State Crimes

11 Key excerpts on "State Crimes"

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  Crimes of the Powerful

  White-Collar Crime and Beyond

  • Dawn Rothe, David Kauzlarich(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 State Crime

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003124603-7

  State Crimes, sometimes referred to as government, wholesale, or regime crimes, can be defined as an act or actions (commission) or failure to act (omission) by actors within the state that result(s) in violations of domestic and international law, human rights broadly, or systematic or institutionalized harm of its or another state’s population in the name of and for the benefit of the state, regardless if there is or is not self-motivation or interests at play. This recognizes independent agency, the organizational context of the political apparatus, and lack of action as well as direct and indirect perpetration. This definition also includes social, cultural, political, and economic harms not “criminalized,” and recognizes the systematic or institutionalized component. Crimes and harms committed by states include, but are not limited to:

  forced displacement; torture; political assassinations; war crimes; illegal war; illegal occupations; human rights violations; genocide; crimes against humanity; denial of due process; state-sponsored cybercrime; general oppression; arms sales; structural violence; overt and covert surveillance; obstruction; bribery; labor exploitation; violence against women; human trafficking; state propaganda and misinformation campaigns; forced sterilization; perpetuation and institutionalization of classism, racism, sexism; treatment and policies targeting “illegal” immigrants and refugees; treatment and policies targeting the homeless; treatment and policies targeting specific religious groups; and denial of basic sustenance.

  These can be thought of as part of a continuum, from the subtle to the obvious to the public. Students and readers might wonder how some of these harms, such as denial of basic sustenance or lack of healthcare, are State Crimes. Consider that the justification for a government/state is to protect and provide for its citizenry. This is a very paternalistic concept, but it is a component of states’ legitimacy to govern. States’ failures to uphold this “contract,” or action in direct opposition to it, results in State Crimes and harms. Consider also that State Crimes include the harming of the environment through policies and failures to address climate change or nuclear weapon waste, the environmental impact of war, and the environmental harms that result from ignoring major infrastructural defaults and deterioration. Given the number of states combined with the crimes and harms we note above, it can often feel overwhelming. Consider Box 7.1

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  Controversies in Critical Criminology

  • Martin Schwartz, Suzanne E. Hatty(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  on behalf of the state, not for the benefit of the individual state official. Even though it is obviously true that any State Crimes must be carried out by people—state officials or their underlings—if the crimes are carried out to advance state interests, or in the name of the state, are only possible through use of the resources of the state, and reflect norms and values that have developed within the state (or some branch of the state), then we have state crime. Society is more than the sum total of its parts. This is also true of state organizations; they have cultures and structures which shape decisionmaking. It is therefore instructive to view state crime within its larger social contexts. To speak of state crime, then, is certainly not to deny or downplay the personal responsibility of individual state officials; rather, it acknowledges that such crime cannot be fully understood solely in terms of the actions of humans.

  The second critical part of the definition is that there is no requirement that a "law" be broken in order to identify a state crime. One of the hallmarks of critical criminology is its rejection of a purely legalistic definition of crime. Indeed, most critical criminologists subscribe to the view that the violation of domestic criminal law is but one way to define crime. Other ways to define state crime include the violation of human rights, principles of self-determination, international law, and regulatory and administrative laws. States can also be said to be engaged in crime if they refuse to alleviate avoidable human suffering, pain, and exclusion. As we shall discuss later, this dimension of the definition of state crime is especially controversial.

  Several types of state crime can be identified. A criminal state is one whose central purpose is a criminal enterprise, such as a state policy of genocidal action. In the twentieth century it was arguably most widely applied to Nazi Germany (as we discuss later), although many other states have been characterized as criminal states as well (e.g., Hussein's Iraq and Milosevic's Serbia). There is also the repressive state, which engages in a fundamental denial of basic human rights (e.g., totalitarian dictatorships in many parts of the world, and the apartheid South Africa as a classic, historical case); the corrupt state, where the state is used as an instrument to enrich its leadership (e.g., the Phillipines under Marcos, or Indonesia under Suharto); and the negligent state,

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  Transnational Crime and Criminal Justice

  • Marinella Marmo, Nerida Chazal(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  4 ) we have seen how many different groups, organizations, individuals and states now operate via fluid, dispersed networks that constitute a complex global order. Through the growth in the number of state-activities watchers, the harm caused by the state is more under scrutiny, and states are more likely to be held accountable in different ways. International standards of values and rights crystallized in conventions, treaties and national and supranational courts’ rulings have contributed to form a new conscience towards the role and functions of the state.

  Definition

  While there is no single and accepted definition of State Crimes (Matthews & Kauzlarich 2007), we can consider, for the purposes of this chapter, the working definition offered by Kramer and Michalowski (2005, pp. 447–448):

  State crime is any action that violates public international law, international criminal law, or domestic law when these actions are committed by individuals acting in official or covert capacity as agents of the state pursuant to expressed or implied orders of the state; or resulting from state failure to exercise due diligence over the actions of its agents.

