Content area
Full text
Legitimacy, Civil Society, And State Crime
TONY WARD is Principal Lecturer in Law at De Montfort University (The Gateway, Leichester, LE1 9BH England; e-mail: [email protected]). He is co-author (with Mick Ryan) of Privatization and the Penal System (1989) and edited Deaths in Custody: International Perspectives (1994) with Alison Liebling. PENNY GREEN is Professor of Law and Criminology at the School of Law, University of Westminster (4 Little Titchfield Street, London W1P 7FW England; e-mail: [email protected]). Her published works include The Enemy Without (1990), Drug Couriers: An International Perspective (1996), Drugs Trafficking and Criminal Policy (1997) and Criminal Policy in Transition (2000). Her research interests include human rights and "natural" disasters, with particular reference to Turkey. She and Tony Ward are writing on a book on state crime and human rights for Pluto Press.
CRIMINOLOGY HAS TRADITIONALLY FOCUSED ON THE STATE AS AN ENFORCER OF rules, rather than as an observer or breaker of rules. A cursory glance at world events suggests, however, that genocide, torture, and war crimes, which are legally classed as "international crimes," punishable by any state regardless of where they occur, eclipse all other forms of violent crime. Together with the predatory activities of regimes such as the former military government of Nigeria, 1 they constitute (even by the most conventional of definitions) a major proportion of all serious crime. Such crimes are generally committed by or with the complicity of state agencies, or by state-like entities (such as the Taliban regime in Afghanistan) that have not achieved international recognition as states. If criminology is to break away from its parochial obsession with the behavior of poor people in rich countries, it urgently needs an adequate conceptual framework for thinking about state crime.
This article will borrow concepts from the disciplines of political science and international relations and attempt to integrate them into a criminological framework. A key concept is that of legitimacy, along with the closely related concept of hegemony, which connects legitimacy to economic interests. A state's legitimacy must be considered in the context of the state's relationship to civil society and to other states, as well as of class relations within the state. This will lead us to an examination of recent work in international relations theory on the...