An international project involving King’s College London, the University
of Hull and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative which is collecting in
one place examples of projects relating to crimes committed by the state
these include: genocide, war crimes, torture and corruption. It is
possible to browse the site to retrieve case studies of individual
countries (including Ivory Coast, Turkey, Sierra Leone) working papers.
The project is also seeking to develop a section containing online
testimonies from survivors. From Intute.ac.uk
The most serious crimes in the modern world, on any reasonable
definition, are acts that are largely committed, instigated or condoned
by governments and their officials: for example, genocide, war crimes,
torture and corruption. However, state crime is under-acknowledged by
popular and academic authors. Calling these activities 'crimes' should
be uncontroversial as they violate international and/or national
criminal law. A purely legalistic definition of state crime, however, is
unsatisfactory for at least three reasons. http://www.statecrime.org/
[Note from Celia: I'm having problems with web site and can't access the sections on Natural Disasters or Torture 5 July 2010]
Corruption
A Critical Introduction to Corruption
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Written by Tony Ward
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Though corruption is difficult to define
precisely, and harder still to quantify, it is undoubtedly one of the
most widespread forms of criminal victimization in today’s world; and
in its most serious forms it is properly regarded as a form of state
crime rather than individual deviance. The International Crisis Group
report Kyrgyzstan: A Hollow Regime Collapses, describes
Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s government, overthrown in April 2010, as an example
of ‘state corruption’, that is, ‘a system where the main levels of
state power are controlled by individuals or a group whose main intent
is to extract personal gain from public finances’ (p. 2, n. 2). Genocide A Critical Introduction to Genocide
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Written by Hazel Cameron
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Genocide, the intentional destruction of
a specific group, is an important subject for scholars of state crimes,
yet it remains underexplored within the discipline. In light of the
increasing pervasiveness of genocide in the twentieth century, it is
perhaps surprising that genocide studies have tended to be the remit of
historians and theologians. Social scientists rarely turned their
attention to the study of this particular type of criminality until the
1970s (Fein, 1979; Horowitz, 1982:3; Bauman, 1989:3, Fein 1993:5; Fein,
2002:75). Hirsch (1995: 75) suggests that even today sociological
attention to this topic has at best grown from almost nonexistent to
scarcely existent. | State-Corporate
Crime |
A Critical Introduction to State-Corporate
Crime
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Written by Kristian Lasslett
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Up until the early nineteen nineties
criminological research on the crimes of the powerful tended to be
separated into two distinct sub-disciplinary genres: corporate crime and
state crime (Kramer 1992: 214). For Ronald Kramer and Ray Michalowski
this was a matter of concern. They believed that by dividing the
research on the crimes of the powerful into these two separate
criminological strands, scholars were obscuring the fact that states and
corporations are “functionally interdependent”, consequently it is rare
for the deviant actions of one to occur without some assistance
(whether by commission or omission) from the other (Kramer et al 2002:
270; see also Aulette and Michalowski 1993: 173; Green and Ward 2004:
28; Whyte 2003: 579-80).
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