This interview offers Iqbal Khan’s directorial perspective on his influential production of Othello (2015). The casting of Hugh Quarshie as Othello and Lucian Msamati as Iago made Othello a play more about intra-racial than inter-racial relations. However, Khan explains how the inclusion of references to the torture of prisoners of war by the allied forces during the Iraq War helped him highlight the ways in which Othello is more than a play about its protagonist’s doubt about his place as a person of colour in a world dominated by people with different traditions that exclude him. According to Khan, the play is equally (if not more) invested in exploring the nature of Othello’s work and the nature of his experience as the leader of mercenary forces. Besides, as Khan points out, the questions that haunt Othello haunt all of us. Some of these questions – including what makes up one’s systems of loyalty, what makes up one’s systems of justice and judgement, or whom one is accountable to – are especially problematic at times of war, because they often reveal a slippage between lack of control (and victimhood) and abuse of power (and complicity).

The failures in Chernobyl are echoed in the stories of other accidents, such as the Challenger and Columbia explosions, the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, and the medical errors that happen every day in every hospital. After these stories of technological disaster, I move to purely human systems. The example I use is the infamous Stanford prison experiment, where fake college-student “prison guards” ran amok after just a day of playing that role, and with no regulations or oversight were on target to permanently harm the other college students, their “prisoners.” This history repeated itself with stories from Abu Ghraib (photo of the prisoner on the box), showing that when we don’t attend to all the layers of Swiss cheese, we end up with disasters again and again.

Chapter 16 shows torture to be a lose-lose practice, its results virtually always unreliable. It is shown to be contrary to customary international law, the domestic and military laws of virtually every state, as well as the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and, of course, LOAC. Yet torture persists. After describing torture, international examples are detailed, including from CIA black sites. Excuses for torture are given and rebutted. Particular attention is given to US uses of torture after 9/11, none of which has been shown to have been useful, contrary to presidential assertions. Israel’s torture experience is covered, as is the French experience in Algeria. Waterboarding is clearly identified as torture, with several examples provided. The “ticking time bomb” scenario is argued to be an intellectual fraud, despite its being a frequent excuse for both liberals and conservatives to promote it. US military practice is also detailed. Cases and Materials include a real-world Sri Lankan ticking time bomb experience and a copy of a chilling US Department of Justice memorandum describing – and authorizing! – CIA black site methods of torture.

Chapter 6 turns to the second term of the Bush 43 administration (2004–2008) which was characterised by more pragmatic engagement with and even tacit endorsement of the court, yet continued insistence on legal privileges through the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Here, the United States is shown to express illiberal internationalist conceptions that appeared more complementary with legalism, but remained distinct from it. Significantly, the negation of exceptionalist ideological beliefs by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal led to acceptance of limited equal rights under the UNSC consistent with legalism. This episode corroborates the claim for ideology’s controlling role in interpreting legal principle but also the power of contesting American IL policy at the level of ideological beliefs.