Kristian Lasslett - State Crime on the Margins of Empire

State Crime on the
Margins of Empire

Rio Tinto, the War on Bougainville
and Resistance to Mining

Kristian Lasslett

First published 2014 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Kristian Lasslett 2014

The right of Kristian Lasslett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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

ISBN 978 0 7453 3503 2 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 3504 9 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7837 1229 8 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7837 1231 1 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7837 1230 4 EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Text design by Melanie Patrick

Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

With this book we launch an exciting new series dedicated to understanding state crime, a series which showcases the best of new state crime scholarship. This is work which challenges official and legal definitions of crime, but on any reasonable definition (whether based on national and international law or a concept such as social harm) crimes condoned, committed or instigated by states dwarf most other forms of crime. Genocide, war crimes, torture, and the enormous scale of corruption that afflicts nations such as Papua New Guinea make everyday crimes against the persons and property of European citizens appear almost trivial. This series grows out of the International State Crime Initiatives work on advancing our understanding of state violence and corruption and of resistance to them. The series is driven by a new and sophisticated wave of state crime scholarship; one in which theoretical development drawing on a variety of social scientific traditions is informed by courageous and rigorous empirical research.

A major area of state crime scholarship, to which this book contributes, is that concerned with the interaction and collusion between states and corporations. In State Crime on the Margins of Empire, Kristian Lasslett provides a compelling narrative of capital, empire and resistance on the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, which endured a brutal civil war from the late 1980s into the 1990s.

On this one small island was visited almost every form of state and state corporate crime including forced displacement, mass-destruction of property, internment, torture, extrajudicial killings and a lethal sanctions regime. Lasslett demonstrates the necessity of understanding the complex layering of formal and informal power structures through a detailed study of clan relationships, patronage networks, patrimonial political relations and the asymmetrical interaction between mining capital and the states of Papua New Guinea and Australia.

The theoretical perspective from which Lasslett views these developments is an interpretation of classical Marxism, which draws on the works of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky as well as less celebrated figures such as the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov. When Lassletts theoretical map places Papua New Guinea on the margins of Empire, the Empire in question is that of global capital. It is an Empire without a sovereign; if it has an Emperor, it is the impersonal logic of capital, which the governments of nation-states serve as more or less obedient viceroys. Although global in reach, its effects can only be understood in relation to the dynamics of local political and economic conjunctures.

Within this framework, the study of state crime starts from a recognition that states cannot rule for long by naked coercion alone. State crime occurs when economic and political pressures lead states to violate the norms on which their legitimacy depends, arousing processes of resistance, exposure and censure which may, in different circumstances, curb criminal activities or provoke an intensification of violent repression. The regional articulations of capitalism embody certain criminogenic potentials, but they become actualised only under specific historical conditions which Lasslett chronicles in meticulous detail. There is nothing crudely reductionist about Lassletts version of Marxism.

While not every state crime scholar is a Marxist, classical or otherwise, Lassletts Marxism is deployed partly in order to critique some other well-established approaches to state and corporate crime. We are delighted to launch the series with such a powerful and innovative contribution to state crime scholarship and hope this book will provoke a healthy debate within the field, to which other books in the series will also contribute.

Penny Green and Tony Ward

Series Editors