State Crime

Tony Ward, Penny Green

Description

What is state crime? This book sets out the parameters of state crime and highlights the complex issues involved. The authors provide a clear chapter-by-chapter assessment of state violence, corruption, state involvement in organised and corporate crime, avoidable 'natural' disasters, torture, criminal policing, war crimes and genocide.



Penny Green and Tony Ward put forward a powerful argument drawing from a range of disciplines including law, criminology, human rights, international relations and political science. They develop a theoretical approach to understanding the boundaries of state crime, employing the concepts of deviance and human rights. Making distinctive use of original research and using a variety of international case-studies, this compelling book offers a fresh and sophisticated approach to this controversial and difficult subject.
Preface

1. Defining States as Criminal

2. Corruption as State Crime

3. State-Corporate Crime

4. Natural Disaster as State Crime

5. Police Crime

6. Organised Crime and the ‘Deep State’

7. State Terror and Terrorism

8. Torture

9. War Crimes

10. Genocide

11. The Political Economy of State Crime

12. Every Crime in the Book: Iraq and its Liberators

Notes

References

Index

Sujets

• International Relations
• Human Rights
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783710966
• Langue: English

Extrait

State Crime

First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Penny Green and Tony Ward 2004
The right of Penny Green and Tony Ward to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1785 5 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1784 7 paperback eISBN 978 1 7837 1096 6
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
Contents Preface 1. Defining the State as Criminal 2. Corruption as State Crime 3. State-Corporate Crime 4. Natural Disaster as State Crime 5. Police Crime 6. Organised Crime and the ‘Deep State’ 7. State Terror and Terrorism 8. Torture 9. War Crimes 10. Genocide 11. The Political Economy of State Crime 12. Every Crime in the Book: Iraq and its Liberators Notes References Index
For Grace
Preface
This is a book about crimes committed by, or with the complicity of, governments and government agents. That is to say, it is a book about most of the serious crime, and the most serious of crimes, in the modern world. Given the paucity of relevant material within criminology, this has often seemed a daunting project, and the phrase about rushing in where angels fear to tread has occurred to us more than once. Much of this terrain, however, proved to have been well trodden by scholars from other disciplines, without whose work this journey would indeed have been impossible. We would also like to acknowledge the pioneering work within criminology of Greg Barak, Stan Cohen, David Friedrichs, Paddy Hillyard, Herman and Julia Schwendinger, Phil Scraton, and Joe Sim; and Ron Kramer and his colleagues whose work we discuss in Chapter 3.
There are other more immediate debts to be acknowledged. An important part of the research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant no. R000223401) and the University of Westminster. The Law Schools at both Westminster and De Montfort Universities provided periods of study leave and congenial environments in which to work. We also feel indebted to the much-maligned architect of the British Library, Colin St John Wilson, for creating such a tranquil and scholarly space in which to work and meet.
We doubt whether this book could have been written without the internet resources provided by, among others, Transparency International, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and the World Rainforest Movement.
To our indomitable research assistants and friends, Christina Curry and Nina Silove, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude. Christina’s research on all things Turkish, and Nina’s on state corporate crime and genocide, made a tremendous contribution to our work. Christina also ably assisted in compiling the bibliography. Lizzy Stanley, Jude McCulloch, Phil Scraton, Deb Coles and Paddy Hillyard provided helpful comments on particular chapters, while Joe Sim, Dave Whyte, Steve Tombs, Maggie Sumner and Tim Hillier provided useful information along the way. Graduate students of State Crime at Westminster have provided fertile ground for testing many of our ideas.
Yücel Sayman and Hacer Gündogdu in Istanbul and Clare and Lily Leon in Ireland provided the warmest hospitality over the years. For insights into the political clientelism that is a feature of both countries, we are indebted to Peter Sweetman, Frank O’Connor, Valerie Hanley and David Healy in Ireland and to so many people in Turkey that it is difficult to know where to start, but especially to the extraordinary efforts of Ayten İnanç and, once again, the wonderful Yücel Sayman and Hacer Gündogdu. Scientists at the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute in Istanbul were especially gracious in their help on the Marmara earthquake. Staff at CIDE in Mexico City provided informative conversations and use of their excellent library.

