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Abstract
Although a considerable amount of thoughtful scholarly research on state crime has been conducted and published, researchers have failed to assemble a comprehensive model of the process and reactions that begin after state crime has occurred and been detected. This article outlines a heuristic model that presents the major political actors that participate in this process and the relationships that can develop among them. In order to create the model, research that has been conducted on state crime is reviewed and integrated, difficulties with this work are analyzed, and recommendations about future research that can be conducted using the model are made.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Rachel Hildebrant, Mike (Lee) Johnson, Aaron Z.Winter and the anonymous reviewers of this article for helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Institute of Political Science, Pontifica Universidad de catolica de Chile, August 7, 2014. Special thanks to Barbara Barraza Uribe and Cassandra Mehlig Sweet for organizing this event.
2. See Matthews and Kauzlarich (Citation2007) for a review of the differences between definitions of state crime and state harms. See Friedrichs (Citation1995/2000) for a discussion on the differences between governmental crime and state crime.
3. Researchers pursuing this line of inquiry must be careful that their work is not inadvertently assisting the state to better counter activists and oppositions.
4. Additional criticisms of Lynch et al. (Citation2013) can be made, including the fact that their suggestion lends itself to ‘ad hoc’ analysis more than the Rothe et al. approach, but for the sake of brevity this is tangential to the arguments developed in this article.
5. McCulloch and Stanley (Citation2013) suggest that ‘State Crime and resistance are imbricated in a “dance” … of “intimate relations” … where each moves, reshapes and reforms in relation to the other’ (p. 225).
6. Cartography, in this context, refers to the charting of organizational and/or institutional relations in the context of state crime and control.
7. This description does not mitigate the possibility of scholars/researchers bringing their own biases into the research process. This writer is not arguing that social science is value free. In this case, objectivity is introduced as an ideal.
8. Numerous examples abound including public service announcements from state social welfare agencies (e.g. Partnership for a Drug Free America).
9. If one wants to develop theories or models of state crime and its control, then we must move away from descriptive analyses of case studies and specify relations among actors and processes.
10. Rothe (Citation2009a, Chapter 10) makes a distinction between controls and constraints. Under constraints, she includes nongovernmental and intergovernmental agencies, news media, citizen tribunals, international financial institutions, and international reactions from states and citizens’ social movements. Similarly, in the context of intelligence agencies, Gill (Citation1995/2000) presents controls and oversight as different kinds of responses.
11. In particular, both a special issue of the journal Social Justice (2009, Vol. 36, No. 3), edited by Dawn L. Rothe, and a relatively recently published book State Crime and Resistance (Stanley & McCulloch, Citation2013) have exclusively concentrated on the subject of resistance to state crime.
12. Turk calls this ‘evasion’ and states that, ‘evasion has been a characteristically lower-class form of calculated resistance, for those experienced in powerlessness learn to avoid rather than to seek confrontations’ (p. 103).
13. For an extended application of this concept as it relates to police use of excessive force, see, for example, Ross (Citation2000a, Chapter 5).