Jinee Lokaneeta, Ph.D.
jlokanee@drew.edu
Full Professor
Drew University
About Me:
Jinee Lokaneeta is Professor in Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, Madison, NJ. She can be contacted at jlokanee@drew.eduJinee received her PhD from the University of Southern California (USC). Prior to USC, she taught Political Science at Kirori Mal College, Delhi University, India. Jinee completed her Bachelors, Masters and Mphil in Political Science at Delhi University. Her areas of interest include Law and Violence, Critical Political and Legal Theory, Human Rights, Law in South Asia, & Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. She joined Drew University in 2006. She is also affiliated with the Womens and Gender Studies Program at Drew. She is the former President of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs. She is on the Editorial Board of American Political Science Review, Law and Social Inquiry, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Politics and Gender.Her most recent book The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India (University of Michigan Press, March 2020, Orient Blackswan- South Asia edition, 2020) theorizes the relationship between state power and legal violence by focusing on the intersection of law, science and policing though a study of forensic techniques-narco analysis, brainscans and lie detectors. The Truth Machines was the co-winner of the 2021 C. Herman Pritchett Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association & the 2022 Bela Kornitzer Faculty Award for nonfiction from Drew University. She is the author of Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India (New York University Press, 2011, Orient Blackswan 2012) and the co-editor with Nivedita Menon and Sadhna Arya of Feminist Politics: Struggles and Issues (in Hindi). Delhi: Hindi Medium Directorate, 2001. At Drew, she teaches courses titled Law, Justice and Society; Torture: Pain, Body and Truth; Policing and the Rule of Law; Political Theory, and Global Discourses on Human Rights. Her most recent work focuses on the Temporalities of Justice for Custodial Violence.
Research Interests
Political Theory
Human Rights
Judicial Politics
Conflict Processes & War
Gender and Politics
Law And Violence
Law And Politics
Human Rights
Gender And Law
State And Citizenship
South Asia
Countries of Interest
India
United States
My Research:
My scholarship is primarily focused on law and violence in liberal democracies. The main puzzle that I am interested in understanding is that if absence of torture is a defining feature of democracies, and yet democracies always struggle to contain the violence, how do states manage the use of such violence? In my first monograph Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India (NYU Press, 2011; Orient Blackswan 2012), I focused on the legal and political discourses on torture. I studied India and the United States as examples of two common-law based constitutional democracies that share certain institutional features and have jurisprudentially influenced each other. Analyzing cases, documents, and cultural representations of torture, I argued that rather than viewing the post-9/11 policies on interrogation (my site of study) as anomalous or exceptional, efforts to accommodate excess violence- a constantly negotiated process- are long standing features of both the democracies. It is the first such book that compares India and US on torture, and on Indian torture. In my forthcoming book titled Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India (University of Michigan Press, March 2020), I examine the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science and policing in India. While in my first book, the focus had been on legal and political discourses, in this book, I study the site of policing. I place my work within recent debates in comparative Political Theory on policing and state that draw upon ethnographic sensibilities and comparative critical analysis. Based on interviews with forensic psychologists, lawyers, human rights activists, and the police in five Indian cities, and analysis of other textual and visual materials, I consider whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain transformations in everyday policing practices. I study the interface of lawyers, police, and forensic psychologists in the use of lie detectors, brain scanning, and narcoanalysis/truth serums in building an infrastructure of interrogations. Studying the techniques, I argue, allows us to critique a monolithic conception of the state and policing. On the one hand, the techniques reveal the texture of violence experienced by certain sections of the population even under a rule of law. On the other hand, a focus on the techniques exposes the contingent, disaggregated and decentered nature of state power and legal violence creating possible sites of critique and intervention. A significant part of my research is focused on the impact of violence and torture on particular subjects and the racialized and sexualized nature of the phenomenon historically and in contemporary times. In my first book, I focused on how torture impacts the most marginalized sections in India and the United States. In my essay on “Violence” for the Oxford Handbook on Feminist Theory, I analyze how feminist theorists have radically shifted the discourse on violence by pointing to histories of slavery, colonialism, war, militarism and conflicts and their impact on everyday subjectivities and resistance. In addition, my current book focuses on how concepts such as rule of law have to be understood in terms of experiences of marginalized communities in India and my collaborative work on racial profiling of Muslims in the US raises the question of rights of particular communities. In 2016, I completed a project (with Dr. Amar Jesani) as a Research Partner on a 16- Country study on Torture Prevention initiatives led by Richard Carver and the Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT), Geneva. Our study empirically assesses the effectiveness of torture prevention initiatives in India between 1985-2014 and includes the analysis of reports and cases, supplemented by key interviews with National Human Rights Commission members, police, activists and lawyers. We found that despite a long history of initiatives in the context of custodial deaths, there is no evidence that torture has declined either in severity or frequency during this period. This is the first such systematic study on India.I have also been writing on Extrajudicial executions in India (particularly in the Northeast) and thinking of legal initiatives and forms of resistance by human rights activists.
Publications:
Books Written:
Evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay beg the question: has the “war on terror” forced liberal democracies to rethink their policies and laws against torture? Transnational Torture focuses on the legal and political discourses on torture in India and the United States—two common-law based constitutional democracies—to theorize the relationship between law, violence, and state power in liberal democracies. Analyzing about one hundred landmark Supreme Court cases on torture in India and the United States, memos and popular imagery of torture, Jinee Lokaneeta compellingly demonstrates that even before recent debates on the use of torture in the war on terror, the laws of interrogation were much more ambivalent about the infliction of excess pain and suffering than most political and legal theorists have acknowledged. Rather than viewing the recent policies on interrogation as anomalous or exceptional, Lokaneeta effectively argues that efforts to accommodate excess violence—a constantly negotiated process—are long standing features of routine interrogations in both the United States and India, concluding that the infliction of excess violence is more central to democratic governance than is acknowledged in western jurisprudence.