Many of our friends deserve special thanks. Belinda Webster and Abdesaddek El Fari provided Grace with an adventure playground when her mother ‘needed her brain taken out’. Susan Aykut, Andrea Beckmann, Malcolm Blair, Andy Boon, Dee Coombes, Clare Fermont, John Foot, Paul Foot, Helen Graham, Elham Kashefi, Melanie McFadyean, Zubeida Malik, Andrew Pitts, Joanna Rollo, Mick and Joan Ryan and Helen Taylor all helped, both by talking about some of the ideas in the book and by not talking about them.
And finally Bill Spence, for enormous tolerance and endless support.
1
Defining the State as Criminal

What are states without justice but robber bands enlarged?
(St Augustine, The City of God [c. 427CE])
Modern states kill and plunder on a scale that no ‘robber band’ could hope to emulate. Any attempt to quantify their crimes is inevitably subject to enormous margins of error, but by adding up mid-range estimates R. J. Rummel (1994) calculated that from 1900 to 1987 over 169 million people were murdered by governments. Rummel’s figure excludes deaths in wars (about 35 million, an unknown proportion of which resulted from war crimes), judicial executions (other than those resulting from ‘show trials’) and killings of armed opponents or criminals. Government officials also make a major contribution to property crime. According to a major international victimisation survey (Zvekic 1998), being asked for a bribe is the second commonest form of criminal victimisation (after consumer fraud) outside the industrialised world. But such petty corruption pales into insignificance beside the ‘grand corruption’ of political elites. The late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha is accused of stealing $4 billion (£2.75 billion) from his country. This is considerably more than the annual amount stolen and damaged in all residential and commercial burglaries in England and Wales (£2.3 billion, according to Brand and Price 2000: 56).
Apart from sheer scale, the other obvious difference between ‘robber bands’ and ‘states without justice’ is that states claim the power to determine what is ‘just’, who is a robber and who is a tax-collector. How, then, can we speak of ‘state crime’? If states define what is criminal, a state can only be criminal on those rare occasions when it denounces itself for breaking its own laws. Perhaps this is why, despite some notable individual contributions, criminology as a discipline has never regarded state crime as an integral part of its subject-matter.

In our previous work on state crime (Green and Ward 2000) we pointed to two features of contemporary states that help to resolve this problem. First, as scholars of international relations have recognised, there are certain norms of conduct in international society, many of them embodied in legal rules, that states cannot violate with complete impunity. Feeble as the sanctions applied to murderous and predatory states often appear, the pressures of domestic and international opinion, economic sanctions and boycotts, etc., are not negligible (Risse et al. 1999). There is therefore a sociological basis for saying that states, or state agencies, engage in deviant behaviour, as well as practice that violates legal norms. Secondly, we argued that some of these norms – those that define universal human rights – reflect, however imperfectly, principles of justice that criminologists ought to support. We do not believe that criminology can be neutral between human rights violators and their victims. These arguments led us to formulate a definition of state crime as state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights.
The main purpose of this introductory chapter is to explain the three concepts involved in that definition: the concept of a state , the concept of organisational deviance , and the concept of human rights.
THE STATE
Augustine’s reference to ‘robber bands’ was remarkably prescient. Tilly (1985) argues that modern nation-states often resemble protection rackets, in that they demand payment for protection against threats that are either imaginary or are the consequences of their own activities:
Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same way as racketeers. There is, of course, a difference: Racketeers, by the conventional definition, operate without the sanction of governments. (Tilly 1985: 171)

Tilly argues that modern nation-states are best understood as the creations of ‘coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs’, but that over a long historical period from the sixteenth century to the twentieth the most successful states have been those that ‘developed a durable interest in promoting the accumulation of capital’ (1985: 170) and accepted certain restrictions on their power as the price of organising their populations efficiently. On the other hand, many Third World states have not found such accommodations necessary to sustain their military power, thanks to the military legacies they received from their former colonial masters, the support of US and Sovietled blocs during the Cold War, and the international market in arms (see also Tilly 1992). But all states, from the most autocratic to the most liberal, share one crucial characteristic: they claim an entitlement to do things which if anyone else did them would constitute violence and extortion – Weber’s ‘monopol