State Crime Flashcards
Definition of state crime: Green and Ward (2005)
“illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of state agencies”
Includes all forms of crime committed by or on behalf of states and governments in order to further their policies. State crimes can include genocide, torture, imprisonment without trial assassination.
McLaughlin (2001): 4 categories of state crimes
- Political crimes, for example corruption and censorship
- Crimes by security and police forces, such as genocide, torture and the disappearance of dissidents.
- Economic crimes, for example, violation of health and safety laws.
- Social and cultural crimes, such as institutional racism.
Defining state crimes: International law
International law definition:
Rothe and Mullins (2008)
“Any action by or behalf of a state that violates international law and or a state’s own domestic law”
Strengths:
Does not depend on personal definitions of harm or who the relevant audience is.
-Instead, it uses globally agreed definitions of state crime.
International law also has the advantage of being designed to deal with state crime, unlike domestic law.
Weaknesses:
- International law is also a social construction involving the use of power.
Strand and Truman (2012)
- Japan has sought to overturn the international ban on whaling by concentrating its foreign and on impoverished “microstates” to bribe them to vote against the ban.
- Focuses on war crimes and crimes against humanity, rather than other crimes such as corruption.
Defining state crimes: Human Rights
Definitions:
UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948
“Human rights are those that suggest that everyone, because if their common humanity, is entitled to the same fair and just treatment wherever they might be in the world”
Herman and Schinediger (1975)
- Argue that we should define state crime as a “violation” of people’s basic human rights by state on its agents.
Weaknesses:
Cohen (1995)
Criticises the Herman and Schinediger’s view
-While the violations of human rights, such as torture, are clearly criminal, other acts such as economic exploitation are not evidently criminal, even if we find them morally unacceptable.
There are also disagreements about what counts as a human right.
Defining state crimes: Domestic Law
Definition:
Chambliss (1989)
“acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of the jobs as representations of the state”
Weaknesses:
Ignores the fact that states have the power to make laws.
-Therefore, avoids criminalising their behaviour.
They can make laws allowing them to carry out harmful acts.
Inconsistencies: what is legal in onse side of the border may be illegal on the other side.
Defining state crimes: Social harm and zemiology
Definition of social harm:
Michalowski (1985)
“including not just illegal acts” but also legally permissible acts whose consequences are similar of those illegal acts in the harm they cause”
Definition of zemiology:
Hillary et al (2004)
Argues that we should replace the study of crimes with zemiology- the study of harms, whether or not they are against the law.
Strength of the definition of social harm:
Prevents the state from ruling themselves “out of court” by making laws that allow them to behave badly.
Strength of the definition of zemiology:
This definition creates a single standard that can be applied to different states.
Weaknesses:
Vague
- What level of harm must occur before an act is defined as a crime?
-There is a danger that this definition makes the field of study too wide.
Who decides what counts as harm?
- This just replaces the state arbitrary definition of crime with the sociologists equally arbitrary definition of harm as well.
Defining state crimes: Labelling and societal reaction
Socially constructed
-How the participants (perpetrators, victims, audience) define the situation
Definition:
Recognises that state crime is socially constructed, and so what people regard as state crime can vary overtime and between cultures of groups.
Strength:
Prevents the sociologist their definition of state crime when this may not be
Weakness:
Kazlarich (2007)
- Study of anti-Iraq war protesters found that while they saw the war as harmful and illegitimate, they were unwilling to label it criminal by contrast, from as “harm” perspective, the war can be seen as illegal.
-Unclear
Explaining state crime: Integrated theory
This theory suggests state crime arises from similar circumstances to those of other crimes, like street crime.
3 factors interact to generate state crime:
- The motivations of offenders
- Opportunities to commit crimes
- Failures of control (whether international or unintentional)
-Research suggests that there is little psychological difference between those who carry out crimes such as torture and “normal” people.
Sociologists argue that such actions are part of a role into which individuals are socialised.
-They focus on the social conditions in which such behaviour becomes acceptable or even required.
Explaining state crime: Integrated theory
Kelman and Hamilton (1989):
3 features that produce crimes of obedience
-Study based on American soldiers massacred 400 civilians in My Lai, Vietnam.
- Authorisation
- When acts are ordered by those in authority, normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey. - Routinisation
- Once the crime has been committed, there is strong pressure to turn the act into routine which individuals can perform in a detached manner. - Dehumanisation
- When the enemy is portrayed as subhuman rather than human and described as animals, monsters etc, the usual principle of morality do not apply.
Explaining state crime: Integrated theory
Stanley Cohen: Culture of Denial (2006)
The cycle:
1. It didn’t happen
2. It did happen but it was something else
3. It was justified anyways
- It didn’t happen
- Deny anything happened
- Lasts until international bodies produce evidence that it did occur. - “it’s not how it looks”
- To question a particular version of events instead claiming that others carried out the atrocity or the evidence pointed to something rather than different occuring. - “It had to be this way”
- Admit that abuse occurred but to justify it.
- To suggest that it was the fault of the victims, or that there was no other way.
An example that supports this theory is the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989.
- Initially blamed Liverpool fans for the death of 96 fans.
- Took 30 years to overturn the coroner’s verdict because of the cover up that was instigated by the police and conservative government (at the time).
Explaining state crime: Integrated theory
Adorno et al (1950): The Authoritarian Personality
Suggested that state crimes were possible due to the presence of authoritarian personalities.
-E.g., During the time of the second world war, Germans had authoritarian personality types due to the positive, disciplinarian socialisation patterns that were common at the time.
-Similarly, often thought that people who carry out torture and genocide must be psychopaths.
However, that there is very little psychological difference between them and “normal” people. For example, Arendt (2006) study of the Nazi criminal (Adolf Eichmann) showed him to be relatively normal and not particularly anti-semitic.
Explaining state crime: Other explanations
Neutralisation theory
Shows how state uses the same techniques when attempting to justify human risks/violations that delinquents use when justifying their deviant behaviour.
-Denial of the victim
-Denial of injury
-Denial of responsibility
-Condemning the condemners
- Appeal to higher loyalty
Explaining state crime: Other explanations
Modernity
Barbarism: absence of culture and civilization.
extreme cruelty or brutality.
-Some argued that the Nazi Holocaust represented a breakdown of modern civilisation and a region to the modern barbarism.
Bauman (1989)
- A division of labour- each person was responsible for one small task, no-one felt personally responsible for the atrocity
Evaluation of researching state crimes:
Cohen: unknown extent of state crime
Cohen: unknown extent of state crime because governments adopt strategies of denial to either deny or justify their actions, or re-classify them as something else.
Evaluation of researching state crimes:
Carried out by powerful people who have an armoury of state agencies
Carried out by powerful people that can control information and to cover up the state’s criminal activity.
Has a disposal of state agencies to cover up their activities.
