State Crime

Governments, Violence and Corruption

Penny Green, Tony Ward

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Jahr: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781783710966
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Thema: Relaciones internacionales

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.

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 ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of force’. That is the aspect of statehood on which we focus in this book.

When we discuss ‘the state’, therefore, we shall be using the term in the traditional Marxist sense to refer to a ‘public power’ comprising personnel organised and equipped for the use of force, ‘material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds’ and agencies which levy taxes (Engels 1968: 577).¹ Such ‘public powers’ also include those political entities (for example, the FARC – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) which deploy organised force, control substantial territories and levy formal or informal taxes but are not accepted members of the international society of states. We shall refer to such entities as ‘proto-states’.

Despite the arguments of some theorists (for example, Giddens 1985) to the contrary, the use and threat of physical violence remains central to state power in liberal democracies. Cover’s remarks on American criminal trials bring this out vividly:

If convicted the defendant customarily walks – escorted – to prolonged confinement, usually without significant disturbance to the civil appearance of the event. It is, of course, grotesque to assume that the civil facade is ‘voluntary’ … There are societies in which contrition and shame control defendants’ behaviour to a greater extent than does violence … But I think it is unquestionably the case in the United States that most prisoners walk into prison because they know they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk. (Cover 1986: 1607)

Where Augustine points to ‘justice’ as what distinguishes state coercion from the naked violence of ‘robber bands’, sociologists and political scientists since Weber more often speak of legitimacy. Legitimacy is a complex notion, which we have analysed in some detail elsewhere.² Without rehearsing the arguments again here, we can say that a state is legitimate to the extent that (1) it acts in accordance with the rules that it sets for itself and its citizenry, and (2) those rules are seen to be justified by shared beliefs. Gramsci (1971) showed how capitalist states secure legitimacy through a process of hegemony. Hegemony is essentially the process by which those beliefs that support the status quo are instilled in the population at large, so that they appear as matters of consensus and ‘common sense’. To most citizens of states which enjoy a measure of legitimacy it appears a matter of ‘common sense’ that force is employed to uphold ‘law and order’ and to defend the country. Hegemony ‘refers to an order in which a common social-moral language is spoken, in which one concept of reality is dominant, informing with its spirit all modes of thought and behaviour’ (Femia 1981: 24). If the hegemonic process is successful, the specific interests of the dominant class will appear as universal interests: thus the subordinate classes see their own interests embedded in those of the ruling elite.

The most important insight that we take from Gramsci is his emphasis on the role of civil society in disseminating this common moral language. Adamson explains Gramsci’s use of the term as referring to ‘the space between large-scale bureaucratic structures of state and economy on the one hand and the private sphere of family, friendship, personality and intimacy on the other’ (Adamson 1987/8: 320). This space is occupied in particular by organisations such as pressure groups, voluntary associations, religious bodies, the mass media and academic institutions, to the extent that they enjoy real independence from the state. Such associations ‘generate opinions and goals with which they seek not only to influence public opinions and policies within existing structures and rules, but sometimes also to alter the structures and rules themselves’ (Adamson 1987/8: 320–1). If civil society plays a crucial role in legitimising the state in those societies where hegemonic rule prevails, it can also play a crucial role in defining state actions as illegitimate where they violate legal rules or shared moral beliefs. Civil society, in other words, can label state actions as deviant.

ORGANISATIONAL DEVIANCE

Deviance is a term which is widely used but seldom defined. On the face of it the simplest definition of deviance is behaviour which infringes a social rule. The scope and interpretation of social rules, however, is often uncertain and contested. As Becker (1963) famously argued, deviance results from the application of a rule to an act: it is not an inherent quality of an act, but inheres in the relation between an act and a social audience. Here, then, is our own attempt at a definition: an act is deviant where there is a social audience that (1) accepts a certain rule as a standard of behaviour, (2) interprets the act (or similar acts of which it is aware) as violating the rule, and (3) is disposed to apply significant sanctions – that is significant from the point of view of the actor – to such violations. The matrix of an actor, a rule, an audience and a potentially significant sanction is what defines the essential subject matter of criminology (a word we use as a shorthand for ‘the study of deviance and social control’).

