ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of human rights in the conceptualization and application of the state–corporate model for studying crimes of the powerful. Since its inception, state–corporate crime research has been shaped by the debate within criminology over the definition of ‘crime’, and the challenges to state-centric criminology posed by a human rights approach. The concept of state–corporate crime emerged as a blend of the early movements to build a non-juridical criminology, particularly the search for a human rights basis for criminological inquiry. In many state-corporate crime studies, the concern for protecting and advancing human rights operates more as a foundational proposition than as specific subject matter. State–corporate analyses can be divided into two broad groups, those that examine acute events and those concerned with destructive conditions, with the latter subdivided into relatively bounded destructive conditions, and unbounded destructive conditions.
