State Organised Crime

Author: Tony Bunyan

Unknown to most of its citizens, behind the closed doors of Brussels the European union is making serious inroads on their privacy.

Author: Bill Rolston

From the start of the twentieth century, images in Ireland began to be transferred onto gable walls where they could be viewed all year round rather than on one day only as was the case with protest banners. This article explore the history and role of political murals in Northern Ireland.

Authors: Penny Green and Tony Ward

This article explores the connections between various forms of organized political violence and ostensibly private, non-political violence in post-invasion Iraq, focusing on gender-based violence and the links between militias and organized crime. We argue that, as in other civil wars, much of the violence is ‘dual-purpose’, simultaneously serving private and political goals, and that despite a decline in violence since 2007, the situation created by the overthrow of the previous dictatorship remains extremely dangerous.

Author: Dave Whyte

The scale and intensity of the appropriation of Iraqi oil revenue makes the 2003 invasion one of the most audacious and spectacular crimes of theft in modern history. The institutionalisation of corporate corruption that followed the invasion can only be understood within the context of the coalition forces' contempt for universal principles of international law enshrined in the Hague and Geneva treaties. Neo-liberal shock therapy imposed on Iraq by the Anglo-American government of occupation provided momentum to an economic order which privileged the primacy and autonomy of market actors over laws intended to enshrine universal protections for civilian populations in war and conflict. As the US government-appointed auditor has subsequently established, an unknown proportion of Iraqi oil revenue has disappeared into the pockets of contractors and fixers in the form of bribery, over-charging, embezzlement, product substitution, bid rigging and false claims. At least $12 billion of the revenue appropriated by the coalition regime has not been adequately accounted for. This neoliberal strategy of economic colonization was facilitated by major violations of the international laws of conflict and by unilaterally granting immunity from prosecution to US personnel. The suspension of the normal rule of law by the occupying powers, in turn, encouraged Coalition Provisional Authority tolerance of, and participation in, the theft of public funds in Iraq. State-corporate criminality in the case of occupied Iraq must therefore be understood as part of a wider strategy of political and economic domination.

Author: Andrew M. Jefferson

Prisons and prison guards in Africa remain understudied and ill understood and are most often represented in the literature as objects/subjects of critique or targets of reform. To begin to redress this balance, drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among prison officers in Nigeria, this article examines prison officer training and the penal philosophy and practice of the Nigerian Prisons Service. Documentation of the contradictions of prison training practice reveals how pretensions to discipline, order and hierarchy are challenged both from below and above at the level of everyday practice. What look like hegemonic practices are, not surprisingly, contested and contradictory. Via a partial ethnography of prison training school practice the article presents a challenge to reform agencies seeking to transform penal institutions via methods that assume the homogeneity of the targeted institutions. A suggestion is made that perhaps the contested nature of penal practices in the South may encourage reform agencies to reconfigure their own identities by tapping in to internal contradictions rather than trying to impose change from without. A space for re-imagining reform strategies is framed that takes the potential but inevitable contradictions and ambiguities of prison practice as its reference point.