Defying Guantánamo: Resistance to indefinite detention and torture in a prison camp
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How can we conceptualize resistance within contexts of detention and extreme asymmetrical violence such as torture prisons? Based on autobiographical accounts of and interviews with former Guantánamo prisoners, this article reconstructs how prisoners dealt with indefinite detention and torture. Based on a dialogue between existing theories of resistance and empirical accounts from Guantánamo, a framework of resistance is developed that operates on three conceptual axes: (1) By looking into the perceptual structure of the detainees’ practices, four modes of resistance are identified: confrontational resistance, concealed resistance, disguised resistance, and internal resistance. These modes vary with respect to whether they can be observed by the camp administration and whether they can be recognized as acts of resistance. (2) By analyzing the situational dynamic of acts of resistance, different degrees of radicalness can be distinguished within each mode. While circular acts seek to alleviate the harmful effects of the environment, transgressive acts seek to end imprisonment. (3) Finally, because circular acts of resistance mitigate specific violations, it is instructive to identify the dimensions of vulnerability that these acts primarily address (corporality, sociality, meaning). Analyzing Guantánamo in such a way does not only open an instructive perspective on detention, torture, and the logics of resistance in the camp but also reveals more general implications for the comparative study of resistance in camps and prisons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".