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Globalisation, green crime, human rights and state crime - Coggle Diagram
Globalisation, green crime, human rights and state crime
Crime and globalisation
The global criminal economy:
- Globalisation has led to a transnational organised crime economy, estimated at over $1 trillion annually. This creates new criminal opportunities, means and offences.
- Forms of global crime:
- Arms and nuclear material, women and children, body parts trafficking
- Smuggling of illegal immigrants (Chinese Triads earning estimated $2.5 billion annually)
- Sex tourism, child exploitation
- Cyber-crimes
- Green crimes
- International terrorism
- Smuggling legal goods to evade taxes, stolen goods
- Drugs trade (estimated $300-400 billion annually)
- Money laundering (estimated up to $1.5 trillion per year)
- The global criminal economy is driven by demand in the rich West and supply from impoverished areas, where criminal activities offer attractive livelihoods
Global risk consciousness:
- Globalisation fosters a new 'risk consciousness', viewing risks as global. Increased migration leads to anxieties and moral panics about crime and disorder in Western countries, often fuelled by media and politicians, sometimes resulting in hate crimes
- Globalisation risk leads to intensified national social control and increased international cooperation
Globalisation, capitalism and crime (Ian Taylor):
- Globalisation, by promoting market forces, increases inequality and crime
- Leads to job insecurity, unemployment, poverty in low-wage countries, and reduced gov control and welfare spending
- Materialistic culture promotes consumption, leading to insecurity and crime, especially among the poor seeking illegitimate opportunities (drug trade in de-industrialised LA, gang numbering 10000 members)
- It creates large scale criminal opportunities for elites (insider trading, fraudulent claims for EU subsidies estimated over $7 billion per year)
- New employment patterns create opportunities for exploitation
Crimes of globalisation (Rothe and Friedrichs):
- International financial organisations dominated by capitalist states impose pro-capitalist structural adjustment programs on poor countries
- Programs, by cutting health/education spending and privatising services, create conditions for crime (imposed on Rwanda in 80s contributed to mass unemployment and the 1994 genocide)
Patterns of criminal organisations:
- Globalisation and de-industrialisation create new local criminal opportunities and organisations
- Modern crime often involves 'glocal' systems: locally based, loose-knit networks with international connections, contrasting older hierarchical 'Mafia' structures
- Centred round individuals with contacts who act as hubs. Others join these networks seeking opportunities. Networks often intertwine legal and illegal activities
- Glocal organisation: crime is locally based but possesses global connections. Local contacts and networks remain crucial for finding opportunities and distributing illicit goods
McMafia (Glenny):
- Criminal organisations emerging in Russia and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and deregulation of global markets
- Former communist officials and KGB generals exploited price disparities in natural resources, becoming wealthy oligarchs
- The collapse of the state led to the rise of 'mafias' for wealth protection
- New mafias were economic, fluid and often franchised their operations, facilitating the entry of Russian capitalists into the world economy and building international criminal links
Green crime
Global risk society and the environment (Beck):
- Most threats to human well-being and the ecosystem are now human-made (manufactured risks), unlike past natural disasters
- Increased productivity and tech creates new dangers, many involving environmental harm
- These risks are often global, leading to Beck describing late modern society as a 'global risk society'
- Mozambique 2010: a Russian heatwave caused grain shortages, leading to export bans and rising world grain prices. Resulted in a 30% bread price increase in impor-dependent Mozambique, sparking riots, looting and deaths
Green criminology:
- Traditional criminology: defines environmental crime by the criminal law (unauthorised act or omission that violates the law). It has a clear subject matter but is criticised for accepting definitions shaped by powerful groups
- Green crime: radial approach, focusing on harm not legality. Any action that harms the physical environment and/or human and non-human animals, even if legal
- A form of transgressive crim (overstepping traditional boundaries) or zemiology (study of harms)
- Legal definitions are inconsistent as laws vary between nation-state
- Bhopal disaster: traditional focus on breaches of safety laws; green considers the broader harm and the company's advantage in operating in a country with weak regulations
- Green crim develops a global perspective on environmental harm, arguing powerful interests define environmental harm in their own favour
Two views of harm (White):
- Anthropocentric (human-centred): dominant view by states and corporations; assumes human rights dominate nature for their own ends, prioritising economic growth
- Ecocentric: sees humans and environment as interdependent, with both vulnerable to exploitation, especially by global capitalism
Types of green crime (South):
- Primary green crimes: result directly from the destruction/degradation of Earth's resources
- Crimes of air pollution: burning fossil fuels, contributing to global warming (Walters notes twice as many deaths from air pollution-induced breathing problems)
- Crimes of deforestation: illegal logging, clearing rainforests
- Crimes of species decline and animal abuse: extinction of species, trafficking, dog-fighting
- Crimes of water pollution: contaminated drinking water (25 million deaths annually), marine pollution, illegal dumping
- Secondary green crimes: breaking rules designed to prevent or regulate environmental disasters
- State violence against oppositional groups: govs using illegal methods against those opposing harmful environment policies (French secret service bombing Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior)
- Hazardous waste and organised crime: illegal dumping toxic waste due to high costs. Eco-mafias profit from dumping. Globalised nature, waste shipped to developing countries with lower costs'non-existent safety standards
- Environmental discrimination: poorer groups disproportionately affected by pollution
Evaluations green criminology:
