Formulation Report
May 29, 2025
The War on Drugs
May 30, 2025
State crime, Social Structure
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Nation-states have always claimed a unique authority over legitimate use of physical force within their own territories (Weber,1921; Cover, 1986) and, in some cases, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2011 NATO-led bombing of Libya, outside those territories as well. States are therefore positioned and, importantly, resourced to perpetrate, instigate or support the world’s most serious, harmful and extensive violence.
This violence, a contravention of legal and/or moral norms, results in pain, injury and death on a vast scale –as scholars of state crime have long demonstrated (Rummel, 1994; Chambliss, 1989; Green and Ward, 2004). State crimes are extensive in their breadth, forms and consequences.
As a generic category state crime includes not only the explicit form of violence observed in, for example, torture, terror, war crimes, border crimes and genocide but significantly and often relatedly, political corruption, organised crime, state-corporate crime and the devastating harms arising from so-called ‘natural disasters.
The combination of ‘an actor, a rule, an audience and a potentially significant sanction is what defines the essential subject matter of criminology’ (Green and Ward, 2004, p. 4). Given that combination, and in the context of investigating state criminality, Tony Ward and Developed the following, now widely adopted, definition of state crime: ‘State organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights’(Green and Ward, 2004, p. 2)). The state
As you saw in Chapter 8, the literature on the state is vast. This chapter will adopt a Marxist definition which highlights the state’s three key features – territory, violence and taxation. Framed in this way the state is a public power, structured and prepared for the use of force and the levying of taxes (Engels, 1884)
This public power is organized through specific agencies and institutions, most visibly through the armed forces, police, prison and probation services and the state security service.
The definition also enables consideration of proto-state entities (such as Islamic State during its peak 2014–17 and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) operational between1964 and 2017) which, while not formally recognised internationally, nonetheless control considerable swathes of territory, extract informal taxes from those who live under their control and deploy organised force as a critical mechanism of governance
You also learnt in Chapter 8 that Antonio Gramsci argues that capitalist states secure legitimacy through a process he calls hegemony. In this way the state secures consent to govern – ostensibly without coercion. If government legitimacy breaks down however, rule through consent gives way to rule through coercion.
This relationship between consent and coercion is captured succinctly by Robert Cover in his description of the routine practice in US courtrooms: ‘most people walk into prison because they know that they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk’ (Cover, 1986, p. 1607).
Hegemony operates using a common moral language, and civil society, as Gramsci makes clear, plays a critical role in disseminating this common language. Civil society, however, plays an ambiguous role as will be seen later in this chapter.
While civil society is central to the hegemonic process of legitimising the state, it also works as an important site of resistance, as it challenges and delegitimises state actions where rules and norms have been violated
State organisational deviance One of the key features that distinguishes state harms from general social harms or human rights violations is that state harms are products of state organisational deviance.
This occurs when state agencies pursue goals and methods, identified by a social audience (which you will return to in Section 3 below) as breaching the rules or standards of behaviour demanded of the population.
David Kauzlarichand Ronald Kramer offer a very helpful understanding of organizational deviance: ‘Criminal behaviour at the organisational level results from a coincidence of pressure for goal attainment, availability and perceived attractiveness of illegitimate means, and an absence or weakness of social control mechanisms’(1998, p. 148).
There is an ongoing debate within the field of state crime as to whether crime is best understood as a legal construct (determined by state legislators and punished by national and international criminal justice processes) or as a breach of social and moral norms.
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Whitney state crimes are condemned formally by law (such as genocide and torture) it is also clear that many are not,Particularly in jurisdictions with high rates of state criminality and state-induced social harm (for example ‘natural’ disasters).
Crime is a shifting, multifaceted and contested concept which rarely accommodates to the rigidity and certainties of law. Number of scholars of state crime do, however, rely solely on formal international and domestic law to define crimes of the state and in turn on domestic and international institutions of justice (the International Criminal Court; the United Nations) to respond to such crimes (Chambliss, 1989; Kramer et al., 2002.
Rothe, 2009). You will see the inadequacies of this approach from the examples given as this chapter unfolds. State crimes are typically committed by institutions, agencies and proxies of the state – police forces, armies, paramilitary forces and other agencies bearing the authority of the state.
Laws too are the constructions of powerful forces within the state – states make laws, and they have proven themselves historically and empirically to be unwilling to define them
own actions as criminal. Relying on state-made legal definitions of state crime is therefore highly problematic, not least because it endorses the state’s monopoly of defining and punishing crime and undermines the power of victims of state crime and civil society to challenge and resist crimes of the powerful.