  The advantage of embracing this definition is that it complies with a general model of criminal liability: the responsibility for criminal offences is personal rather than collective. In fact, the ‘state’ is a rather abstract concept; who is the ‘state’? The answer may vary, to include the government, parliament and state police as a collective entity, but also the prime minister or president as individuals although acting officially to address a function of the state. The statutory individuality of criminal liability is insufficient to embrace the several forms of collective criminal responsibility and, particularly, to apply and enforce this responsibility to the state. That is why Kramer and Michalowski’s (2005) definition refers to individuals or agents: this definition engages with the legal-procedural concept of criminal liability.

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  Crime

  Local and Global

  • John Muncie, Deborah Talbot, Reece Walters(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Willan

    (Publisher)

  Traditionally within criminology, the state is most commonly understood as ‘protector’ against, rather than perpetrator of, crimes. But states also kill, injure, destroy and plunder with far more serious and widespread consequences than those associated with ‘everyday crime’. State crime can take various forms, including corruption and intimidation, violation of health and safety regulations, institutional racism and, of most significance to the discussion in this chapter, torture, terrorism, disappearances, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It might rightly be considered the most serious form of criminality because the monopoly of both violence and legal regulation typically enjoyed by sovereign nation states means that they can inflict violations of human rights with impunity on both foreign nationals and their own citizens.

  A key characteristic of all nation states is that they have successfully claimed a monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within their own territory (Weber, 1968; Cover, 1986; Tilly, 1992). They are therefore in a position to perpetrate or instigate the world’s most serious violence: the infliction of pain, injury or death in contravention of international or national legal or moral norms (Green and Ward, 2004). It is this illegitimate state violence, or state crime, that is addressed in this chapter. It is also important to recognise that ‘State violence needs to be understood both as an expression of state power, and as comprising individual acts of aggression with complex social and psychological relations to other forms of interpersonal violence’ (Green and Ward, forthcoming).

  Criminal state practice is manifested in a range of guises, of which torture, war crimes and genocide are perhaps the most familiar (at least as they are represented by intermittent media coverage). But state crime as a generic category importantly can also include political corruption, forms of organised crime, state–corporate offending and much of the death and suffering attributed to natural disasters (see Chapters 1 , 5 and 6

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  The Unlawful Society

  Global Crime and Security in a Complex World

  • Paul Battersby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 The Globalization of State Crime

  States have need of laws, including international laws, and yet states, or their agents, claim the prerogative to reinterpret, rewrite or even transgress the law – where necessity dictates. For this reason, State Crimes are entirely absent from the corpus of international criminal law – as they are from domestic criminal codes (Bassiouni, 2011 , loc. 248). Even the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) implies individual and not state criminal liability. Unlike civil law, where responsibility can be apportioned and penalties imposed upon state and corporate entities, responsibility for criminal acts committed in the name of the state is individuated so that individual culprits can be identified, isolated and punished, but not the institutions they represent. Yet, the concept of state crime enjoys wide currency among international jurists, political scientists, criminologists and humanitarians. The terms “pariah state,” “narco-state” and “state sponsor of terrorism” sur face in official security discourse to justify punitive actions against “rogue” foreign governments. The “failed state” is a special category of political deviance, where, under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm, the rights and privileges of sovereignty are abrogated because “national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity ” (emphasis added) (UNGA, 2005 , p. 31). There are evidently strong moral as well as politi cal grounds for regarding certain state actions as criminal and assigning ­collective responsibility for them.

  There is a countermovement, however, to the progressive extension and expansion of international criminal law and international humanitarian law. Many state actions once considered unlawful are being ­rendered lawful in a formal legal sense – in the name of state and international security. What was once considered covert and objectionable is now overt and negotiable. For example, “running guns” to insurgent groups is normalized under R2P. Informationalization is “dehumanizing” war and enlarging the scope of state power but also weakening the legal foundations of basic human rights. Total war is taken to a new level

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  Revisiting Crimes of the Powerful

  Marxism, Crime and Deviance

  • Steven Bittle, Laureen Snider, Steve Tombs, David Whyte, Steven Bittle, Laureen Snider, Steve Tombs, David Whyte(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This first point emphasizes the ontopolitical analysis of the imposition and the definition of power in colonial societies. As can be noted, in colonial societies, power is constituted in a different manner than in the Global North. That is, ontopolitical definitions of reality must be highlighted from the very beginning of any research on colonial State Crimes. Thus, when orthodox scholars look at the Global South and argue that a specific state is a criminal state, they are probably overlooking many aspects of day-to-day experiences with violence. Therefore, in a society where the non-ethics of war and the colonial state of exception are the norm, it is important to look at what has been naturalized, rather than looking at what appears as exceptional. Furthermore, colonial State Crimes, as manifestations of the crimes of the powerful, operate through the confluence between local and global interests. As Pearce (1976) reminds us, this aspect must be considered from an international or global perspective.

