State Crime Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

State crime is any action that violates international public law and/or a state’s own domestic law when committed by individual actors acting on behalf of, or in the name of, the state, even when such acts are motivated by their personal economical, political, and ideological interests. Crimes of the state have been one of the foremost social problems of the past 100 years, with wide-reaching costs and little in the way of potential controls.

During the course of the 20th century, the state crimes of Turkey, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot and the Khymer Rouge, and Maoist China were especially large-scale, dramatic examples. Crimes of the state involving weapons of mass destruction, genocides, and crimes against humanity have been all too frequent (e.g., Bosnia, Croatia, Darfur, Democratic Republic of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia). Other charges of state crime occurring around the world involve Egypt, Israel, the United States, China, United Kingdom, Russia, Chechnya, and North Vietnam.

In the late 20th century, new major initiatives sought to bring perpetrators of crimes of the state to trial, including International Criminal Tribunals focusing on genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and the establishment of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. As legal attention to such events increased, so has the scholarly community’s attention toward description and analysis of these phenomena.

Costs of State Crime

Committing the most harmful of crimes (physical and economic) are entities and individuals acting on the behalf of, or in the name of, the state. Such acts have cost citizenries and the international society incalculable losses. Additionally, genocides, war crimes, and crimes against humanity have claimed millions of lives over the past century. Further, they produce an immeasurable amount of pain and suffering for the survivors. Crimes of the state also can lead to the destruction of infrastructures, resulting in additional devastating atrocities (e.g., the 2002 sinking of the Senegalese ferry Le Joola, with a loss of more than 1,000 lives).

State crimes can also result in environmental destruction, with devastating effects on generations of citizens (e.g., the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl). More important, state-committed crimes rip asunder the social trust between a state and its citizenry (e.g., Watergate) as well as trust between states (e.g., invasion and occupation of sovereign states, including most recently Iraq). When states violate such trust, domestically or internationally, they threaten the security of the global order, peace, and legitimacy of an international community. To maintain peaceful, productive, and respectful global interactions, nations must agree to, and abide by, the rule of international law that guides states’ behaviors.

State Crime and Criminology

An outgrowth of Edwin Sutherland’s 1939 call to expand the purview of criminology to crimes of the powerful, the subfield of state crime specifically traces its origins to William Chambliss’s 1988 American Society of Criminology presidential address on state-organized crime. Exploring crimes such as piracy and smuggling, Chambliss showed how states can be crucial in the organization and support of activities that violate their own laws and international laws when doing so fulfills their broader political and economic objectives. Criminologists, particularly critical criminologists, quickly adopted the concept, broadening and enriching the field. Their early work focused not only on crimes tacitly supported or organized by a sovereign polity, but on actions committed by nation-states themselves. As this field evolved, it broadened the definition of state crime to include all actions committed by states that violated domestic, international, or human rights laws, as well as incidents of states or state agencies failing to take actions when obligated to do so.

Critics suggest that reliance on governmental or quasi-governmental agencies for the labeling of actions as crimes removes scholastic independence and mires the field within political struggles in national or international arenas. Others advocate a social harm-based definition. This position points out that laws are created by states within political processes, and therefore law is a non-objective definitional criterion. Rather, behaviors engaged in by a state or its agents that generate demonstrable social harm on a nation’s citizens or the citizens of another nation are actually state crimes. Those who advocate this position claim that through the use of a nonlegal (and thereby nonpolitical) definition, independent scholars can define and explore the phenomena in a more objective fashion. Critics of the social harm definition suggest that socially injurious actions, the main definitional criterion, are vague and open to individualistic political interpretation, even if they avoid the political constructions of states.

Other cognate areas of state crime include political crimes, political white-collar crimes, environmental crimes, finance crimes, and the recently added crimes of globalization. Crimes of globalization recognize the intertwinement of states and international finance institutions (e.g., World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) that can result in forms of state crime.

International Controls of State Crime

The capacity of international law as a control for state crime can be both a potential deterrent and a guide for state behaviors. However, due to the problematic ways of international law enforcement (or non-enforcement), it does not hold the same deterrent power over states as domestic laws may have over the citizenry. Nonetheless, law can be a post hoc control to address states’ and/or individual state actors’ criminality. There are five main venues for such controls: states’ domestic prosecution, the United Nations, international criminal tribunals, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court.

The United Nations exists as a mediating agency through which states can air their concerns and grievances before an international audience. Designed as a diplomatic clearinghouse, it has the ultimate goal of enhancing international peace and stability via dispute resolution. The International Court of Justice is essentially a global civil court where disputing parties seek either arbitration or a trial hearing. They can submit themselves to binding and nonbinding agreements when various treaties have been violated. The International Criminal Court is a permanent criminal court designed to investigate, prosecute, and punish genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It is a complementary court empowered to act when a given state is unable or unwilling to do so itself.

Bibliography:

Chambliss, William J. 1995. “Commentary by William J. Chambliss.” Society of Social Problems Newsletter 26:1-9.
Friedrichs, David and Jessica Friedrichs. 2002. “The World Bank and Crimes of Globalization: Case Study.” Social Justice 29:13-36.
Rothe, Dawn and David Friedrichs. 2006. “The State of the Criminology of Crimes of the State.” Social Justice 33:1147-61.
Rothe, Dawn and Christopher W. Mullins. 2006. Symbolic Gestures and the Generation of International Social Controls: The International Criminal Court. New York: Lexington Books.
Rothe, Dawn, Christopher W. Mullins, and Stephan Muzzatti. 2006. “Crime on the High Seas: Crimes of Globalization and the Sinking of the Senegalese Ferry Le Joola!” Critical Criminology: An International Journal 14(3):159-80.
Sutherland, Edwin. [1939] 1940. “White Collar Criminality.” Presidential address to the American Society of Sociology. American Sociological Review 5:1-12.

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