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
| 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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A Critical Introduction to State-Corporate Crime
| 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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