Psychology, Torture, Networks: Or, Structure as the Subject of Human Rights

Abstract

This essay lays out a networked conception of violence and justice work. Locating a prime example of networked culpability for twenty-first-century torture in the financial and professional ties that bind the Association of American Psychologists (APA) to the US Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, the essay points back to the long twentieth-century collaboration between national security and behavioral science that fueled network science. I argue that network thinking confounds the liberal humanist sense of agency or sovereignty, and it provokes a promising rethinking of human rights efforts as networked challenges to networked violence. The essay looks at tools for prosecuting violence networks and toward models for disrupting and rerouting them drawn from sociology, quantum physics, indigenous feminisms, and liberation psychology.