This is as true for liberal democracies as it is for authoritarian regimes. In authoritarian regimes however, where far fewer checks on state power exist, the consequences of ‘legal’
approaches to state criminality can be devastating as a Burmese activist makes clear: ‘Under a repressive regime like Burma state crime is the rule of law’ (anonymous
Burmese civil society activist, 2012). Moreover, and equally significant, the law lacks the agility to identify the processes leading up to even the most flagrant forms of state violence, for example practices of dehumanisation, social isolation, the targeting of minority groups for discriminatory treatment – precursors to the final stages of crimes such as torture, genocide and mass forced eviction.
You will explore state crime as a process in the context of genocide – specifically the Myanmar state’s genocide of the Rohingya Muslims – in the second part of this chapter.
State human rights violations
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Not all forms of state organisational deviance are ‘crimes’ and not all result in harms as defined by semiologists. Where state agencies depart from repressive rules or diktats, as for example when soldiers refuse to obey orders to shoot civilian protestors, the actions of the dissenting soldiers would probably not be widely described as ‘crime’ – but certainly would be by the state they are disobeying.
Rather, they are deviations from repressive state rules. Similarly, contravention of restrictive US trade tariffs by a foreign power is not usefully defined as criminal and better understood as a form of civil dispute.
Absent in these quite different examples of state organizational deviance is the violation of a universally acknowledged human right. The state-crime perspective relies on the breach of a human right in order to qualify state acts as criminal.
Human rights in this context are those rights that allow human beings to act as purposive agents, that isas actors with preferences and goals, and draws heavily on the work of Julia and Herman Schwendinger who argued, controversially in the1970s, that ‘imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty can be called crimes’ (1975, p. 137).
While the Schwendener’s did not develop theory of state crime their explicit association of human rights abuses with crime and deviance contributed to laying the foundations for understanding and exploring the state as a criminal actor (Green award, 2004, pp. 7–10)
Given that agents of the state – intelligence services, prison authorities, police, military and security forces, government officials and their proxies – are so frequently responsible for criminal acts, should look to them for solutions?
Crime is one type of deviance, and state crime is a form of organisational deviance, that is, deviant activity conducted in pursuit of the goals of an organisation. The idea of deviance implies that the behaviour violates some kind of norm and attracts some socially
significant censure or sanction. This is where civil society comes in.
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For the critical scholar of crimes of powerful, solutions to state crime lie well outside the frameworks of criminal justice, law, international conventions, domestic or international courts. Instead, any such solutions, it is argued, are much more likely to be found in the struggles of the state’s victims or those who advocate and organise on their behalf.
And it is the organization of those victims and advocates that not only has the power to challenge state violence and corruption but is central in defining that corruption and violence as criminal in the first instance. We know from the work of pioneering criminologists like Howard Becker (1963) and Steven Box (1983) that deviance is not an inherent property of an action – rather it is produced by the social application of a label to that action.
The social application of a deviant label necessarily requires a social audience through a process Tony Ward clearly articulates: An act is deviant where there is a social audience that (1) accepts certain rule as a standard of behaviour, (2) interprets the act, or similar acts … as violating the rule, and (3) is disposed to apply significant sanctions – that is significant from the point of view of the actor – to such violations.(Ward, 2004, p. 87)
Within a state-crime perspective, the social audience is primarily constituted by civil society. The concept of civil society helps in understanding how states can be ‘criminal’ in a criminologically relevant sense.
Criminologists understand civil society as comprising groups and associations that are organised and largely independent of the state and finally, concerned with developing social norms and exerting pressure on those who violate them, either directly or through pressure on state and safer workplaces or the banning of alcohol advertising at sports events t is also the case that the law approaches crime as an event or discrete behaviour.
As you saw in the Introduction to this chapter, scholars of state crime emphasise that crimes of the powerful involve multi-faceted deviant processes occurring over sometimes lengthy periods (for example, practices of dehumanisation; targeted discrimination; enforced isolation of groups).
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These processes are often the forerunners of even greater state crimes, such as torture, genocide and mass forced eviction (Green and Ward, 2004; Lass Lett et al., 2015). Civil society has far greater agility than law in identifying and criminalising these early deviant processes, given its role in monitoring and holding to account the actions of government. Civil society: an ambiguous force Civil society is fundamental to the underlying rationale of criminology, that is, its concern with rules and rule breaking.
On the one hand we have the rules and norms that preoccupy criminology and on the other we have different forms of serious organised public pressure to conform to them.
However, civil society does not occupy a simple role in relation to state crime – it is not always the source of organised pressure for the state to abide by law. It is important to approach civil society with a critical rather than a romantic eye, and to recognise its fundamentally ambiguous relationship to state crime.
