ABSTRACT

This book highlights the continuing impunity enjoyed by corporations for large scale crimes, and in particular the crime of toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast in 2006. It provides an account of the crime, and outlines contributory reasons for the impunity both under the law and from a criminological point of view. Furthermore, the book reveals the retrogressive role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in Ivory coast, contrary to the societal expectations made of 'non-governmental' organisations (NGOs) and CSOs.

This book reveals that in the case of this particular example of state-corporate crime, civil society as an agency of censure and sanction actually played a distinctly retrogressive role. Here, in fact, state and state-corporate crime facilitates corruption within the civil society sphere through a process referred to in the book as the ‘commodification of victimhood’ and, as a result, ensures that impunity is virtually guaranteed for the corporation and the Ivorian government. This book also examines the failure of international and domestic legal measures to sanction the perpetrators alongside civil society’s shortcomings and ultimately advocates a more cautionary approach to civil society’s potential to label, censure and sanction large-scale state-corporate crime.

This book will help readers understand the difficulties in sanctioning such crime as well as promoting the theoretical framework of state crime, the understanding of which could lead to the alleviation of human suffering at the hands of criminal states and corporations.

chapter 1|7 pages

Introduction

Applying a criminological framework

chapter 2|20 pages

State-corporate crime

Origins of the ‘ship of death’

chapter 3|13 pages

The Probo Koala arrives at Abidjan

chapter 5|9 pages

Explanations for impunity

chapter 6|12 pages

Civil society’s role

chapter 7|22 pages

Researching civil society in Ivory Coast

chapter 9|17 pages

Cover-up and denial

The battle in Britain

chapter 10|7 pages

Conclusion