ABSTRACT
In order to maintain social order and protect their populations, modern states make laws, employ police, and provide for armies and military weaponry. In Max Weber’s (1958/1970) words, states claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in the enforcement of their order.Yet, by monopolizing violence, states hold the capacity to put that to deleterious effect in the violent control of human life and the promotion of one idea of social order over another. Indeed, the extraordinary levels of violence and human suffering that have occurred as a result of crimes committed by nation-states make more traditional street crimes pale into insignificance by comparison. In both war and peacetime, states of all kinds – democratic, dictatorial and colonial
– have instigated and overseen mass robbery, injury, murder, rape and environmental devastation on a grand scale in acts ranging from illegal wars to genocide, slavery and colonialism. This chapter explores a number of these crimes of states, examining how they are organized, legitimized and carried out. It considers why the criminological imagination has most often failed to consider state crimes, and it examines how otherwise law-abiding people can be drawn into carrying out extreme levels of state-sanctioned violence.