  Second, the concept of colonial State Crimes begins with the recognition that the terms “crime” and “state terrorism,” as orthodox studies have understood them, are reductionist, and do not recognize the socio-historical roots of the conflicts they seek to define. Hence, when studying colonial State Crimes, one must look at how certain practices have been defined in colonial societies and how that reflects a better understanding of state violence. As has been stated, the normalization of exceptionality and state violence in colonial societies makes it very difficult to define certain practices of state violence as crimes.9

  Additionally, the colonial State Crimes concept acknowledges that a frequent error in the studies on colonialism is to equate state terrorism with State Crimes. My contention is that state terrorism refers to very specific strategies implemented by the colonizer and colonized states to ensure their domination. Elsewhere, I have shown that colonial state terrorism refers to the systematic use of repression, criminalization, and support of pro-state organizations to delegitimize anticolonial mobilizations (Atiles-Osoria 2016). Colonial state terrorism is located within the matrix of colonial State Crimes, but it is not comparable to the totality of forms of violence that colonial State Crimes entail.

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  Controlling State Crime

  • Jeffrey Ross(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Can States Commit Crimes? The Limits of Formal International Law Luis F. Molina*

  In a strict sense, the term state crime is almost, but not quite, an oxymoron, a legal absurdity. A crime is, tautologically, a wrongful act only insofar as it is a violation of criminal law that is punishable by a state,1 and sovereign states have generally been unwilling to expose themselves to sanction by other countries or by international tribunals. Under only two treaties have states contemplated ceding their sovereignty to an international body that would have the authority to identify and prosecute international crimes.2 Under no circumstance has any state agreed to international criminal prosecution, although individuals who have acted in their official capacities have been prosecuted before international tribunals. Moreover, despite some recent impetus encouraging identification and prosecution of State Crimes under formal international law, it is unlikely that international prosecutorial courts to assess state reponsibility for criminal conduct will be created in the foreseeable future.

  Nonetheless, there are actions perpetrated by state authorities that are normatively criminal, and despite problems in enforcement, the international community is not entirely without recourse. A broad range of measures, including legal ones, are available to respond to reprehensible actions by states against individuals. At the international level, these legal measures are chiefly provided through international criminal justice and human rights instruments under the auspices of human rights bodies and initiatives.

  In this chapter, I will first show that international condemnation of states allowing or promoting consensually reprehensible acts has not been achieved through recourse to a formal international legal system. Second, to overcome the implications of the definitional and practical problems embedded in a concept of “state crime,” including international enforcement, I outline some forces that provide a philosophical basis for a circumvention of these problems. Third, I describe situations in which human rights procedures, not criminal proceedings, have effectively addressed normatively criminal acts by violative states.3

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  Cultural Criminology

  An Invitation

  • Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, Jock Young(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In recent years, this position has been finessed – quite often as a result of debates surrounding the in-built political dimension of knowledge production within criminology (Hillyard et al., 2004) – by scholars associated with the ‘social harm’ perspective (e.g. Hillyard and Tombs, 2004; Hillyard et al., 2005; Coleman et al., 2009). Proponents of this approach argue that when national and international legalistic approaches to crime are invalid, it becomes necessary for criminology to widen its horizons beyond the legal realm and think of acts such as state violence, ecological destruction or cross-border pollution (see Chapter 3) not simply in terms of whether or not rules have been broken, but as social and physical harms. While it must be stressed that the social harm perspective has definitional problems of its own, it is clearly a useful tool for thinking about the state as an enabler of violence both within and beyond its own borders. Indeed, a number of critical criminologists have already undertaken studies of the state’s actions during the Iraq war and subsequent military occupation (Kramer and Michalowski, 2005; Kauzarlich, 2007; Whyte, 2007, 2010). This is useful work, but as cultural criminologists we’re also aware of its limitations. Specifically, by training critical attention solely on the entity of the ‘state’ (either as ideological expression or overarching structural apparatus of power), these accounts have a tendency to ignore the fact that state power, whether exerted in a war zone or as part of a covert ‘black operation’, is in the main implemented at ground level by highly committed, indeed often zealous, individuals who are all-too-willing to undertake what military personnel or secret service operatives call the ‘wet stuff’ (see Goldhagen, 1996), i.e. house-to-house shakedowns, rendition, torture and search-and-destroy missions

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  The 'War on Terror', State Crime & Radicalization

