The criminalization of politics, the politics of criminalization and their paradoxes

ABSTRACT

The notion of the criminalization of the state is paradoxical. On the one hand, the idea that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ might shed light on the potentially criminal behaviour of state-officials. On the other, the assumption that legal rules are general and anonymous, that they apply identically to everybody (and that allows defining these elites as criminals), is in its contemporary form linked to the bureaucratic rule of the state itself. In this commentary on the contributions to this special issue, I address this and other paradoxes of the state with regard to the relation between politics and criminality.

KEYWORDS:

• Criminality
• law-enforcement
• organized crime
• political power
• war

Acknowledgments

I thank Noah Gault for his very useful comments on an earlier draft of this short article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Olsson

Christian Olsson is professor in political science at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), director of its research unit in international relations (REPI) and affiliated to its Observatory of the Arab and Muslim worlds (OMAM). He has recently published in Millenium, Critical Military Studies and the Canadian Journal of Political Science.