ABSTRACT
The Conclusion sets out the main lessons of the book for three fields of study: criminology, law and the interdisciplinary study of civil society. It also sums up the dialectical relationship between state crime and resistance.
All six countries in the study proved to have vibrant civil societies which actively investigated, publicised and censured state crimes. The importance of law to civil society is primarily ideological and rhetorical, although formal legal processes are important for some civil society organisations. Civil society draws creatively on multiple forms of law (including constitutional, international, customary and religious law) to foster an oppositional consciousness of rights.
Civil society comprises a wide variety of associations, including primarily charitable or religious groups as well as ‘norm entrepreneurs’ for whom the promotion of rights or other norms is a central activity. It also includes a wide spectrum of attitudes towards violence, which cannot be simply dichotomised into violent and non-violent forms of resistance. Civil society can carry out many of its essential functions even under repressive regimes which afford it little or no legal protection.
State repression and civil society resistance exemplify the dialectical idea of the ‘unity and struggle of opposites’, a process in which repression does not destroy civil society but rather gives rise to the forms in which resistance reproduces itself.