- Strengths: recognises growing importance and global nature of environmental issues, addressing harms and risks to humans and non-human animals
- Weaknesses: broad focus on 'harms' rather than legal crimes makes its boundaries challenging and involves moral/political judgements that critics argue cannot be objectively established
State crime
- Illicit or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of, state agencies. Committed by or on behalf of states to further their policies - Green and Ward. Excludes acts benefiting only individual state employees
- Scale of harm: states possess immense power, capable of inflicting harm on a massive scale (Green and Ward - 262 million people murdered by govs in the 20th century)
- Source of law: state defines crime, upholds law, prosecutes yet it can conceal its own crime, evade punishment and avoid criminalising its actions, undermining justice and public faith
Case studies of state crime:
- McLaughlin: 4 categories of state crime:
- Political crimes: corruption, censorship
- Crimes by security and police forces: genocide, torture, disappearances of dissidents
- Economic crimes: violations of health and safety laws
- Social and cultural crimes: institutional racism
Genocide in Rwanda:
- UN definition: 'acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group'
- Belgian colonial rule 'ethnicised' Hutus and Tutsis
- In 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered, legitimated by dehumanising labels
- Estimated 1/3 of the Hutu pop actively participated
State-corporate crime:
- Committed jointly by state agencies and corporations
- State initiated: direct or approve corporate crime (Challenger space shuttle disaster, NASA and Morton Thiokol's negligent, cost-cutting decisions led to 7 astronauts deaths)
- State facilitated: state fails to regulate corporate behaviour, making crime easier (Deepwater horizon oil rig disaster, gov regulators failed to oversee BP, Halliburton and Transocean's cost-cutting, leading to 11 deaths and the largest accidental oil spill
War crimes:
- Illegal wars: wars not declared by the UN security council (except self-defence) are illegal - US led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where claims of WNDs were knowingly false
- Crimes committed during war/aftermath:
- Neo-liberal colonisation of Iraq (illegal changes to privatise economy, $48 billion going to US firms with poor oversight and waste)
- Torture of prisoners (Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, US military inquiry found 'sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses', but only nine low-ranking soldiers were convicted)
- Terror bombing of civilians (normalised since 30s, including fire-bombing of 67 Japanese cities and atomic bombing of Hiroshima/Nagasaki in WWII, with no war crimes trials)
Defining state crime
Domestic law (Chambliss):
- 'Acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their jobs'
- Inadequate, states make laws to avoid criminalising their own actions or permit harmful acts. Leads to inconsistencies across borders
Social harms and zemiology (Michalowski, Hillyard et al):
- Illegal acts and 'legally permissable acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts' in the harm they cause. Replaces crime with zemilogy (study of harms)
- Prevents state from defining away their misbehaviour, creates universal standard
- Vague, who decides what counts as harm
Labelling and societal reaction:
- Whether an act is a state crime depends on how the social audience (direct or via media) defines it
- Recognises social contruction of state crime, varies by time and culture
- Even vaguer than social harms. Audience definition may be manipulated by ruling class ideology
International law (Rothe and Mullins):
- Any state action violating international laws (treaties, conventions) and/or domestic law
- Uses globally agreed definitions, designed for state crime
- International law itself is a social construction influenced by power. Focuses mainly on war crimes/crimes against humanity, not other state crimes like corruption
Human rights (Herman and Schwendinger):
- Violation of people's basic human rights by the state or its agents. Includes imperialism, racism, sexism, economic exploitation
- States care about human rights image making them susceptible to shaming and encouraging respect for rights. Sociologist's role is to defend human rights, even against state laws
- Cohen: some acts are not self-evidently criminal, even if morally unacceptable. Disagreements on what constitutes a human right
Explaining state crime
Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al):
- Willingness to obey superiors without question
Crimes of obedience:
- State crimes are acts of conformity to a higher authority
- Individuals are socialised into roles; resocialisation, training and propaganda are used to overcome norms against cruelty
- States create 'enclaves of barbarism' where torture is practised in isolation
- Kelman and Hamilton (My Lai massacre): three features:
- Authorisation: duty to obey replaces normal morals when acts are ordered
- Routinisation: pressure to make the crime a routine, detached act
- Dehumanisation: portraying enemy as a sub-human negates normal morality
Modernity (Bauman on the Holocaust):
- Holocaust was enabled by modern features, not a breakdown of civilisation:
- Division of labour: each person performs a small task, reducing personal responsibility
- Bureaucratisation: normalised killing as routine, rule-governed job dehumanising victims as units
- Instrumental rationality: efficient methods used regardless of the goal
- Science and tech: used for transport to death camps and industrially produced gas
- Bauman: 'modern, industrialised mass production factory system' for murder, resulting from rational-bureaucratic civilisation
- Not all genocides are highly organised (Rwanda). Ideology also plays a crucial role in motivating participation
The culture of denial (Cohen):
- Growing pressure from international human rights movement compels states to conceal or justify their human rights crimes
- Spiral of state denial: it didn't happen, if it did happen it is something else, even if it is what you say it is is it justified
- Techniques of neutralisation (drawing on Sykes and Matza): states use them to justify/deny crimes:
- Denial of victim
- Denial of injury
- Denial of responsibility
- Condemning the condemners
- Appeal to higher loyalty
- Techniques reinterpret events to normalise otherwise criminal actions (US justifying torture lite as not physically/psychologically damaging)