Topic 8: Globalisation, green crime, human rights and state crimes Flashcards
Held et al
There has been a globalisation of crime: increasing interconnectedness of crime across national borders and the spread of transnational organised crime.
Castells
There is now a global criminal economy worth over £1 trillion per anum. This includes arms trafficking, trafficking in women and children, sex tourism, green crime, terrorism etc.
Global risk consciousness
Globalisation creates new insecurities- risk now seen as global e.g. Migrants fleeing persecution raises anxieties in Western countries. One result is the intensification of social control at the national level e.g. The tightening of border control regulations
Taylor
Marxist perspective- globalisation has led to greater inequality:
Transnational corporations can switch manufacturing to low wage countries, cussing job insecurity, unemployment and poverty.
Deregulation means governments have little control over their own economies and state spending on welfare has declined.
This has produced rising crime/new patterns:
Inequality among the poor causes people to turn to crime eg the lucrative drugs trade.
Globalisation creates large-scale criminal opportunities for the elite eg deregulation of financial markets creates opportunities for insider trading and tax evasion
New employment patterns create new opportunities eg using subcontracting to recruit ‘flexible’ workers, often working illegally.
Hobbs and Dunningham
Crime is now organised in a ‘glocal’ way- individual act as a Hun around which a loose-knit network forms, often linking both legitimate and illegitimate activities. Although the they have global links crime is still rooted in its local context.
Glenny
‘McMafia’- organisations that emerged in Russia/Eastern Europe after the fall of communism in 1989.
The economy was deregulated- leading to a huge rise in prices for food and rent, but commodities eg oils, metals, gases, were kept at the old Soviet prices- way below the world market price. Well-connected citizens could by these up very cheaply and sell them on the world market, creating a new elite of ‘oilgarchs’.
To protect themselves from increasing disorder, these people turned to the new ‘mafias’- often composed of ex-state/security servicemen from the communist regime. The organisations were purely economic and about self-interest- not families like the old mafias. These organisations were vital for the entry of the new Russian capitalist class into the world economy.
Beck
Late modern society is ‘global risk society’ as threats are increasingly on a global scale. The massive increase in productivity/technology has created new manufactures risks which may involve harm to the environment/serious consequences for humanity. Most threats are now human-made rather than natural disasters.
White
The proper subject of criminology is any action that harms the physical environment and the humans and animal within it even if no law has been broken. This is green criminology which comes from the notion of harm and believes legal definitions cannot give a consistent global standard as laws differ from state to state and many of the worst environmental harms are not illegal. This is a from of transgressive criminology- it transgresses the boundaries of traditional criminology to include new issues. Traditional criminology only studies patterns/causes of law-breaking and is not concerned with pollution if it is actually legal.
White says nation-States/TNC’s adopt and anthropocentirc/human-centred view of crime- assuming that humans have the right to dominate nature- putting economic growth before the environment.
Green criminology instead takes an ecocentric view that sees humans and their environment as interdependent, so that environmental harm hurts humans also.
South
Two types of green crime:
Primary green crimes- result directly from the destruction of the earth’s resources eg air pollution, deforestation, species decline, water pollution.
Secondary green crimes- the fluting of rules aimed at preventing/regulating environmental disasters eg state violence against oppositional groups, hazardous waste/organised crime
Green and Ward
State crime- illegal or deviant actives perpetrated by or with the complicity of state agencies eg genocide, war crimes, torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination.
McLaughlin
Four categories of state crime:
Political eg corruption, censorship
Economic eg official violations of health and safety
Social/cultural eg institutional racism
Crimes by security/police forces eg genocide, torture
Michalowski and Kramer
Great power and great crimes are inseparable-scale of state crime: can commit large-scale crimes with widespread victimisation eg Khmer Rouge government killed a fifth of Cambodia’s population between 1975 and 1978. Power also means it can conceal crimes/evade punishment. As the state defines what it is criminal it can avoid categorising its own harmful actions as such. National sovereignty makes it difficult for external authorities eg the UN to intervene/apply international conventions
Human rights and state crime
Most definitions of human rights include natural rights eg life and liberty and civil rights eg the right to vote.
A right is an entitlement and acts as a protection against the power of the state over an individual
From a humans rights perceptive the state can be seen as a perpetrator of crime, not simply as the authority that defines and punishes crime
Schwendinger and Schwendinger
We should define crime int eras of the violation of basic human rights rather than the breaking if legal rules. States that deny individuals’ human rights must be regarded as criminal. States that practise imperialism, racism/sexism or inflict economic exploitation on citizens are committing crimes.
Cohen
States conceal/legitimate human rights crimes:
Dictatorships deny committing abuses while democratic states follow the three stage spiral of denial- it didn’t happen, if it did it is something else, if it is an abuse it is justified eg to protect national security
Neutralisation theory- states/officials neutralise their crimes- denial of the victim, denial of injury, denial of responsibility, condemning the condemners, appeal to higher loyalty
