Performative cruelty is an ancient practice, even though the phrase itself is new. Gladiatorial fights (Ancient Rome, c. 264 BCE–5th century CE) in arenas like the Colosseum were intentionally staged spectacles of violence, often involving slaves, prisoners, or volunteers fighting to the death. These public events, attended by massive crowds, promoted imperial power and Roman dominance. Guillotine executions (1793–1794) in Paris squares, such as the Place de la Revolution, were highly publicized events that drew large crowds. Thousands of revolutionaries, commoners, and some royals were decapitated as exemplary punishments, justified as necessary to protect the Republic.
Performative cruelty goes beyond simple violence; it employs violence to communicate power. By making suffering visible and shareable, perpetrators turn individual pain into a public warning: submit or face this fate. Throughout history, this theatrical method has taken many forms, each aimed at increasing fear through spectacle. A brief history of state-sponsored performative cruelty offers a clearer view of how modern governments oppress targeted communities and spread fear both domestically and internationally.
State Cruelty in Historical Context
In the spring of 1938, shortly after the Anschluss, the streets of Vienna became stages for orchestrated humiliation. Elderly Jewish men with long beards, respected rabbis, and middle-class professionals were forced to kneel on the cobblestones. Armed with small brushes or even toothbrushes, they scrubbed slogans on pavements painted by Nazi activists— “Juden Raus” (Jews Out)—while “onlookers responded with joy and applause.” The scenes were photographed from multiple angles, and the images were later shared to show the new reality: Jewish dignity could be stripped away in broad daylight, and no one would intervene.
Decades later, in the ravaged neighborhoods of Gaza, Israeli military operations from late 2023 onward carried out acts of performative cruelty. Palestinian men—some identified as fighters, many later released without charges—were ordered to strip down to their underwear in the open air. Blindfolded and tied up, they were arranged in rows or made to kneel on broken pavement while soldiers stood guard. The scenes were filmed on mobile phones from elevated positions, creating images that quickly spread online. These photos and videos demonstrated to Palestinian society that military control could strip any Palestinian of their dignity, blurring the line between fighters and civilians.
In a different context, the American South and borderlands long used public execution as a way to deter crime. The last such event happened on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. Rainey Bethea, a young Black man convicted of rape, was taken to a scaffold set up in a vacant lot. As many as 20,000 spectators—families, vendors selling snacks, out-of-town visitors—gathered in a carnival-like atmosphere. Newspapers had hyped the event for weeks, partly because the sheriff was a woman. When the trapdoor fell, cheers mixed with gasps. The festive mood highlighted the paradox of performative cruelty: rather than inspiring respect for the law, the public display weakened the state’s moral authority. Within two years, Kentucky banned public executions, becoming one of the last states to do so.
Contemporary states from North Korea to Afghanistan continue to practice performative cruelty. Since 2021, under Taliban rule, sports stadiums in Kabul and other cities have been converted into sites of public floggings and executions. Offenders convicted of illicit relationships, theft, or moral violations are fastened to wooden frames in the middle of the field. Officials announce the sentences through loudspeakers, citing divine justice, before the Taliban administer dozens of lashes with leather whips. The crowds—segregated by gender and often pressured to attend—observe silently. The audible cries ensure that fear sustains social order more effectively than secret repression. Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada has supported the performative enforcement of what they call “Shariah.”
In the US, immigration enforcement is becoming highly visible. Under President Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted large-scale workplace raids and residential sweeps with paramilitary-style staging. In a September/October 2025 operation in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, for example, agents in tactical gear surrounded an apartment complex before dawn. Doors were battered down; families were separated in hallways. US-citizen children, some still in pajamas, were reportedly restrained while their parents were detained. The extensive media coverage of the degradation has highlighted to immigrant communities nationwide that they face not just deportation, but also the public tearing apart of their families.
High-profile rhetoric can achieve comparable effects of degradation without physical force. Recently, during a televised Cabinet meeting, President Trump repeatedly described Somali immigrants as “garbage,” linking the insult to Rep. Ilhan Omar and Minnesota’s Somali community. The remarks, delivered on camera and immediately broadcast, coincided with reported increases in ICE activity targeting Somalis. By dehumanizing an entire diaspora in a public forum, the language performed an unapologetic act of cruelty: it warned existing immigrants of potential exclusion. It signaled to prospective migrants that specific national origins would invite official contempt.
In foreign affairs, the Trump administration has started a campaign to demonize many countries, including Venezuela. He authorized the military to stop any vessels from Venezuela if they are suspected of drug trafficking. A video shows a small boat, not a large ship, leaving the shores of the target country. A missile hits the boat and destroys it, killing most of its occupants. However, a few lucky ones survive the strike and hold on to the boat’s fragile remains. A second missile kills them, too. The government disputes the facts related to the double strike, though the publicized nature of such strikes amplifies regional fear, regardless of factual accuracy. Now, every ship in the Caribbean Sea worries about being hit with missiles. Fear spreads throughout the region.
What unites these episodes—separated by ideology, era, and geography—is the deliberate choice of visibility over concealment. As explained below, ordinary cruelty seeks deniability; performative cruelty seeks dissemination. Performative cruelty turns the victims into spectacles, ensuring that the audience—whether neighbors, an entire population, or distant observers—internalizes the sweep of power. In each case, the state demonstrates its reach and willingness to degrade those it considers threats or unwanted individuals and communities.
Understanding the common elements across these diverse examples reveals the systematic nature of performative cruelty.
