Crimes of the Powerful
About the Book Series
Crimes of the Powerful encompasses the harmful, injurious, and victimizing behaviors perpetrated by privately or publicly operated businesses, corporations, and organizations as well as the state mediated administrative, legalistic, and political responses to these crimes.
The series draws attention to the commonalities of the theories, practices, and controls of the crimes of the powerful. It focuses on the overlapping spheres and inter-related worlds of a wide array of existing and recently developing areas of social, historical, and behavioral inquiry into the wrongdoings of multinational organizations, nation-states, stateless regimes, illegal networks, financialization, globalization, and securitization.
These examinations of the crimes of the powerful straddle a variety of related disciplines and areas of academic interest, including studies in criminology and criminal justice; law and human rights; conflict, peace, and security; economic change, environmental decay, and global sustainability.
Humanitarian Crime: Disasters, Dispossession, and Resistance in Port-au-Prince
1st Edition
By Angela Sherwood
June 02, 2026
This is the first book to theorise humanitarian power within the crimes of the powerful tradition. It offers a compelling account of the structural forces embedded in humanitarian institutions, and the practices and forms of legitimation through which the violent effects of humanitarian ...
State Crime, Digital Technology and Civil Resistance: The Mosireen Collective and the Politics of Visibility
1st Edition
By Saeb Kasm
February 26, 2026
Making state crime visible through acts of documentation, resistance and memory has become one of the defining struggles of the digital age. Focusing on Egypt’s Mosireen Collective, this book examines how citizens mobilised digital technologies to expose repression during and after the 2011 ...
Framing Impunity in the Context of State Crime: A Study of Turkish State Criminality Against Kurds (1990- 2000)
1st Edition
By Sanya Karakas
November 28, 2025
This book introduces a new conceptual framework for impunity within state crime theory and uses Turkish state criminality against Kurds between 1990 and 2000 as a case study. It develops an understanding of impunity that goes beyond viewing the state solely as an actor, facilitator, or denier of ...
Tolerating State Violence
1st Edition
By Elizabeth Stanley
November 04, 2025
Why do we tolerate state violence, despite it being disagreeable, painful and often harmful for our societies? Drawing on three liberal democratic countries – Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom – this book exposes how states perpetuate tolerance for their violence through ...
Citizenship and Genocide Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar
1st Edition
By Natalie Brinham
October 30, 2024
This book draws on Rohingya oral histories and narratives about Myanmar’s genocide and ID schemes to critique prevailing international approaches to legal identities and statelessness. By centring the narratives of survivors of state crimes, collected in the aftermath of the 2017 genocidal violence...
Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy
1st Edition
By Gregg Barak
April 01, 2024
Indicting the 45th President is a sequel to Criminology on Trump in real time, continuing the criminological investigation into the former US president. Developing and expanding on the themes of family dynamics, deviance, deception, dishonesty, and the weaponization of the law, this book offers the...
Domestic Violence as State Crime: A Feminist Framework for Challenge and Change
1st Edition
By Evelyn Rose
September 25, 2023
Domestic Violence as State Crime presents a provocative challenge to the way that domestic violence is understood and addressed. Underpinned by a radical feminist perspective, the central argument of this book is that domestic violence against women constitutes a patriarchal state crime. By ...
Criminology on Trump
1st Edition
By Gregg Barak
May 17, 2022
Criminology on Trump is a criminological investigation of the world’s most successful outlaw, Donald J. Trump. Over the course of five decades, Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault, tax evasion, money laundering, non-payment of employees, and the defrauding of tenants, customers, ...
Corrupt Capital: Alcohol, Nightlife, and Crimes of the Powerful
1st Edition
By Kenneth Sebastian León
April 29, 2022
This book offers a deep dive into the social, political, and economic forces that make white-collar crime and corruption a staple feature of the nightlife economy. The author, a former bouncer-turned-bartender of party bars and nightclubs in a large U.S. city, draws from an auto-ethnographic case ...
State Violence, Torture, and Political Prisoners: On the Role Played by Amnesty International in Brazil During the Dictatorship (1964–1985)
1st Edition
By Renata Meirelles
June 30, 2021
State Violence, Torture, and Political Prisoners discusses the activities of Amnesty International during the period of Brazil’s dictatorship (1964–1985). During the dictatorship, Amnesty assisted political prisoners who were submitted to torture and helped to publicise charges of torture against ...
Market Criminology: State-Corporate Crime in the Petroleum Extraction Industry
1st Edition
By Ifeanyi Ezeonu
March 31, 2021
Building on original research into the petroleum industry and on the theory of crimes of globalization, this book introduces the concept of Market Criminology: the criminology of preventable market-generated harms and the criminogenic effects of market rationality in variegated forms of capitalism....
Natural Resources, Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Latin America: Exploring the Boundaries of Environmental and State-Corporate Crime in Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico
1st Edition
By Marcela Torres Wong
March 31, 2021
In 1989, the International Labor Organization stated that all indigenous peoples living in the postcolonial world were entitled to the right to prior consultation, over activities that could potentially impact their territories and traditional livelihoods. However, in many cases the economic ...