Penny Green - State Crime and Civil Activism: On the Dialectics of Repression and Resistance

State Crime and Civil Activism explores the work of non-government organisations (NGOs) challenging state violence and corruption in six countries Colombia, Tunisia, Kenya, Turkey, Myanmar and Papua New Guinea. It discusses the motives and methods of activists, and how they document and criticise wrongdoing by governments. It documents the dialectical process by which repression stimulates and shapes the forces of resistance against it.

Drawing on over 350 interviews with activists, this book discusses their motives; the tactics they use to withstand and challenge repression; and the legal and other norms they draw upon to challenge the state, including various forms of law and religious teaching. It analyses the relation between political activism and charitable work, and the often ambivalent views of civil society organisations towards violence. It highlights struggles over land as one of the key areas of state and corporate crime and civil resistance. The interviews illustrate and enrich the theoretical premise that civil society plays a vital part in defining, documenting and denouncing state crime. They show the diverse and vibrant forms that civil society takes in a widely varied group of countries.

This book will be of much interest to undergraduate and postgraduate social science students studying criminology, international relations, political science, anthropology and development studies. It will also be of interest to human rights defenders, NGOs and civil society.

Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation and Head of Department at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). She has published extensively on state crime theory (including her monograph with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption), state violence, natural disasters, genocide, mass forced evictions and resistance to state violence. She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Egypt, Kurdistan, Palestine/Israel, Tunisia and Myanmar. She is Founder and Co-Director of the award-winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI). Her seminal works, with ISCI colleagues Thomas MacManus and Alicia de la Cour Venning, on the Rohingya genocide, Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (2015) and Genocide Achieved, Genocide Continues: Myanmars Annihilation of the Rohingya (2018), have drawn widespread global attention.

Tony Ward is Professor of Law at Northumbria University. He became interested in state crime and civil activism through working for INQUEST, a British NGO concerned with deaths in custody. In addition to state crime he writes and teaches on the law of evidence, legal history, jurisprudence and law and literature.

Crimes of the Powerful

Gregg Barak, Eastern Michigan University, USA
Penny Green, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Tony Ward, Northumbria University, UK

Crimes of the Powerful encompasses the harmful, injurious, and victimizing behaviors perpetrated by privately or publicly operated businesses, corporations, and organizations as well as the state mediated administrative, legalistic, and political responses to these crimes.

The series draws attention to the commonalities of the theories, practices, and controls of the crimes of the powerful. It focuses on the overlapping spheres and inter-related worlds of a wide array of existing and recently developing areas of social, historical, and behavioral inquiry into the wrongdoings of multinational organizations, nation-states, stateless regimes, illegal networks, financialization, globalization, and securitization.

These examinations of the crimes of the powerful straddle a variety of related disciplines and areas of academic interest, including studies in criminology and criminal justice; law and human rights; conflict, peace, and security; economic change, environmental decay, and global sustainability.

Torture as State Crime

A Criminological Analysis of the Transnational Institutional Torturer

Melanie Collard

Natural Resources, Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Latin America

Exploring the Boundaries of Environmental and State Corporate Crime in Bolivia, Peru and Mexico

Marcela Torres Wong

The Crime of Maldevelopment

Economic Deregulation and Violence in the Global South

Mara Laura Bhm

Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm

Rights, Regulation, and Injustice in the Canadian Oil Sands

James Heydon

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Crimes-of-the-Powerful/book-series/COTP

First published 2019

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Penny Green and Tony Ward

The right of Penny Green and Tony Ward to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Green, Penny, 1957 author. | Ward, Tony, 1957 author.

Title: State crime and civil activism: on the dialectics of repression and resistance / Penny Green and Tony Ward.

Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018056702 | ISBN 9781138189775 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: State crimesCase studies. | Civil disobedienceCase studies. | Government, Resistance toCase studies.

Classification: LCC HV6322 .G78 2019 | DDC 323/.044dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056702

ISBN: 978-1-138-18977-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-64145-4 (ebk)

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by codeMantra

For Grace

In whom light, courage and beauty shine brightest

and for our mothers

Maxine Miriam Green
(February 28th 1929March 16th 2017)

and

Lisa Ellen Ward

This book has been almost ten years in the making, and given the scale, duration and magnitude of the research involved we have, along the way, accrued many more debts than we can properly credit.

Our postdoctoral researchers, Thomas MacManus, Ian Patel and Kristian Lasslett, skilfully conducted large swathes of the fieldwork, and research assistants Sanya Karakas and Alicia de la Cour Venning made a major contribution to data collection in Burma and Turkey. That the fieldwork was often conducted in hostile and difficult environments speaks to the courage and tenacity of all our researchers. Their work certainly made our own forays into the field far more productive and valuable at every level.

A project involving primary research in seven countries (we include Thailand for the Burma resistance in exile) requires meticulous management, and we were extremely fortunate that Alicia de la Cour Venning and Fatima Kanji shared the demanding role of research manager at different stages in the life of the project. It is down to their superb skills that our research stayed on track, on budget and on time.