ABSTRACT
From Africa to Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, rural and urban citizens alike are facing the ‘enclosure of the commons’, a process of elite-driven land privatization that strips them of customary use rights and traditional title. Displacement of rural and urban populations often follows, enacted through forced evictions behind which stands a range of illicit transactions and state violence. This chapter presents the position that development-based displacement, organized through forced eviction, constitutes a modality of state-corporate crime that is in need of empirical and theoretical examination from a criminological perspective. It describes that these criminogenic events commonly occur through illegal land transactions, corruption and illegitimate forms of violence, which are prompted by the opening-up of landed property to predatory capital flows. As with Papua New Guinea, foreign investors with criminogenic histories have been welcomed by the Burmese state, itself long-fashioned by criminal state violence and corruption.