Features of Performative Cruelty
There are several core features of performative cruelty. First, the primary motive for performative cruelty is to send a message to a broad audience beyond the immediate victim. The message could be aimed at everyone, a specific community, or a foreign country. The ICE raids are aimed at messaging immigrant communities, including those who are planning to migrate to the US Similarly, striking the Venezuelan boats is a signal to all vessels engaged in drug trafficking, including those that might be suspected.
Second, performative cruelty is staged. It is choreographed, planned, scripted, executed, and shared, with attention to setting, sequence, and framing, whether in a stadium at noon or an apartment building at dawn. Acts are made public through crowds, photographs, announcements, or media coverage. This theatrical element turns violence into a spectacle, reinforcing dominance by creating collective trauma and fostering widespread compliance through anticipation. It will be much more cost-effective for the Trump government if immigrants leave on their own to save themselves from the trauma of detention.
Third, performative cruelty is self-righteous. Perpetrators openly defend their actions as morally necessary, legally required, divinely approved, or as protecting a greater good, such as national security, public order, or divine justice. The Taliban defend public floggings in the name of the Shariah. The Trump administration aims to deport immigrants to restore America’s former glory. Professor Rory Bahadur rightfully points out that the moral framing of cruelty justifies it in the eyes of supporters who otherwise oppose violence, without undergoing any cognitive dissonance.
Fourth, performative cruelty thrives on overreach. The acts of cruelty are somewhat random and even irrational, so the fear of becoming the next victim is pivoted on arbitrariness rather than legality. The ICE swooping on people who appear to be illegal immigrants (greenlit by the US Supreme Court) gives the impression that the agency conducts raids, not after careful examination of whether the individuals pursued lack valid authorization to be in the country. Effectively, these tactics signal that a broad fishing net is used, where legal immigrants, naturalized citizens, and native-born citizens of targeted communities are all potentially fair game.
In addition to these features, performative cruelty may also use other tactics to spread fear, anxiety, and attack fundamental freedoms and family life.
International Law Responses to Performative Cruelty
International law does not explicitly prohibit or punish performative cruelty. However, the prohibition of “outrages upon personal dignity” and the infliction of “degrading treatment” are core tenets of international law, repeatedly affirmed in international treaties. These human rights and humanitarian law treaties can be safely interpreted to prevent and even punish acts of performative cruelty. The US has signed the following treaties, though with reservations, declarations, and understandings that cannot be invoked, as a matter of international law, to subvert the “object and purpose of any treaty.”
Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) provides an absolute, non-derogable prohibition: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” While the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” international law goes further to prohibit degrading treatment that may occur even before conviction and punishment. Public spectacles of humiliation often qualify as degrading treatment, as interpreted by the Human Rights Committee.
The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT, 1984) enshrines the core value of the degrading treatment in its title, equating it with other offenses against the human body and mind. Although CAT focuses on torture, it does not leave out the prohibition against state-sponsored degrading treatment. Article 16 requires states to prevent “other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” that do not amount to torture. Whether done secretly or openly, the CAT mandates signatory states to train officials to prevent and punish prohibited acts, including performative cruelty.
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (1949), applicable in non-international armed conflicts and to “persons taking no active part in the hostilities,” prohibits signatory states from “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” of any person regardless of “race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” Additional Protocol II (1977) explicitly bans such outrages in all settings, including public ones. Article 4 of the Additional Protocol also prohibits any “order that there shall be no survivors,” a rule that might arguably apply to the second missile strike on the Venezuelan boat, even though the evidence released in public is controversial. For various legal reasons, many experts would contest whether these provisions apply to the drug boats.
The US is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), a point I have discussed in a previous commentary. However, its provisions are relevant for understanding the core principles of international law mentioned above. For war crimes, Article 8 of the Rome Statute criminalizes “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” during armed conflicts. In crimes against humanity, which can occur in peacetime, Article 7 similarly proscribes “widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population,” such as immigrants, which may fall under “other inhumane acts,” intentionally causing great suffering. Even illegal immigrants are covered under “any civilian population.”
Conclusion
Performative cruelty accomplishes its strategic goal of spreading fear by intentionally perpetrating outrages against human dignity. Unlike ordinary cruelty, which seeks secrecy to preserve legitimacy, performative cruelty gains momentum through display. This shift from private harm to public spectacle turns the victim’s situation into a billboard.
The spectacle of state actions, like highly publicized ICE raids, is designed to create fear that spreads rapidly. These staged acts of violence act as a powerful form of communication, projecting uninhibited power. It forces the audience to understand the cost of resisting. However, performative cruelty can backfire, as it did in Kentucky after the carnival-style hanging. Nations, including 56 Muslim-majority states, have not yet recognized the Taliban government.
While international law does not explicitly ban performative cruelty, the staged acts of humiliation qualify as degrading treatment under treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, and Additional Protocol II, highlighting the legal obligation of states to prevent outrages on human dignity.
In the US, the federal judiciary is likely to step up and assess the damage caused by performative cruelty to social psychology, immigrant families, and specific communities like the Somalis. The US Supreme Court, in its reality-blind analysis, has been criticized for granting the President power and immunity without considering the potential harm to the rule of law and the dignity of the people. In future cases, the Court will hopefully reconsider its hermetic formalism and consider the harsh realities on the ground.
L. Ali Khan is the founder of Legal Scholar Academy and an Emeritus Professor of Law at the Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas. He has written numerous scholarly articles and commentaries on international law. In addition, he has regularly contributed to JURIST since 2001. He welcomes comments via email.
