Penny Green and Tony Ward (eds.): State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption.

Penny Green and Tony Ward (eds.) State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption Pluto Press, 2004, 251 pp. ISBN 0-7453-1784-7 (pbk) 14.99 [pounds]

The study of state crime--crimes committed by states--constitutes one of the most crucial fields of criminology, for it reveals and examines various aspects of the modern state's structure and its legitimating power in relation to crimes committed by governments. Although crimes committed by states are the most serious ones, research about them has so far not been able to provide a concrete and profound sociological analysis on the topic. This is exactly where Penny Green and Tony Ward's contribution lies, in the form of State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption.

An important issue relating to state crime is that of its very nature. If a crime is an act defined by the state and its institutional mechanisms, then who is to define state crime? The epistemological problem of defining state crime has probably been one of the reasons why the research category 'state crime' has been marginalised by contemporary criminology. The authors offer a new approach to state crime, defining it as 'state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights' (p. 2), and they underline the role of civil society in 'defining state actions as illegitimate where they violate legal rules or shared moral beliefs' (p. 4). In their Gramscian perspective on 'civil society', they argue that 'civil society can label state actions as deviant' (p. 4) and can therefore push such actions to the centre of the public agenda.

In order to explain the concepts involved in their definition of state crime, they focus on three aspects. First, they discuss the state not only in Marxist terms--on the basis of Engels's notion of the state and of Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony'--but also with reference to Weber's 'monopoly of the legitimate use of force' (p. 2). As they note, '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' (p. 3). Second, using the term 'organisational deviance' they categorise state crime as a form of crime 'along with corporate crime, organised crime, and the neglected area of crime by charities, churches and other non-profit bodies' (p. 5). According to the authors, basic criminological concepts such as control, motivation and opportunity structures can be applied to organisational deviance just as well as to individuals (p. 5). Third, they use the concept of human rights, as ratified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and by the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (1966) and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), and seek to explain the 'enormous gap between the normative ideal of human rights ... and the selective and hypocritical promotion of such rights by powerful states and transnational institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The role that human rights play in the strategies of such states and institutions can in our view be understood in terms of the concept of global hegemony' (p. 9).

Green and Ward explore various forms of state crime, and use case studies from different parts of the world. Corruption, a form of so-called 'whitecollar' (and state) crime, 'which victimises people indirectly and without their knowledge' (p. 11), includes 'the form of simple bribery, of an exchange of "favours" between state and non-state actors, or of the embezzlement which is tolerated as an informal "perk" of an official position' (p. 11). After theorising corruption as a means (p. 13) and as an organisational goal (p. 16), they analyse aspects of 'clientelism' and 'patrimonialism' (p. 21). While clientelism is related to 'a pattern of social exchange between patrons, normally the holders of political administrative officers, and clients' (p. 21), patrimonialism 'is the antithesis of bureaucratic government: it is the form clientelism takes where a rational-legal bureaucracy does not exist' (p. 21). As examples of clientelism and patrimonialism, the authors use the pattern of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and also the genocide in Rwanda--a crisis 'triggered by falling coffee prices and the World Bank's structural adjustment programme, which led to an increasing concentration of power in the shadowy and corrupt "Akazu" network centered on the family of the President's wife' (p. 27).

Also, in order to explore the political economy of state-corporate crime, which they consider to be a second form of state crime, they focus on three cases: the case of the shrimp industry in Latin America; that of the oil industry in Nigeria; and the us and British arms trade. They show how, after the rapid boom in shrimp aquaculture in the 1980s, multinational aquaculture corporations developed large-scale shrimp farms in countries like Honduras, Guatemala and Ecuador, displacing local communities; and how these local communities were policed and repressed by the state, resulting in the murder of several fishermen (p. 30). Similarly, Nigerian oil installations causing massive environmental devastation displaced local communities, and were policed both by the private security employed by corporations and by the Nigerian state (p. 30). In the case of the us and British arms trade, the authors give examples of state-corporate crime 'where states and corporations have colluded covertly to breach embargoes on repressive states, or trade in weapons or equipment which have devastating consequences for the civilian populations upon whom the arms are employed' (p. 31).

Although their study includes an empirically and theoretically substantial analysis of classical forms of state crime such as police crime, state-organised crime, state terror and terrorism, torture, war crimes and genocide, Green and Ward also introduce new perspectives on state crime. Their innovative conceptualisation of natural disasters as state crimes drives them to the analysis of 'criminal actions and negligent practices' (p. 52) of the state in cases of natural disasters: 'Examples such as the 1958-1961 Chinese famine, the Northern African famines in the Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia in the latter half of the twentieth century, the 1976 Guatemalan earthquake and subsequent landslides and the 1999 Turkish earthquakes illuminate the direct links between gross human rights violations, corrupt practices and natural catastrophes' (p. 67).

With analytical tools from the theory of human rights, criminology and political science, Green and Ward succeed in elaborating one of the most controversial subjects in social science. Thus, their study on state crime provides not only a fundamental contribution to the political economy and the sociology of state crime, but also an important contribution both to modern state theory and to Marxist social theory.