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For most of its history criminology confined its attention to the offending of individuals within the borders of the nation-state. Three interconnected developments have decisively widened that frame, and together they form one of the most demanding areas of the Paper 3 specification. Globalisation — the deepening interconnection of societies through flows of capital, goods, people and information — has generated new transnational forms of crime and a genuinely global criminal economy. The growing recognition of environmental harm has prompted green criminology to ask whether the gravest threats to human and ecological well-being are captured at all by conventional, state-defined notions of crime. And the study of state crime has overturned the assumption that the state is merely the neutral arbiter of justice against which crime is committed, revealing that states are capable of the most extensive and lethal harms of all — up to and including genocide. This material concerns the crimes of the powerful on the largest scale, and it must be approached in a measured, scholarly register: the subject matter — war crimes, genocide, torture, ecological devastation — is grave, and analytical clarity, not rhetorical effect, is what the discipline and the examination require. This lesson examines the globalisation of crime (Held, Castells, Taylor, Beck), green criminology (South, White, Beirne), and state crime (McLaughlin, Chambliss, Kramer and Michalowski, Cohen), and the ways in which the three are entangled.
Key Definition: Globalisation is the increasing interconnectedness of societies across the world through the accelerating movement of goods, capital, information and people across national borders. For criminology it creates new opportunities and forms of crime, a transnational criminal economy, and new difficulties for control and regulation.
This lesson addresses the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) Paper 3: Crime and Deviance specification requirement that students understand "globalisation and crime in contemporary society; the media and crime; green crime; human rights and state crime." It draws together the strands of the specification concerned with crime in a global context, with environmental harm, and with the crimes of states, and it connects directly to the cross-cutting themes of power, the social construction of crime, and the role and limits of social control. It builds on the analysis of corporate crime from the lesson on social class and extends the concept of the crimes of the powerful to the transnational and state levels.
David Held et al. (1999) offer the standard definition of globalisation as the widening, deepening and speeding-up of worldwide interconnectedness. For criminology this matters because the same infrastructures that integrate the legitimate world economy — financial systems, communications networks, container shipping, cheap air travel — simultaneously enable the integration of an illegitimate one. Globalisation does not merely move crime across borders; it transforms its scale, organisation and reach.
Manuel Castells (1998) argued that we now inhabit a network society organised around flows of capital, information and people that move across borders with unprecedented speed. He identified a global criminal economy of very great value, integrated into the legitimate economy through money laundering and shared infrastructures. The principal transformations can be summarised as follows.
| Change | Explanation |
|---|---|
| New criminal opportunities | The internet, global banking and cheap travel enable cybercrime, fraud, identity theft, money laundering, and the trafficking of drugs, arms and people on a transnational scale. |
| Transnational criminal networks | Criminal organisations operate across jurisdictions, exploiting differences in law, policing and regulation, and the line between "legitimate" and "criminal" global business is frequently blurred. |
| Deregulation | The global trend toward economic deregulation has expanded the opportunities for corporate crime, tax evasion and financial fraud across borders. |
| Global risks | Globalised crime — the drugs trade, transnational terrorism, large-scale cyber-attack — generates harms capable of affecting very large populations simultaneously. |
Ian Taylor (1997, 1999), writing from a broadly Marxist and left-realist standpoint, analysed how global economic change reshapes local patterns of crime — a process sometimes termed glocalisation. The relocation of manufacturing from the older industrial economies to lower-wage regions has produced deindustrialisation, structural unemployment and community disintegration in the areas left behind, generating the relative deprivation that fuels both "crimes of the streets" (robbery, drug dealing) and "crimes of the suites" (the financial and corporate crime of those who profit from global restructuring). Taylor argued that globalisation has increased inequality within and between societies, fuelling crime; created a vast global criminal economy; and weakened the capacity of individual nation-states to regulate crime within their own borders.
Ulrich Beck (1992), in Risk Society, argued that late-modern society is increasingly organised around the distribution not of "goods" but of "bads" — the new, manufactured risks produced by human technological activity, which are global in reach and difficult to calculate or contain (climate change, nuclear hazard, toxic pollution, pandemics). For criminology, Beck's significance is twofold: many of the most serious contemporary harms are transnational and do not respect borders, and many of them are not crimes in law at all, which is precisely the problem that green criminology takes up. Risk-society theory thus provides the bridge from globalisation to green crime. Beck also argues that, unlike the "natural" hazards of earlier eras, contemporary risks are manufactured — the unintended by-products of human industrial and technological activity — and are therefore, in principle, the responsibility of identifiable institutions, even where no law has been broken. This reframing is criminologically powerful: it shifts the focus from individual wrongdoing to the systematic generation of harm by states, corporations and the global economy, and it suggests that the most pressing task for a contemporary criminology is to make these diffuse, transnational and often lawful harms visible and accountable. The difficulty, as the evaluation below notes, is that risk-society theory describes the production of global harm more convincingly than it specifies who should be held responsible, or how — a gap that the analyses of green and state crime attempt, with mixed success, to fill.
Green crime (or environmental crime) refers to harm done to the physical environment and to the human and non-human life that depends on it. Green criminology is the field that studies such harm, and it is divided at the outset over how "green crime" should be defined.
