Academic research on state crime has focused on the illegal actions of individuals and organizations (i.e., syndicates and corporations). Interchangeably labeled governmental crime, delinquency, illegality, or lawlessness, official deviance and misconduct, crimes of obedience, and human rights violations, state crime has largely been considered in relation to insurgent violence or threats to national security. Generally, it has been seen as a phenomenon endemic to authoritarian countries in transitional and lesser developed contexts. We need look no further than today's headlines to see the evidence of state crime. Rwanda, where government troops massacred countless Hutus and Tutsis, governmental atrocities in Kosovo, at the hands of the Yugoslavian Army, and East Timor where both individuals and property have been decimated, largely perpetrated by the Indonesian military.The study of how to control state crime has been difficult. There are definitional, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological problems, as well as difficulties in designing of practical methods to abolish, combat, control or resist this type of behavior. Jeffrey Ian Ross reviews these shortcomings, then develops a preliminary model of ways to control state crime. His intention is stimulating scholarly research and debate, but also encouraging progressive-minded policymakers and practitioners who work for governmental and nongovernmental organizations. The hope is that they will reflect upon the methods they advocate or use to minimize state transgressions. This new edition will be of compelling interest to students of political science and criminology, as well as general readers interested in human rights, state crime, and world affairs.

Through a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field, State Crime offers a set of cases exemplifying state criminality along with various methods for controlling governmental transgressions.

This text recognizes that crimes of the state are far more serious and harmful than crimes committed by individuals, and considers how such crimes may be contested, prevented, challenged or stopped.

Across the world, most people are well aware of ordinary criminal harms to person and property. Often committed by the powerless and poor, these individualized crimes are catalogued in the statistics collected annually by the FBI and by similar agencies in other developed nations. In contrast, the more harmful and systemic forms of injury to person and property committed by powerful and wealthy individuals, groups, and national states are neither calculated by governmental agencies nor annually reported by the mass media. As a result, most citizens of the world are unaware of the routinized "crimes of the powerful", even though they are more likely to experience harms and injuries from these types of organized offenses than they are from the atomized offenses of the powerless. Research on the crimes of the powerful brings together several areas of criminological focus, involving organizational and institutional networks of powerful people that commit crimes against workers, marketplaces, taxpayers and political systems, as well as acts of torture, terrorism, and genocide. This international handbook offers a comprehensive, authoritative and structural synthesis of these interrelated topics of criminological concern. It also explains why the crimes of the powerful are so difficult to control. Edited by internationally acclaimed criminologist Gregg Barak, this book reflects the state of the art of scholarly research, covering all the key areas including corporate, global, environmental, and state crimes. The handbook is a perfect resource for students and researchers engaged with explaining and controlling the crimes of the powerful, domestically and internationally.

State crime victimization often leaves a legacy of unrecognized victims that are ignored, forgotten, or negated the right to be labeled as such. Victims are often glossed over, as the focus is on a state’s actions or inactions rather than the subsequent victimization and victims. Towards a Victimology of State Crime serves to highlight the forgotten victims, processes and cases of revictimization within a sociological, criminological framework. Contributors include expert scholars of state crime and victimology from North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America to provide a well-rounded focus that can address and penetrate the issues of victims of state crime. This includes a diverse number of case study examples of victims of state crime and the systems of control that facilitate or impede addressing the needs of victims. Additionally, with the inclusion of a section on controls, this volume taps into an area that is often overlooked: the international level of social control in relation to a victimology of state criminality.

Genocide, State Crime and the Law critically explores the use and role of law in the perpetration, redress and prevention of mass harm by the state. In this broad ranging book, Jennifer Balint charts the place of law in the perpetration of genocide and other crimes of the state together with its role in redress and in the process of reconstruction and reconciliation, considering law in its social and political context. The book argues for a new approach to these crimes perpetrated 'in the name of the state' - that we understand them as crimes against humanity with particular institutional dimensions that law must address to be effective in accountability and as a basis for restoration. Focusing on seven instances of state crime - the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman state, the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, apartheid South Africa, Ethiopia under Mengistu and the Dergue, the genocide in Rwanda, and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia - and drawing on others, the book shows how law is companion and collaborator in these acts of nation-building by the state, and the limits and potentials of law's constitutive role in post-conflict reconstruction. It considers how law can be a partner in destruction yet also provide a space for justice. An important, and indeed vital, contribution to the growing interest and literature in the area of genocide and post-conflict studies, Genocide, State Crime and the Law will be of considerable value to those concerned with law's ability to be a force for good in the wake of harm and atrocity.

This book examines the ‘war on terror’ and radicalization from an ontological, non-state centric perspective. Since 9/11, criminology has developed in its study of terrorism, utilising alternative non-state centric frameworks to uncover and make visible state-initiated harm. Although progress has been achieved, criminology has continued to privilege the state, thereby failing to uncover forms of state crime and how such crimes facilitate radicalization and terrorism. Ahmed aims to rectify this gap by demonstrating how crimes of the state have contributed to the existence of Islamist-inspired terrorism and the emergence of global Jihadist organisations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The ‘War on Terror’ abandons the dominant socially-constructed discourse and application of the ‘war on terror’ and instead favours a grounded approach whereby actors, actions and consequences are analysed according to the risk they represent. Ahmed achieves this grounded approach through situating state practices in international human rights law and international humanitarian law. Through documenting the intersectionality of these practices with radicalization in the emergence of global Jihadist organisations, the book demonstrates how state crimes contribute to terrorism. Although the book sits at the intersections of critical criminology, state crime, international/transnational crime, it is relevant to all disciplines that are concerned with state crime, terrorism and radicalization.

State Crime in the Global Age brings together original writings from leading scholars in the field to explore the many ways that the use and abuse of state power results in grave social harms that outweigh, by far, the consequences of ordinary street crime. The topics covered include the crimes of empire, illegal war, the bombing of civilians, state sanctioned torture, state sacrifice of human lives, and judicial wrongdoing. The book breaks new ground through its examination of the ways globalization has intensified potentials for state crime, as well as bringing novel theoretical understandings of the state to the study of state crime, and exploring strategies for confronting state crime. This book, while containing much that is of interest to scholars of state crime, is designed to be accessible to students and others who are concerned with the ways individuals, social groups, and whole nations are victimized by the misuse of state power.

This book introduces a new conceptual framework for impunity within state crime theory and uses Turkish state criminality against Kurds between 1990 and 2000 as a case study. It develops an understanding of impunity that goes beyond viewing the state solely as an actor, facilitator, or denier of crime. It argues for an expanded definition of state crime to encompass criminal acts and processes undertaken by states, including impunity. Building on field research, case analysis, and interviews, this book digs deep into the mechanics of impunity and ways in which the Turkish state has evaded punishment for its criminal acts. In doing so, Framing Impunity in the Context of State Crime uncovers a close connection between the crimes of the government and the impunity which allowed those crimes to flourish. It demonstrates that state violence and impunity are endemic in the structural design of the Turkish state and serve to further both the state goals of ethnic and religious assimilation and the subsequent persecution of those who refused to be assimilated into the new state construction. The book uses Stanley Cohen’s work on states of denial techniques to examine how states justify their illegal acts in order to deny and/or to evade responsibility for their crimes. Cohen’s work on denial at the organisational level is central to the question of impunity because, as a form of state crime, impunity involves various state institutions or actors representing the very state machinery deployed to conceal and deny state criminality. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to law students, scholars, researchers, NGOs, and civil society organisations. It will have broader applicability beyond the case study of Turkey and will be valuable to academics and policymakers worldwide who focus on the intersection of state crime and impunity.