ABSTRACT
Economic and political institutions are major sources of harm, injury and violence which exceed the systemic damage caused by the routine running of states and markets. Institutional violence, therefore, is the outcome of violations perpetrated by individuals and groups against their own official principles and philosophies. State agents violating their own written norms who engage in abuse, torture and killing are cases in point. Firms causing death and lethal diseases, in their turn, violate health and safety regulations or infringe norms for the protection of the environment. Institutional violence may trigger a lawmaking mechanism: torture, military invasion, kidnapping of suspects, and the use of prohibited weapons create important precedents and, undetected, tolerated and unprosecuted, rewrite the international law and refound the principles of justice. This chapter also deals with institutional violence as a response to imagined threats, followed by a shifting of the balance between security and human and civil rights, leading the authorities to violate their own laws. As will become apparent, it is not always easy to separate institutional violence perpetrated by economic actors from that inflicted by state actors, as the notion of state-corporate crime may well illustrate. This chapter, however, attempts to identify their respective specific traits and then to observe how they blur and merge.
