ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, a growing body of literature on state crime has focused on the descriptive and etiological factors of the worst atrocities that have resulted from government policies and actions: crimes against humanity (e.g. enslavement, forced disappearances), genocide (e.g. intent to destroy in whole or in part an ethnic population), human rights violations (e.g. obstruction of humanitarian food aid), and war crimes (e.g. targeting civilian populations). A key concern for analysts of state crime is the presence or absence of potential control mechanisms that can act as barriers to state criminality and/or as after-the-fact mechanisms of accountability. For example, post-controls such as international military tribunals, ad hoc international criminal tribunals, and the International Criminal Court have been used to hold a select few high-ranking government officials accountable for their crimes. Other international institutions such as the United Nations have used sanctions as an attempt to control ongoing wrongful state behavior. Likewise, others have identified international financial institutions (IFI) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WB) as potential mechanisms to control and/or constrain state criminality through the withholding of loans (Ross 1995, 2000; Rothe and Mullins 2006).
