ABSTRACT
This chapter offers answers to Kurt Schock’s questions while paying particular attention to our own concerns around the dialectical relationship between the state and civil society in the exposure, definition and sanction of state criminality. State violence was one of the primary mechanisms deployed by the state in order to crush emergent civil society groups in Burma, Tunisia and Turkey. Extreme state violence, particularly torture, makes clandestine structures or resistance from exile inevitable. Arrest and imprisonment were both attempts by the state to crush dissent, but they also paradoxically served to educate, organise, foster resilience and ultimately empower many of those they targeted. Even under the most repressive and criminal of authoritarian states, organisations of resistance emerge and develop tactics and strategies to confront the commission and the impact of state crime. State crime cannot be understood without the intervention of civil resistance and nor can that resistance be understood without reference to its relation to state violence and corruption.
