Globalisation, green crime, human rights and state crime

• Globalisation


  The increasing interconnectedness of societies: what happens in a locality is shaped by distant events and vice versa
• Causes of globalisation


  • Spread of new ICT
  • Influence of global mass media
  • Cheap air travel
  • Deregulation of financial and other markets
• Global criminal economy


  The increasing interconnectedness of crime across national borders, and the spread of transnational organised crime
• The global criminal economy is worth over £1 trillion per annum
• Forms of the global criminal economy


  • Trafficking arms and nuclear materials
  • Smuggling illegal immigrants
  • Trafficking in women and children
  • Sex tourism
  • Cybercrime
  • Green crime
  • Terrorism
• The drugs trade is worth an estimated $300-400 billion annually at street prices
• Money laundering of the profits from organised crime is estimated at $1.5 trillion annually
• Global risk consciousness


  Risk is now seen as global rather than tied to particular places
• Globalisation creates new insecurities or 'risk consciousness'


  Economic migrants and asylum seekers fleeing persecution have given rise to anxieties in Western countries
• Globalisation creates new insecurities or 'risk consciousness'


  Intensification of social control at the national level, e.g. the UK has tightened its border control regulations
• From a Marxist perspective, globalisation has led to greater inequality
• Transnational corporations (TNCs)


  Can now switch manufacturing to low-wage countries to gain higher profits, producing job insecurity, unemployment and poverty
• Deregulation


  Governments have little control over their own economies and state spending on welfare has declined
• Deregulation and declining welfare

  Has produced rising crime and new patterns of crime
• New patterns of crime due to globalisation

  • Among the poor, greater insecurity encourages people to turn to crime, e.g. in the lucrative drugs trade
  • For the elite, globalisation creates large-scale criminal opportunities, e.g. deregulation of financial markets creates opportunities for insider trading and tax evasion
  • New employment patterns create new opportunities for crime, eg using subcontracting to recruit flexible workers, often working illegally
• Crimes of globalisation


  The IMF commits 'crimes of globalisation' by imposing pro-capitalist structural adjustment programmes on poor countries, requiring them to cut public spending and causing unemployment
• 'Glocal' organisation of crime

  • Involves individuals acting as a hub around which a loose-knit network forms, often linking legitimate and illegitimate activities
  • Different from the rigid, hierarchical Mafia-style criminal organisations of the past
• 'McMafia' organisations


  Emerged in Russia and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism (1989) as the new Russian government deregulated much of the economy, leading to huge rises in food prices and rents, but commodity prices were kept low, allowing well-connected citizens to profit
• Green crime


  Crimes and/or harms done to the environment, including to non-human animals
• 'Global risk society'


  The massive increase in productivity and technology has created new, manufactured risks that are increasingly on a global scale and have serious consequences for humanity, e.g. climate change
• Traditional criminology only studies the patterns and causes of law-breaking
• Green criminology


  Starts from the notion of harm rather than the criminal law, since legal definitions cannot provide a consistent global standard of environmental harm
• Anthropocentric view of environmental harm

  Humans have a right to dominate nature, putting economic growth before the environment
• Ecocentric view of environmental harm


  Humans and their environment are interdependent, so that environmental harm hurts humans also
• Types of green crime

  • Primary green crimes: air pollution, deforestation, species decline, water pollution
  • Secondary green crimes: flouting of rules aimed at preventing or regulating environmental disasters, e.g. illegal toxic waste dumping
• State crime


  Illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by or with the complicity of, state agencies
• The state's power enables it to commit extremely large-scale crimes with widespread victimisation
• Because the state defines what is criminal and manages the criminal justice system, it also has the power to avoid defining its own harmful actions as criminal
• State-corporate crime


  State crimes committed in conjunction with corporate crimes, either state-initiated or state-facilitated
• Types of war-related state crime


  • Illegal wars, e.g. falsely claiming that a war is in self-defence
  • Crimes committed during war or its aftermath, e.g. illegally seizing an occupied country's assets, torture of prisoners, bombing civilians
• Domestic law definition of state crime


  Acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their jobs as state representatives
• Social harms and zemiology definition of state crime


  Includes both illegal acts and 'legally permissible acts whose consequences are similar to those of illegal acts in the harm they cause
• Labelling definition of state crime


  Whether an act is a crime depends on whether the audience for that act defines it as a crime
• International law definition of state crime

  Any action by or on behalf of a state that violates international law and/or a state's own domestic law
• Human rights definition of state crime


  States that practise imperialism, racism, sexism, or inflict economic exploitation on their citizens are committing crimes
• Culture of denial


  States conceal and legitimate their human rights crimes through denial, justification, and neutralisation
• Authoritarian personality


  Willing to obey orders without question, common in Nazi Germany due to disciplinarian socialisation
• Crimes of obedience


  State crimes involve obeying higher authority-the state-as part of a role into which individuals are socialised
• Features of modernity that enabled the Nazi Holocaust


  • Division of labour
  • Bureaucratisation
  • Instrumental rationality
  • Science and technology