Law, the State, and the Dialectics of State Crime

Regulation and governance versus criminology: Disciplinary divides, intersections, and opportunities

“…The interactionist framing of state–corporate crime scholarship provides a direct parallel to the institutional structures found within governance studies. Twenty‐first century processes of globalization and digitalization have created “counter‐hegemonic transnational networks” (Ward & Green , p. 229) through which victims of state crime can secure justice; transnational legal pluralism has thus created more diverse opportunities for “criminalization,” broadly understood, than traditional concepts of state and state–corporate crime acknowledged (Ward & Green ). However, the market‐government‐civil society “governance triangle” that underpins regulatory scholarship is cast in a more problematic light if we focus on the nature of the political power that corporations wield in the era of globalization (Barkan ; Wilks ).…”

“…This critical view of regulatory governance narrows our understanding by equating the regulatory state with neoliberal deregulation (Levi‐Faur ). It arguably undervalues the importance of augmenting or aligning the formal criminal law with more bottom‐up community, digital, and market‐based forms of social control (Lacey ; Ward & Green ). There are non‐criminal systems of administrative sanctioning that increasingly possess greater power, capacity, and deterrent impact than prosecutorial agencies, and fields of “beyond‐the‐state” regulation that exert just as, if not more, effective control than state‐led alternatives (Haines ; Grabosky ; Parker et al .…”

Refugees and the (Digital) Gatekeepers of “Fortress Europe”

“…If specific software applications, system architectures and personalized devices are now indispensable for the maintenance and extension of punitive forms of border security, then they need to be incorporated into debates around defining and pursuing cases of state crime on one hand and, on the other, human rights norms and jurisprudence (Pillay 2014;Ward and Green 2016;Vincent 2010). After providing an overview of the statistical and categorical dimensions to these population movements according to UN records, I consider the conceptual challenges of these politically and ethically controversial undertakings for the study of state crime in domains characterized by the embedding of computer-networked tools and procedures in the redesign of immigration and asylum policies across the EU.…”

“…For organizing resistance, within and across physical and digitally encoded borders, as well as in specific locales where local groups can interact with those populations needing assistance, the offline-online nexus needs addressing in a strategic way. The digitization of Fortress Europe needs its riposte in technologically and media-savvy responses to human rights abuses in order to generate the sort of critical mass that can support activist and scholarly approaches to tackling the intersection of state crime, humanitarian crises and their digital, networked manifestations, approaches that can work within the paradigm of "dialectical legal pluralism" (Ward and Green 2016).…”

“…Echoing the conclusions of Ward and Green (2016) in their rethinking of state crime as a multiplex category and domain, critical scholarship that hopes to influence policymakers and judiciaries needs to take the lead in several respects. First, to develop robust modes of analysis that can shift the political payoff of binaries that feed xenophobic and racist public discourses on one hand and, on the other, dismiss human rights activism at the online-offline nexus as irrelevant (Franklin 2018).…”