefore, democracy as an institution is not something we can rely on to protect us from torture.

You say torture is a societal norm. That’s a deliberately provocative statement.

I don’t think it’s all that provocative if you consider that human rights are a very recent achievement and that torture wasn’t always condemned. The statement «torture is a norm» might seem shocking in its absoluteness. But when you apply it to specific situations – police violence, domestic violence, all these processes – you can see the parallels. These forms of violence are interconnected.

But we don’t associate this everyday violence with torture. We push that idea onto places like Syria or Russia – authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, foreign cultures.

We tend to see others as more violent, as wilder. And it’s true that the violence in Syria or the war in Ukraine operates on a completely different scale compared to police violence in our societies.

The capacity for torture, the inclination toward it – that’s something that unites us as humans.

I find it paradoxical, but an American archaeologist once said that this is actually an argument for the unity of humanity. If you want to argue against biological differences between peoples, you just have to look at how humans behave in war – because in war, everyone behaves the same. On the other hand, you can also take a more optimistic view: we’ve managed to universally condemn this behavior. We all collectively say, «no, we do not torture.» So, to answer your question: Yes, torture exists in all states. But all states also deny it. Except perhaps the current Russian regime.

What do you mean?

Last year, an ISIS offshoot carried out an attack during a concert in the Crocus City Hall in a Moscow suburb, killing 144 people. Authorities captured the suspected attackers as they fled and interrogated them. They were then presented in court. The men had clearly been tortured. One still had a piece of plastic from a bag around his neck, and another was missing part of his ear. To display torture so openly is extremely rare.

One of the alleged perpetrators of the attack on Crocus City Hall, Saidakrami Murodalii Rachabalizoda, at a court hearing in Moscow. His right ear is bandaged because the security forces are said to have cut off part of it when they arrested him in a wooded area.

Kirill Zykov / Imago

The Russian state wanted to send a message: This is what happens if you go against us.

I interpret it as a sign of weakness. A state that systematically tortures and has control over its people doesn’t need to show it. In Syria, everyone knew where people disappeared to.

Do Russians torture differently?

Not in terms of techniques, but in terms of intensity: Russian torturers are more brutal. I don’t like speaking this way about a people.

Why more brutal?

Civilization fundamentally serves to reduce violence and control arbitrary power. But at the same time, you also have opposing processes – decivilizing processes. In Russian society, violence has been legitimized through numerous such processes.

You’re talking about the brutalization of society.

We can observe this concretely in Russia’s internal colonization. The most recent and brutal example is the Chechen War. We’ve almost forgotten the sheer brutality and mercilessness with which Putin allowed tens of thousands to be killed and how many thousands disappeared. The war made it clear that even in post-Soviet Russia, brutal, raw violence is a legitimate tool of the state.

And that leads to more brutal torture compared to elsewhere? In the U.S., for example, there have been over 600 mass shootings per year in recent years. The country has been at war for decades. That society seems similarly desensitized to violence.

That’s true. The U.S. has also faced issues with excessive violence in military training, but they’ve tried to reform it. In Russia, commanders in the 1990s similarly complained that the level of violence during training was counterproductive to discipline. But today we know: Russian recruits are themselves tortured during their training.

What is the point of torturing your own soldiers?

On one hand, it’s a form of initiation ritual. It’s what truly makes someone part of the group. The Russian army also consists of conscripts, many of whom are drafted against their will. Their individuality has to be broken first. Think of domestic violence, which operates in a very similar way: «You’re part of this family, you’re nothing without this family, and as long as you live under this roof, you follow my rules.» The army is the family.

How does this disciplining process work in practice?

It involves very basic techniques. For instance, recruits are forced to stand in a squat position leaning against a wall for a painfully long time, to sleep outdoors in subzero temperatures until they develop frostbite, or simply endure regular beatings. Another example is the use of gas masks.

Gas masks?

Yes, that’s actually something I haven’t seen anywhere else. It’s a kind of simulated suffocation using gas masks. I assume it’s because they just have so many gas masks lying around.

In your research, you emphasize the importance of simple objects. You say the most significant object of torture is the chair.

If you’re someone who wants – or is forced – to torture someone, you’ll usually want to do it in the simplest way possible. You’ll use whatever is readily available. Since torture is officially prohibited, the object can’t be something that’s obviously designed for torture. Imagine you’re in a war zone, often in an abandoned building with very few objects or resources at your disposal. You need something simple, reliable, and ideally something that minimizes direct contact with the victim. The chair is perfect because it essentially does the work for you.

