Abstract
Reviewed by: Scott Poynting, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, and School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
This valuable collection meets a vital need: to inform critically and with manifold and global instances, “a sense of agency or hope that things could be different” (p. 6) in the face of widespread and often overwhelming state crime. “What matters is not to know the world, but to change it,” wrote Fanon in 1952. David Friedrichs’ chapter 2, about resisting state crime in the context of the “Arab Spring,” may well remind us that this was as true for Tunisia in 2011 as for Algeria in the 1950s. Of course, Fanon was echoing Marx from 1845, and indeed the 11th thesis on Feuerbach is quoted by McCullloch and Stanley in their concluding chapter of this volume (p. 226). Criminologists may have criticised state crime, and some have administered it; the point, however, is to eradicate it – to change the world that produces it. The “Arab Spring” may have turned to winter, yet another such spring may not be far behind. Many of the gains in civil society, and the experiences and consciousness of collective struggle, will live on and grow anew. Such political hopefulness is sadly not an approach that has characterised my own teaching in the social sciences, not least in the doleful field of criminology and especially state crime, and this is something which the more engaged students have always raised as a challenge.
State Crime and Resistance meets that challenge admirably. Elizabeth Stanley and Jude McCulloch, in their acknowledgements (p. xii), credit the inspiration of their “students in state crime courses who were eager to find hope in the face of the reality of state crime.” The authors of this volume have collectively offered this hope, and since its publication, my students and I have been grateful for the corrective. Over those last three years, I have used several chapters of this book as readings in an honours (that is, graduate) course on state crime and another on the contemporary criminology of global crises. These, and indeed all the chapters, are eminently accessible in style, succinct in presentation, and contemporary in content and relevance; each is erudite in its specialist knowledge. Every chapter offers a springboard into the study of an area of state crime, and particularly of resistance to it.
The crimes concerned are various, starting with “repressiveness, massive corruption and grossly unresponsive or stagnant social policies” of states across the Middle East – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Morocco, (Friedrichs, p. 15). Green and Ward (chapter 3) bring a Gramscian perspective and an emphasis on resistance in civil society, since “it is largely through civil society that state crime is identified, labelled, and resisted” (p. 38). They showcase the work of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI), in which exemplary resistances to state crime are adduced from the post-conflict countries such as Cambodia, Colombia, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, and Turkey. The reader is introduced to cutting-edge work from emerging critical scholars of the ISCI; the reference list serves as a port of embarkation for many critical journeys.
Ronald Kramer (chapter 4) champions public criminology in resistance to state-corporate crime related to global warming. This is one chapter that I have used successfully with my students, and they grasped well what Kramer (following Robert Jensen) calls “the prophetic voice”: to “call out the social injustices that states and corporations produce and tolerate, confront the abuses of powerful officials and analyse how political and economic systems cause destruction, devastation and untold suffering” (p. 42). Yet, this is more than analysis of systems and denunciation of state-corporate criminality, it is an exhortation for critical criminologists “to act in the political arena,” for example by “organizing or participating in peace, environmental, or transitional justice movements, challenging empire, contesting the power of the corporate state, working to reinvigorate democratic governance and enhancing the power and control of international political and legal institutions” (p. 42). Rob White’s contribution (chapter 10) – another chapter that I have used in teaching – presents a useful typology and analysis of what we face when confronting environmental harm and lessons about what is effective in challenging it.
Stanley and McCulloch list four fundamental ingredients of resistance to state crime: opposition, intention, communication and transformation (p. 5). Most of the chapters elaborate on these, with varying emphases and across myriad forms and levels of resistance, including: riots, occupations, strikes of various forms, manifestations, processions, banners, guerrilla warfare, armed uprisings, escapes, dramatic self-harm, suicide, lobbying, petitioning, legal action, legal reform, radical art, music, photography, theatre and education (p. 4), to give but a sample.