In many but not all violations of human rights all these elements are present. The relevant actors are state agencies. The relevant rules are rules of international law, domestic law and social morality, as interpreted by audiences that include domestic and transnational civil society (see below), international organisations, other states and other agencies within the offending state itself. The relevant sanctions include legal punishments, censure or rebellion by the state’s own population, damage to the state’s domestic and international reputation, and diplomatic, economic and military sanctions from other states.

State crime is one category of organisational deviance, along with corporate crime, organised crime, and the neglected area of crime by charities, churches and other non-profit bodies. It is now well established in criminology that organisations, as well as individuals, can be deviant actors (Kauzlarich and Kramer 1998 provide a useful overview of this issue). Organisations have a socially (and often legally) recognised identity which persists over time (even if the membership of the organisation changes). Organisations make decisions and implement them, set goals and pursue them, follow rules and break them. They can be subjected to formal and informal sanctions. They have reputations and can be subjected to ‘shaming’ (Braithwaite 1989; Risse et al. 1999). The central concepts of criminology, such as deviance, motivation, opportunity structures, control and labelling, can be applied to organisations just as well as to individuals.

Clearly the state does not always or even in the majority of cases act as a unitary force. The state comprises an ensemble of institutions which do not necessarily share a single set of interests and goals (Jessop 1982). The same will often be true of large-scale institutional structures within the state. For example, Punch (1985: 16–17) makes the point that it ‘lacks subtlety’ to look for organisational deviance only at the level of a police force as a whole. Sometimes whole forces will be deviant but the evidence suggests, at least in western Europe, that more often particular sub-units will adopt deviant goals (see Chapter 5).

Nevertheless, there are instances where the entire coercive apparatus of the state acts in a coordinated way (even if this conceals internal conflicts). Consider for example the strategy of terror pursued by the Argentinean Junta (Chapter 7), or the policing of the 1984/5 miners’ strike in Britain. In the latter case, numerous ostensibly autonomous police forces, the prisons, the courts, the security services and the military³ were centrally coordinated in a strategy that was both deviant (in the sense that it violated widely held perceptions of the proper role of the police) and violated human rights on a wide scale (see Callinicos and Simons 1985; Fine and Millar 1985; Green 1990). What both these examples illustrate is that, in times of economic and political crisis, the capitalist state does pursue an overarching goal of defending the existing order.

It is by identifying the operative goals of an organisation or sub-unit that we can distinguish between individual and organisational deviance, or to use Friedrichs’ (1995) terminology, between ‘political white-collar crime’ and state crime. The former is carried out for direct personal benefit, the latter in accordance with the operative goals of a formal organisation (Schrager and Short 1977: 412). The operative goals of an organisation are those that its members actually work together to achieve, which may or may not reflect the goals the organisation publicly proclaims (Punch 2003).

It is important to bear in mind that the organisational goal served by an act need not be the same as the individual motive of the actor. For example, a soldier in war may commit rape purely for reasons of personal gratification but still contribute to organisational goals such as demoralising the enemy or promoting ‘ethnic cleansing’ (see Chapter 9). The organisational goal may be of little importance to the soldier himself, but may be an important reason for his comrades and superiors to turn a blind eye to his action. If, on the other hand, the soldier is promptly court-martialled, we may infer either that he acted contrary to an important organisational goal (perhaps the army’s goal of presenting itself as the liberator of the local population), or that the organisation is riven by conflict over its goals or the means of pursuing them. The organisation’s reaction (or lack of it) to individual deviance will generally be the clearest – even if not a totally reliable⁴ – indication of the deviant act’s perceived compatibility with organisational goals. In the course of this book we will be exploring in some depth the intersection between state organisational goals and individual motivation.

The most sophisticated attempt to conceptualise state crime as a form of organisational deviance is found in the work of Ronald Kramer and his colleagues (we examine this body of work, so far as it relates to state-corporate crime, in Chapter 3). In Crimes of the American Nuclear State, Kauzlarich and Kramer (1998) identify the need to integrate structural, organisational and social psychological factors and it is this integration which forms the analytical framework of our own investigation. Building on Merton’s anomie theory as extended to organisational crime by Passas (1990), they argue that:

Criminal behaviour at the organisational level results from a coincidence of pressure for goal attainment, availability and perceived attractiveness of illegitimate means, and an absence or weakness of social control mechanisms. (1998: 148)

Kauzlarich and Kramer emphasise the goal-driven, instrumentally rational nature of organisational deviance. Their ‘integrated framework’ is a useful starting-point for the analysis of state crime although, as they th...