Key Definition: Green criminology is the study of harms committed against the environment and against human and non-human life, encompassing both acts that breach existing environmental law and acts that are lawful but environmentally destructive.
| Approach | Definition | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional (state-defined) | Green crime is conduct that breaches existing environmental law and regulation; the criterion is legality. | Illegal toxic-waste dumping, illegal logging, poaching of protected species, breach of statutory pollution limits. |
| Transgressive (harm-based / zemiology) | Green crime should be defined by the harm done to the environment and to human and animal well-being, irrespective of current legality — since much of the gravest environmental damage is perfectly legal. | Lawful large-scale deforestation, lawful intensive-farming practices, lawful greenhouse-gas emissions by fossil-fuel industries. |
The transgressive position, associated with Rob White (2008) and Nigel South, rests on the concept of environmental harm rather than legal crime, and is a form of zemiology (the study of harm). Its rationale is that a purely legal definition allows the most powerful actors — states and transnational corporations — to inflict massive ecological damage lawfully, and so renders criminology complicit in their impunity. The cost, as critics note, is a potential loss of analytical precision, since "harm" lacks the settled boundaries of "crime".
Nigel South (2010, 2014) distinguished two types of green crime, a typology students should be able to apply.
| Type | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Primary green crimes | Direct harm to the environment and its inhabitants, caused by the destruction and degradation of the earth's resources. | Deforestation; air, water and land pollution; species decline and the destruction of habitats; the harms of climate change. |
| Secondary green crimes | Harm arising from the flouting or non-enforcement of the rules that are supposed to prevent or regulate environmental damage. | States failing to enforce pollution controls; regulators "captured" by the industries they oversee; the illegal disposal of hazardous waste in defiance of regulation. |
Piers Beirne (1999, 2007) extended green criminology toward species justice, arguing that the moral and legal circle should be widened beyond human beings to include non-human animals. On this view, practices such as industrialised animal agriculture, certain forms of animal experimentation and the destruction of habitats may be analysed as harms — even crimes — against other species, regardless of their current legality. Beirne's argument illustrates how far the transgressive, harm-based approach is prepared to extend the boundaries of criminological concern.
A central question for green criminology is why so much of the gravest environmental harm is not treated as crime. Several interlocking reasons can be identified, and they connect green crime closely to the analysis of the crimes of the powerful.
| Reason | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Power over definition | States and corporations exercise substantial influence over the framing of environmental law, and tend to define as lawful the activities — emissions, resource extraction, intensive agriculture — on which profit and growth depend. |
| Diffuse and deferred harm | Environmental harm is often spread across vast populations and projected far into the future; there is rarely an identifiable victim and offender in the way the law's individualistic model requires. |
| The "growth" imperative | The dominant economic model treats continuous growth as a non-negotiable good, so that vigorous environmental regulation is framed as a brake on prosperity rather than as crime control. |
| Transnational evasion | Environmentally destructive operations can be relocated to jurisdictions with weaker regulation, exploiting the global division of regulatory capacity. |
The significance of this analysis is that environmental harm exemplifies, in an especially stark form, the general thesis of the lesson: that the conduct most harmful to human and ecological well-being is precisely the conduct least likely to be defined or punished as crime, because it is bound up with the normal operation of powerful states and corporations. This is why green criminologists argue that a criminology confined to the legal definition of crime is structurally incapable of addressing the gravest threats of the era — and why the transgressive, harm-based redefinition, for all its difficulties, has such appeal.
The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven workers and released a very large volume of oil into the ocean over several months, in what is generally regarded as the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. The case illustrates how the three strands of this lesson converge in a single event.
State crime refers to illegal or seriously deviant activity perpetrated by, or with the complicity of, state agencies. Because of the gravity of the conduct involved — which at its most extreme includes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture — the topic must be handled with particular analytical seriousness. Penny Green and Tony Ward (2005) define state crime as state organisational deviance that violates human rights, capturing the two features that make it distinctive: its perpetrator is the very institution charged with defining and enforcing the law, and its harms are typically directed at populations rather than individuals.
Key Definition: State crime is illegal or deviant activity carried out by, or with the complicity of, state agencies, including genocide, war crimes, torture, unlawful imprisonment, corruption and systematic violations of human rights. Its scale and lethality can far exceed those of all conventional crime combined.
Eugene McLaughlin (2001) offered a widely used four-fold classification.
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Political crimes | Corruption, censorship, suppression of political opposition, electoral manipulation. |
| Crimes by security and police forces | Torture, unlawful killing, enforced disappearance, the use of death squads. |
| Economic crimes | Official corruption and fraud, and the violation of health-and-safety or labour law in state activity. |
| Social and cultural crimes | Institutionalised discrimination and systematic violations of citizens' rights. |
William Chambliss (1989) argued, in his presidential address to the American Society of Criminology, that criminology must take state crime seriously and that it should be defined not by reference to a state's own domestic law but by reference to internationally recognised human rights. The rationale is decisive: because the state has the sovereign power to define what is lawful within its territory, a state that tortures or persecutes may do so in perfect conformity with its own statutes. Only an external, universal benchmark — human rights — can identify such conduct as criminal. This move connects criminology to international law and to the institutions of global justice, while raising the problem of cultural relativism considered below.
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