For one thing, it is far from the case that civil society is always progressive. For example, in the field of state crime significant examples of Becker’s ‘moral entrepreneurs’ around in the virulent political homophobia, Islamophobia and racism exhibited by otherwise progressive civil society groups, particularly evident in the case of Myanmar’s civil society response to the genocide of the Rohingya (Green and Ward, 2019).
Somewhat differently to recognising that civil society is not always progressive force, Thomas MacManus’s work on grass roots campaigning against the dumping of toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoire revealed that civil society can sometimes in fact be a façade for fraudulent activity itself (MacManus, 2018).
Further, organisations of civil society may not see, refuse to see, or refuse to intervene in, stat crime – in his book States of Denial (2001), criminologist Stanley Cohen documents that mass atrocities such as the Holocaust may be denied by perpetrators and be met simply by those who stand by and do nothing.
As you will see in the case study of the Rohingya genocide, below, this has been either accepted or indeed encouraged and furthered by groups within civil society. With each of these caveats in mind, however, civil society still offers the most credible, independent and unbiased force for defining and challenging crimes committed by states Beyond state-defined law?
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to conform with social norms – the pressure exercised through the criminal justice system by agencies of the state. In turn, this means that for the most part criminology has left it to the state – or supranational institutions such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court in the case of international crimes – to define its subject matter.
Dissatisfaction with the dominance of state definitions of the subject matter of criminology was one of the key reasons for the development of critical criminology from the 1960s, a form of criminology beyond the mainstream which, among other things, casts a critical eye upon the state, law and criminal justice system. (Pearce, 1976; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975; Green and Ward, 2004)
. From the perspective of critical criminology, what is ‘criminal’ or ‘legitimate’, especially in relation to crimes of the powerful, should not be determined by law and the state but rather should be matters of moral and political consciousness. The actual expression of consciousness as the history of social and political change reveals, is most obviously and powerfully delivered through the medium of civil society (Green and Ward, 2019)
Civil society as a site of struggle and resistance Civil society has three main roles in defining and resisting state crime. Identifying state crime
The first role of civil society is to engage in naming forms of criminal behaviour – that is, whether some word equivalent to ‘crime’ is used, identifying certain forms of behaviour as seriously harmful, wrong and needing to be stopped. Regardless of the label used (and whether a word equivalent to ‘crime’ is used), the essential point is that state actions are seen as an illegitimate exercise of authority.
There has been much argument within criminology over whether to define ‘crime’ in legal terms, to define it more broadly in criminological terms, or to abandon the language of ‘crime’ altogether in favour of concept of ‘social harm’ as discussed above (Hillyard and Tombs, 2004).
While it is favourable to define crime sociologically –that is, crimes are behaviours defined by a significant audience as seriously harmful and wrong – it is worth acknowledging that in the context of highly repressive states the main forms of state crime will be manifestly illegal by international standards, for example torture and murder.
Exposing state crime
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This usually involves a process of information gathering, source credibility checks and the dissemination of the information in a meaningful way. In the case of repressive, secretive regimes (such Burma until 2011) both the naming of state crime and the dissemination of information about it will often involve a ‘boomerang effect’ (Risse et al., 1999)
, in which the information uncovered is first transmitted to international civil society organisations (CSOs) outside the relevant state and then ‘returned’ in the form of international pressure and adverse publicity for the offending government. ‘Punishing’ state crime The third role of civil society is to put pressure on the perpetrators of crime to cease their activities and/or make amends by some form of acknowledgement, apology or reparation.
The pressure may be direct, in the form of demands or threats addressed directly to the government and other perpetrators, or indirect, where the pressure is applied either on those formal institutions of the state perceived as having a degree of legitimacy (and not as perpetrators of the crimes question), or on other states, global CSOs and transnational institutions. Here again, the expectation is that these institutions, states and CSOs will respond by sanctioning the criminal state in some form.
State crime attacks the most basic interests of those it targets, including bodily integrity, freedom of expression, the possession of land for subsistence farming, and the religious practices central to many people’s lives.
In so doing, it creates a dialectical imperative of resistance which ensures the reproduction of its greatest adversary: a vibrant, creative and resilient civil society Genocide through a state-crimelensGenocide is a particular form of state crime that involves, as leading genocide scholar Daniel Feierstein explains, social practices that aim‘
(1) to destroy social relationships based on autonomy and cooperation by annihilating a significant part of the population … and
(2) to use the terror of annihilation to establish new models of identity and social relationships among the survivors’ (2014, p. 14)
. Genocide is undoubtedly a serious social harm, but it is also, and more powerfully in terms of labelling and potential sanctioning, a state crime. Seen through a state-crime lens, specific and structural culpability for genocidal practices can be identified, highlighted and exposed.
