This edited volume seeks to contest prevailing assumptions about torture and to consider why, despite its illegality, torture continues to be widely employed and misrepresented. The resurgence of torture and public justifications of it led to the central questions that this inter-disciplinary volume seeks to address: How is it possible for torture to be practiced when it is legally prohibited? What kinds of moves do agents make that render torture palatable? Why do so many ignore the evidence that torture is ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique? Who are the victims of torture? The various contributors in the book look to history, the practices of interrogators, artistic representations, documentary films, rendition policies, political campaigns, diplomatic discourses, international legal rules, refugee practices, and cultural representations of death and the body to illuminate how torture becomes permissible. Building from the personal to the communal, and from the practical to the conceptual, the volume reflects the multivalence of torture itself. This framework enables readers at all levels better appreciate how and why torture is open to so many interpretations and applications. This book will be of much interest to students of International Relations, Security Studies, Terrorism Studies, Ethics, and International Legal Studies.

Spectral Methods Using Multivariate Polynomials on the Unit Ball is a research level text on a numerical method for the solution of partial differential equations. The authors introduce, illustrate with examples, and analyze 'spectral methods' that are based on multivariate polynomial approximations. The method presented is an alternative to finite element and difference methods for regions that are diffeomorphic to the unit disk, in two dimensions, and the unit ball, in three dimensions. The speed of convergence of spectral methods is usually much higher than that of finite element or finite difference methods. Features Introduces the use of multivariate polynomials for the construction and analysis of spectral methods for linear and nonlinear boundary value problems Suitable for researchers and students in numerical analysis of PDEs, along with anyone interested in applying this method to a particular physical problem One of the few texts to address this area using multivariate orthogonal polynomials, rather than tensor products of univariate polynomials.