Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 320p. $100.00 cloth.

moved by contextual factors such as those in their experiments, while others do shift their views under those conditions (p. 155). In the first three experiments only one in four fell into the fluid category, supporting their claim that “only a small subset of individuals explain variance in aggregate support for torture” (p. 109) whereas in the fourth experiment this proportion jumped to one in three, perhaps as a result of paired vignettes in the conjoint design (pp. 152, 155). Second, their experiments confirm existing data that seeing or reading about the effectiveness of interrogational torture drives up support for it. More troubling, support for torture increased or did not decrease even after treatments showing it was ineffective or that rapport-building approaches were effective. Moreover, Kearns and Young found baseline support for torture even in cases in which it wasn’t effective, suggesting that at least some “support for torture is more punitive than instrumental” (p. 76, also p. 153). Finally, their respondents do not appear to be fooling themselves; the vignettes in the third experiment with physical and psychological torture were (correctly) identified as torture and considered illegal and immoral. Aside from these larger points, it is difficult to know what to take away from the four studies together. National identity of the torture victim seems to matter in some contexts or frames, but not in others; the degree of expertise about the effectiveness of interrogational torture seem to have little effect on popular support for the practice. While issue salience created by the release of the Senate torture report had no effect on attitudes in any of the experimental conditions, it did have a large effect on increasing the rate of petition signing in the second wave, signaling a disjuncture between beliefs and preferences, on the one hand, and political action, on the other. Ten interviews with interrogation and torture experts, all opposed to torture and whose views are sprinkled throughout the text, add anecdotal color and commentary but sit uncomfortably aside the experimental approach that drives the book. Also uncomfortable are operationalizations of “us” [Americans] as “someone who has a white, American-sounding name,” rather than an “Arabic name” and Chinese and Syrians as “groups different from ourselves” as opposed to those in the United Kingdom, who constitute “a group similar to ourselves” (pp. 95, 97, 108, 137). On the basis of the claim that torture can generate some actionable intelligence under conditions that almost never prevail today, Anatomy of Torture argues that torture critics should avoid arguments about efficacy and instead argue against it on moral grounds. The latter, Hassner argues, will be more persuasive, citing a since-published survey (Ron E. Hassner, “Persuasive and Unpersuasive Critiques of Torture,” Perspectives on Politics, 2022) (p. 147). Tortured Logic supports that prescription, insofar as apparently exposure to any form of counterterrorism interrogation—including ineffectively torturous or effective rapport building—apparently increases or at least fails to decrease support for torture. Similarly, in line with the survey just cited, people who displayed less support for torture in Kearns and Young’s first experiment posttest, cited “harmful’’ and “illegal” more than “ineffective” as reasons for their shift (p. 72). Hassner asks whether torture critics “should set aside sound moral arguments that fail to persuade” and answers in the negative (p. 147). But the same is true for efficacy arguments.We can all agree that “[t]orture critics [and this reviewer would say proponents!] should make arguments that are true regardless of whether they convince, not arguments that are convincing regardless of whether they are true” (ibid.). Sadly, that is just as apposite for arguments against torture’s efficacy as it is for moral arguments. Anatomy of Torture and Tortured Logic each offer a novel approach to old questions surrounding interrogational torture’s efficacy and perceptions of efficacy in public support for interrogational torture. Each is also a cautionary tale, not only substantively in terms of their respective subjects but also methodologically about how to study those subjects. Hassner’s claim that torture is not very effective even under the most favorable conditions nowhere near obtaining in modern democracies reinforces skepticism about torture’s ability to elicit intelligence information as part of modern counterterrorism strategy. The methodological difficulties with archival sources reveal some of the obstacles scholars will face as new archives (e.g., in France, in Algeria) become available. Kearns and Young’s findings that many Americans support torture even when they think torture is ineffective provides a sobering corrective to our understanding of why and when Americans support torturing terrorist suspects. The difficulties inherent in experimental surveys suggest it will be difficult to pin down Americans’ labile attitudes toward torture. The fact that both are cautionary tales methodologically appears to be due less to any fault of the authors than it is due to the complexity and difficulty of the subject matter.