That sounds incredibly pragmatic.

You’re a soldier, in a stressful situation. It’s also about minimizing effort for the torturer. If you can make it easier on yourself, you won’t want to waste your energy beating someone to exhaustion. Chairs are effective, ubiquitous, easy to use, and they avoid direct physical contact. The same principle applies to techniques like the Dulab, where the prisoner’s legs and head are placed into a truck tire and then they are beaten in the midsection. Why truck tires? They were everywhere in Syria.

In an interview, Ukrainian human rights activist Maksym Butkevych, who was captured by the Russians, described how they tortured him. He said they used small field radios or communication devices to attach electrodes to his body and administer electric shocks.

These field radios are standard equipment for militaries – every military. This technique can actually be traced back to the Americans in Vietnam, but it has reappeared wherever such devices were present.

The history of torture is essentially a global, cross-cultural history of technology and practices.

Exactly. We continue to pass this culture on – or keep it alive. For example, the French passed their methods to the Algerians during the Algerian War, just as the British did during their colonial exploits.

It is said that former SS officers trained the Syrian intelligence services.

That could be true, but it’s not definitively proven. However, I don’t think the Syrians would have tortured any differently if the Germans hadn’t come. These techniques spread even without external training. Take, for example, the torture technique where victims are hung by their arms behind their backs on a hook. Over time, their own body weight dislocates their shoulders. In the U.S., this is called a «prolonged stress position.» In North Korea, the same technique is known as «pigeon torture.» These techniques appear all over the world again and again – because they’re simple, they’re effective, and, particularly in this case, because they require very little effort from the torturers. The victim essentially tortures themselves. And anyone can do it.

Syrians try to identify their relatives who were tortured to death by the Assad regime.

Ugur Yildirim / Imago

That sounds very banal.

One of the biggest misunderstandings about torture is the assumption that torturers spend a lot of time thinking about what to do to their victims, how to inflict the most pain. Torture is a thoughtless act. It’s an act that becomes normalized, regularized, and repetitive.

Were we more brutal during the Middle Ages?

Yes.

That was a quick answer.

I think this is one of the fascinating historical aspects of torture: When torture was still considered a legitimate tool to spread fear among the population or to make an example of someone, it was definitely much more brutal. People had their limbs torn from their bodies, were kept alive longer with care, and the methods were highly creative.

It was a job.

There was the executioner, a professional torturer. These people probably chose that job themselves, though we don’t know for sure. Today, it’s different. Most people who torture don’t do it as a profession, except in very rare cases.

When I read about torture videos, I was reminded of the Pelicot case. The videos showed men raping a defenseless woman. Since then, the question of how seemingly ordinary men – many of these perpetrators were, at least on paper, ordinary – could commit such acts has been ever-present. You say: Anyone can become a torturer under the right circumstances. Does that mean anyone could have been one of those men in the Pelicot case?

That’s the ethical dilemma I’ve grappled with throughout my work. I’ve documented what I’ve found, but it’s ethically unsettling. As a society, we’ve agreed that individuals bear responsibility for their actions – and for good reason. It’s the foundation of societal functioning. At the same time, it’s clear that structural factors push people toward such acts. In that context, it becomes irrelevant whether these men in France were «normal» or «abnormal.» Perhaps they were actually normal but had deeply internalized the violence present in society in an abnormal, extreme way.

Both things can be true at the same time.

We say only 2% of people enjoy exercising violence over others. But the other 98% aren’t completely averse to violence either. There’s potential for violence in perhaps 15 or 20%. And if we don’t address the structural causes, this will keep repeating itself. These repetitions are what I find most fascinating as a researcher. What I’ve learned from conversations with Syrians connects to rituals in Russian military training and now manifests again in occupied territories in Ukraine. It’s like a circle in which we’re trapped by our own behavior.

You’ve watched so many torture videos and spoken to so many torturers. Would you be more likely than me to become a torturer under the right circumstances?

I hope not. (laughs) But I would probably be a good adviser.

You laugh a little nervously. Watching these videos must be traumatizing.

I had to stop watching the videos. But I’m not the only one watching them. On Instagram, on Twitter, it’s very easy to find these violent videos today. Paradoxically, it’s taking us back to a time we thought we had left behind, when kings would torture and execute someone in the town square. Back then, as now, it served also as a distraction for the masses. It shows that even in our modern, democratic societies, we still normalize and accept the violence that enables torture.

Jonathan Luke Austin is professor of International Relations at the University of Copenhagen and heads a research project on the prevention of violence in a human rights context, which is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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