Crimes of States and Powerful Elites

This book explores fourteen international case studies of ‘crimes of the powerful’, both contemporary and historical. As such, it explores a hidden and often unknown area of criminal and immoral activity beyond the more commonly studied field of conventional or ‘street’ crimes. It offers a unique insight into different examples of criminality and immorality enacted by the powerful, including corporations, states and criminal networks. The case studies include little-known and more widely known events, offering a critical sociological or forensic analysis of each case. By doing so, the book explores what kinds of criminality or immorality the case exemplifies and identifies key contextual and legislative factors facilitating their occurrence and limiting the perpetrators’ accountability. The critical analytical approach situates the case studies within the wider context and considers the role of social, political and other factors, such as neoliberalism, colonialist histories, inequalities of race and gender and globalisation in their facilitation of particular kinds of immoral or criminal acts. Fundamentally, it explores the legacies of social harm produced by the case study events and how these have played out over time.

Drawing upon themes like disasters, medico-crimes, genocide, corporate crime, organised crime, colonial crimes and internment, the book explores key concepts like critical criminology, sociology and legislation combined with critical social policy. It will also include corporate crime, white collar crime, professional crime and social harm. These concepts will be outlined and then applied in the case studies as a way of understanding and analytically engaging with the individual cases.

Being highly topical, the book reflects a growing popular and academic interest in the social harms produced by the actions of the powerful relating to the legacies and consequences of colonialism, and the impacts of global inequalities, particularly in terms of race and gender. Offering a critical sociological perspective on these issues, the book presents a novel insight into criminality which has interdisciplinary relevance in diverse disciplines including criminology, sociology, social policy and law, geography, environmental studies, international politics and development, peace studies and critical gender studies.