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.

This book critiques the conceptualization of security found in mainstream and critical theoretical debates, and applies this to the empirical case of the 2003 Iraq War. The Iraq War represents one of the most puzzling, complex, and controversial events in the post-Cold War era. The manner in which the Bush administration finally decided to hold Saddam Hussein accountable through military intervention provoked a worldwide outcry due to the narratives they constructed to justify the "pre-emptive use of force" and "enhanced interrogation techniques." Responding to constructivist and post-structuralist scholars' calls for a turn to discourse, and aligning its argument with critical security studies, particularly the Copenhagen School (CS), this book conceptualizes language as a pivotal mechanism of power. Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach, it moves away from thinking about the nexus between security and language from a single action, or speech act, to a series of actions or interactions. To illustrate this new approach, the author examines two cases in particular: the UN inspectors' finding that there was no credible evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in early 2003 and the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. Both events show that the boundaries and relations between securitized rules and environments are not pre-given but produced in a particular language game. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, US foreign policy, and IR in general.

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.