State Crime
 
Crimes of the state have been one of the foremost social problems of the past 100 years, with wide-reaching costs and little in the way of potential controls. During the course of the 20th century, the state crimes of Turkey, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot and the Khymer Rouge, and Maoist China were especially large-scale, dramatic examples. Crimes of the state involving weapons of mass destruction, genocides, and crimes against humanity have been all too frequent (e.g., Bosnia, Croatia, Darfur, Democratic Republic of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Yugoslavia). Other charges of state crime occurring around the world involve Egypt, Israel, the United States, China, United Kingdom, Russia, Chechnya, and North Vietnam.
In the late twentieth century, new major initiatives sought to bring perpetrators of crimes of the state to trial, including International Criminal Tribunals focusing on genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and the establishment of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. As legal attention to such events increased, so has the scholarly community’s attention toward description and analysis of these phenomena. 
 
A Criminology of State Crime
 
An outgrowth of Edwin Sutherland’s (1939) call to expand the purview of criminology to crimes of the powerful, the subfield of state crime specifically traces its origins to William Chambliss’ 1988 American Society of Criminology presidential address on state-organized crime. Exploring crimes such as piracy and smuggling, Chambliss showed how states can be crucial in the organization and support of activities that violate their own laws and international laws when doing so fulfill their broader political and economic objectives. Criminologists, particularly critical criminologists, quickly adopted the concept, broadening and enriching the field. Their early work focused not only on crimes tacitly supported or organized by a sovereign polity, but on actions committed by nation-states themselves. As this field evolved, it broadened the definition of state crime to include all actions committed by states which violated domestic, international, or human rights laws, as well as incidents of states or state agencies failing to take actions when obligated to do so.
Critics suggest that reliance on governmental or quasi-governmental agencies for the labeling of actions as crimes removes scholastic independence and mires the field within political struggles in national or international arenas. Others advocate a social harm-based definition. This position points out that laws are created by states within political processes and therefore law is a non-objective definitional criterion. Rather, behaviors engaged in by a state or its agents that generate demonstrable social harm on a nation’s citizens or the citizens of another nation are actually state crimes. Those who advocate this position claim that through the use of a non-legal (and thereby non-political) definition, independent scholars can define and explore the phenomena in a more objective fashion. Critics of the social harm definition suggest that socially injurious actions, the main definitional criterion, is vague and open to individualistic political interpretation, even if it avoids the political constructions of states. Other cognate areas of state crime include political crimes, political white-collar crimes, environmental crimes, finance crimes, and the recently added crimes of globalization. Crimes of globalization recognize the intertwinement of states and international finance institutions (e.g., World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) that can result in forms of state crime.
 
Need to Go Beyond State Crime
 
            One of the self-imposed limitations of using the term, state crime or even crimes of the state, is the omission of other actors that may be involved in the crime commission-though not working in collusion. Back in 1990, Ronald Kramer and Raymond Michalowski saw this issue in dealing with corporate crime: at times there was an intersection with states. As such, they developed the concept of state-corporate crime. However, this term, as with the concept of state crime, omits other actors that may be directly or indirectly involved in state crime-militias and paramilitaries. Likewise, such groups may be in opposition to a regime, and committing massive crimes simultaneously of a government. As such, the term state crime would omit these other actors. In recognition of this limitation a group of scholars came up with the term, Supranational Criminology. However, this seems to imply, on the surface, crimes committed above or beyond a state. On other hand, there are those of use who merely include other relevant terms with state crime—state crime and other violators of international criminal law or human rights. This concept was included in the recent development of the first state crime research center.
 
International State Crime Research Consortium (ISCRC)
 
            The ISCRC is an officially recognized Research Consortium located in the College of Arts and Letters, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University. The ISCRC serves as an international forum for discussion and research in crimes by states, post-conflict justice and international criminal law violations including but not limited to:

• various forms of state crime (e.g., corruption, genocide, massive human rights violations, state-sponsored terrorism, torture, war crimes, etc.)
• state-corporate crime (i.e. collusion between governmental agencies and for profit organizations that result in ‘crime’)
• crimes of globalization (i.e., the intertwinement of state and international financial institution actions/policies)
• violations of international criminal law by governments, militias, paramilitaries, and other organizations in collusion with and/or independent of states
• post-conflict justice mechanisms (i.e., truth and reconciliation commissions, amnesties, lustration or vetting, disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs, local traditional or ritual practice, and memorializations).
• international criminal justice systems and their hybrids (e.g., the International Criminal Court, the ICTY, ICTR, Tribunal for Sierra Leone)

For a link of recent State Crime Publications –click here
For a link of recent post-conflict justice literature-click here
Recent books on State Crime:
State Criminality: The Crime of All Crimes (2009)
Blood, Power and Bedlam: Violations of International Criminal Law in Post-Colonial Africa (2008)
Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Government and Business (2006)
State Crime: Governments, Violence, and Corruption (2004)
 
Forthcoming Books (2010)
State Crime in a Globalized World
Crimes of State: Current Perspective