Photographs? Wayne Morrison (chapter 11) analyses the meaning and importance of the resistance in 1944 in taking and smuggling out of Auschwitz-Birkenau of four photographs witnessing and documenting the genocide there: photographs made and sent by the “special labour detail” unit of prisoners – themselves destined to be murdered – charged with facilitating the mass murder and disposing of the human remains. In that context of the Nazi Holocaust, argues Morrison, “communication and recording are in themselves acts of resistance” (p. 142). Those bereft of their humanity and their agency in the Nazi death camps, Morrison reminds us, could be reduced to moribund beings lacking will and resistance, dubbed Muselmänner (literally “Muslim”: possibly because of what seemed a prayer-like posture of those resigned to impending death) by the inmates of the camps, as recounted by Primo Levi. Yet, this condition was not inevitable; not all were reduced to this state. The resistance in producing and passing on photographs of the genocidal atrocity, though futile in any immediate sense, was immensely fruitful and powerful in bearing witness.
Escape? While carefully circumscribing any comparison with the concentration camps of mass murder and the apparatus of genocide, Mike Grewcock (likewise taking inspiration from Levi and via Agamben) also draws on the distinction between the incapacity of the Muselmänner and those resisting hopelessness and dehumanisation, in his instructive study of resistance among Australia’s asylum seeker detainees today. Escapes from their detention centre camps may be (usually) shortlived and largely symbolic, but the resistance inherent in these insists on the humanity of the people criminally confined and mistreated there, and also becomes part of a campaign of bearing witness in the present tense and organising beyond the razor wire.
Suthaharan Nadarajah’s and Victoria Sentas’s chapter 6, “The politics of state crime and resistance: self-determination in Sri Lanka,” deals with the genocidal state crime of the Sri Lankan state, culminating in the military defeat of The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009, and its atrocious aftermath. In the carrying on of resistance in the Diaspora, we see a sort of globalisation of that resistance to state crime. I have used this chapter to good effect in teaching a course on state crime, underlining the importance of transnational solidarity, and well as making the point about the criminalisation (as “terrorists”) of diasporic support for this resistance.
Elizabeth Stanley’s own chapter, chapter 7, makes a powerful case that the genocidal criminality of the Indonesian state in West Papua has its basis in state-corporate crime. The violent expropriation of Papuan people, of land, minerals, timber, the destruction of their environment, the severe repression and denial of self-determination, have always been resisted. Stanley instances many forms of resistance, from flag-raisings to armed insurgency, but traces how, in the face of overwhelming state violence and impunity, the fulcrum of resistance has shifted from the “bow and arrow” guerrilla warfare (pp. 91, 93) of the Free Papua Movement, to non-violent “civil forms of resistance,” whose long-term prospects of success will depend on international attention to, and mobilisation against, the crimes of multinational corporations and the state that sustains and depends upon them.
Chris Cunneen’s contribution (chapter 8) deals with another order of state crime: that of the fraudulent expropriation of wages and trust monies of Indigenous people in Australia, along with the forced labour and other crimes in which the state has been culpable or complicit. This has been an integral (and long hidden) part of the history of colonialism in this continent. Resistance has ranged from historic strikes to legal challenges, and the latter are ongoing as I write.
It is invidious to attempt to précis all the chapters of this collection: there are 17 of them, and the book is replete with works from scholars at the global forefront of the study and resistance of state crime: among them Christina Pantazis and Simon Pemberton, David Kauzlarich, Sharon Pickering, Leanne Weber and Dawn Rothe, as well as the editors themselves. I will leave the last word to Raymond Michalowski (from the penultimate chapter). He asks whether the “master’s tools” of supranational law can be deployed to oppose successfully the crimes of powerful states. He concludes that “the current institutions of supranational justice” belong to “the Master’s house,” which cannot be so dismantled. “Effective resistance to normalized state deviance,” he asserts instead, “can only come from mass social movements that demand not simply after-the-fact punishment of state criminals, but rather a recalibration of the political-economic structures that facilitate systemic state crime” (p. 221).
For this, we shall need optimism of the will, as well as pessimism of the intellect. State Crime and Resistance offers both.