Legitimacy, Civil Society, and State Crime

Abstract

CRIMINOLOGY HAS TRADITIONALLY FOCUSED ON THE STATE AS AN ENFORCER OF rules, rather than as an observer or breaker of rules. A cursory glance at world events suggests, however, that genocide, torture, and war which are legally classed as crimes, punishable by any regardless of where they occur, eclipse all other forms of violent crime. Together with predatory activities of regimes such as former military government of Nigeria, [1] they constitute (even by most conventional of definitions) a major proportion of all serious crime. Such crimes are generally committed by or with complicity of agencies, or by state-like entities (such as Taliban regime in Afghanistan) that have not achieved international recognition as states. If criminology is to break away from its parochial obsession with behavior of poor people in rich countries, it urgently needs an adequate conceptual framework for thinking about crime. This article will borrow concepts from disciplines of political science and international relations and attempt to integrate them into a criminological framework. A key concept is that of legitimacy, along with closely related concept of hegemony, which connects to economic interests. A state's must be considered in context of state's relationship to civil society and to other states, as well as of class relations within state. This will lead us to an examination of recent work in international relations theory on processes by which human rights become institutionalized. When we discuss the state in this context, we use term in a traditional Marxist sense to refer to a public power comprising personnel organized and equipped for use of force, material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, and that levy taxes (Engels, 1968:577). Of course, there is more than this to present-day welfare states, and boundary between in this extensive sense and civil society is not easy to define. [2] Yet in old-fashioned sense share a criminologically crucial characteristic in that they claim an entitlement to do things that, were anyone else to do them, would constitute violence and extortion -- Weber' s monopoly of legitimate use of force. State agencies in this sense include some technically private bodies such as private prisons, and states (or perhaps we should say protostates) include entities that deploy organized force, control substantial territories, and levy formal or informal taxes, but are n ot accepted members of international society of states. Legitimacy, Deviance, and Human Rights What does it mean to say that a state's use of force or its demands for money are legitimate? Beetham (1991) argues persuasively that legitimacy, as a social-scientific concept, must be distinguished from belief in (as Weber, 1968, fails to do) and legitimacy in philosophical sense of a morally justified claim to obedience. To borrow a term from legal philosophy that is not used by Beetham, social-scientific statements about are detached normative statements (Raz, 1979). These are statements to effect that a given action is or is not rationally justified given actor's normative beliefs, which maker of statement does not necessarily endorse. They are quite different from committed normative statements that, for example, an action is evil or unjust (Friedrichs, 1986: 36), or (in our case) description of a as upholding or violating human rights, which apply critical standards independent of state's own norms. They are also quite different from stat ements as to whether an action is deviant, which may be descriptive statements about reaction to act by a particular audience, or hypothetical statements about how audience would react if it knew of act, or descriptions of actor's perception of audience's likely reaction (e. …