  A Constitutive Theory of Radicalization

  • Shamila Ahmed(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It does this through examining how states practices and State Crimes have facilitated the radicalization process and thus, terrorism. As previously stated, there has been a vast neglect in labelling state actions and state practices as State Crimes within the ‘war on terror’. Therefore, when assessing state practices in the ‘war on terror’, and considering the fluidity between state practices and terrorism, the book draws on the concept of state crime and grounds this concept in international law, domestic law, conventions, protocols, social harm and citizens’ perceptions. The concepts of state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism were considered weak because they too exist as separate entities to state crime. The continued use of these terms, state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism, perpetuates a framework in which the state is privileged through the abandonment of a criteria in which state practices can be acknowledged and labelled as State Crimes. As Judith Butler (2006) suggests in Precarious Life, the potential for an ethical response to 9/11, to terrorism, and to suffering is curtailed by the monopolization of the legitimate meaning of 9/11 in public discourse. This monopolization constructs the boundaries of the public discourse and what is to be labelled as patriotic and what is to be labelled as criminal. In contrast, the utilization of state crime adopts an ontologically neutral perspective through which it is possible to explore the state as any other entity, and, therefore, it is possible to shift the focus on what should really be the focal point of academic scrutiny—human suffering. In utilizing the label ‘crime’, the book purposely seeks to accept and indeed reinforce the stigma the label ‘crime’ carries and ensure that criminal states carry the burden such a label implies (Matthews & Kauzlarich, 2007). Where the concept of terrorism is concerned, Tilly (2004) contends that the term is politically powerful and analytically elusive

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  Handbook on Crime

  • Fiona Brookman, Mike Maguire, Harriet Pierpoint, Trevor Bennett(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Willan

    (Publisher)

  This paper will be more useful to students who become familiar with the two concepts which underpin this discussion: the concept of state crime and the (much earlier) concept of social harm. A third concept, that of the global state, has its roots in Marxist theory of the 1970s rather than in criminology.

  Stan Cohen first developed the concept of ‘crimes of the state’ in 1993, a concept which has been elaborated most notably by Green and Ward (2004) and again by Green (2008). The discussion turns on the distinction between crime and deviance, and the presence or absence of a superordinate political capacity to define the actions of states as criminal, that is to say a law-making capacity. Key texts are Cohen’s (1993) ‘Human rights and crimes of the state: the culture of denial’, Green’s (2008) ‘Women and natural disasters: state crime and discourses in vulnerability’ in M. Cain and A. Howe (eds). See also Green and Ward’s (2004) State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption.

  The criminological concept of social harm was developed by Edwin Sutherland, whose work is cited in the text and references. A valuable recent discussion and elaboration of the concept can be found in the editorial Introduction to Hillyard et al. (2004) Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously. In this text harm is pegged definitionally to the experience of victims. The difference between this and the definition of Sutherland (1948) and, much later, of Cain and Howe (2008) is between those who seek a legal definition of harm, however broadly ‘legal’ may be defined, and those who argue that harms are best identified and defined by the victims. Green and Ward’s work, defining social rather than legal definitions of harm as deviance even when a state is the perpetrator, offers a third option. This is an important debate between scholars who all agree, as Hillyard et al. so cogently put it, that ‘much harm is the wreckage of neo-liberal globalisation’ (Hillyard et al

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  Who Are the Criminals?

  The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan

  • John Hagan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Several aspects of international criminal law should be kept in mind in this discussion. First, individuals, not states, are tried in international criminal courts. Second, whereas individuals at all levels of a political and military chain of command may engage in rape and sexual violence as war crimes, international criminal courts devote their resources to prosecuting leading perpetrators at higher levels in the command chain. At issue in these cases is how political and military leaders use the apparatus of the state and its official and unofficial armed forces as instruments of criminal organization and joint criminal enterprise that lead to sexual violence.

  The full force and potential significance of this kind of international legal recognition are expressed in the collective responsibility of nation-states, through international criminal courts of law or other lawful means, to provide protection to victims against crimes of sexual violence. While this collective responsibility too often in the past has been merely an aspiration of international criminal law, it may today be coming closer to actualization. A specific example explored in this chapter is the prospective arrest and prosecution of Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir for his responsibility for the targeting of state rape in Darfur (Office of the Prosecutor 2008).

  I turn next to the challenge of explaining the role of states in the use of rape and sexual violence as war crimes. Critical criminologists from the age of Roosevelt, such as William Chambliss, Stanley Cohen, and Austin Turk, played important roles in reframing states and their agents as potential criminal offenders, and this premise is a starting point for contemporary genocide researchers. Savelsberg (2010) points out that it was more common for classical criminology, and now in the age of Reagan for the public, to frame the role of the state—for example, in the war on terrorism—simply as a bulwark against crime, and not as a perpetrator itself.

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