Privilege, torture and nonkilling

[Extract]
In a nonkilling society, members would neither kill nor threaten to kill one
another. Nor would they kill or threaten to kill outsiders. There would be
neither armies, navies and air forces, nor shadow forces. Arms industries,
which both depend upon and drive violence and killing, would lack conceptual,
economic and political raison d’être and would be consequently neither
sustainable nor profitable. The resulting economic and political incentives towards
the militarization of workers, managers and communities similarly
would vanish. Those struggling to create nonkilling societies must work towards
their elimination by finding ways to eliminate the relationships of domination
and exclusion which make their existence possible and which therefore
enable killing (Paige, 2009: 21-22). We can appreciate a great deal about
these relationships from an analysis of the institutional and causal conditions
underlying torture. For example, careful analysis demonstrates that torture is
not and cannot be a consequence solely of the behaviour of so-called bad apples;
its occurrence depends upon complex social dynamics and, in particular,
requires the existence and promotion of masculinist attitudes within the perpetrators,
their society, and its institutions. In the following I focus specifically
on the foundational role played by masculinism in enabling torture. I argue
that its centrality in torturing and killing societies demonstrates that the elimination
of masculinism is central to the development of a nonkilling society