This lens allows us to identify genocide as a protracted process and not, as is commonly misunderstood, as a ‘spectacularised instance of mass killing’ (although mass killing is often one of the final stages of a genocidal process).
By identifying crimes as processes, the possibility of early intervention becomes possible. In the case of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, the tragedy is that the political and legal machinery of international justice was unprepared and unwilling to acknowledge, intervene to prevent or punish the crimes of the Myanmar state.
This was despite the identification of early stages of genocide by international civil society organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Fortify Rights, as well as some scholars (Zarni and Cowley 2014; Green et al., 2015).
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In late August 2017 the world witnessed the dénouement of the genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim population. The mass killings of thousands of men, women and children, the brutal destruction of over 350 Rohingya villages by the Myanmar military, mass rape on an
unprecedented scale, and the forced flight of some 800,000 Rohingya from northern Rakhine state across the border into Bangladesh is now well known.
Myanmar Rohingya communities and livelihoods had been obliterated in Myanmar’s genocidal clearance operations. The official policy of denial regarding the military’s murder, rape and village destruction extended to State
Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, who used the political capital that she had accumulated with the international community over decades to cover for the military and give it time to
prepare and carry out its final genocidal campaign Far less well known than the detail of this genocide is the fact that its roots dated back several decades and centred on state policies of religious (Buddhist) and ethnic (Burmese-Bamar) supremacism.
When in 2011 Myanmar opened its doors to world markets and ended its era of political and economic isolation, political and religious anxieties encouraged the Myanmar regime to animate its final solution in relation to the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. In a Facebook post on 2 September 2017, Myanmar’s leader of the armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing revealed the planned nature of the genocide when he declared:
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‘The Bengali problem was long-standing one which has become an unfinished job despite the efforts of the previous governments to solve it. The government in office is taking great care in solving the problem.’ (Min Aung Hlaing ’Facebook page was prohibited and deleted by Facebook in August 2018.)
When Raphael Lemkin (1947) first coined the term genocide, he made it clear that genocide, or the extermination of an ethnic, racial, national or religious group, can be accomplished not solely by mass murder, but also by social, cultural, religious and economic destruction (for example, through processes of forced mass exodus, population fragmentation and the social reconstruction of an ethnic identity).
In his context it was evident that by the end of 2ohingya had been achieved: the Myanmar identity of its Rohingya people had been destroyed and the reshaping of society in Rakhine state was well under way.
Well before 2017, however, compelling evidence existed of ongoingenocidal processes, their historical roots, and the political, social and economic conditions in which genocide was emerging (Greened al., 2015).
Employing Feierstein’s framework, International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) researchers identified the ‘six stages of genocide’, which you will examine in the rest of this section. Chapter 11 State crime, social harm and genocide126Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp, Bangladesh Stage one: stigmatisation According to Feierstein,
‘The first step in destroying previously cooperative relations within or between social groups is stigmatisation’ (2014). The stigmatisation and dehumanisation of the Rohingya operated from the highest levels of government to local Rakhine CSOs and the Buddhist Sangha (organised monkhood) (Greenet al., 2015).
Long before the horrors of 2017, the Myanmar state had pursued a campaign of dehumanisation against the Rohingya, intermittently attempting to reposition them outside the state’s sphere of responsibility by introducing violent and repressive restrictions on their daily lives. This included, at its core, a denial of the Rohingya ethnicity:
The Government of the Union of Myanmar does not recognize the name Rohingya … Bengalis now pushing to use the term Rohingya are surely fanning the flames of sectarian violence
…Bengali demands to be recognized as Rohingya will only be divisive, leading to more conflict, possibly with greater losses than before. (Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2013, p. 56)
State officials prohibited Rakhine’s Muslims from identifying as Rohingya in the 2014 census, announcing on the eve of the event that anyone who attempted to do so would be registered as ‘Bengali’.
in London, in July 2013 former President Thein Sein declared that ‘We do not have the term Rohingya’ (Inky, 2013). In May 2016, following the tradition of her military predecessors, State Councillor Aung San Suu Kyi instructed the United States ambassador to desist from using the term Rohingya on the grounds that the Rohingya are not recognized as citizens (Paddock, 2016).
The state-sanctioned stigmatisation of the Rohingya animated vigorous campaign of hate crime led by extremist sections of the Buddhist Sangha and ethno-nationalist forces inside Rakhine state. This hate campaign served to remove the Rohingya, ideologically, from the frame of Myanmar community cohesion and responsibility. Stigmatisation thus enhanced Rohingya vulnerability to the later stages of the genocidal process Stage two: harassment
The harassment, violence and terror inflicted on Rohingya people, most dramatically in 2012, 2016 and 2017, have their roots in successive and well documented discriminatory state policies.
Extensive interviews with survivors of the genocide revealed that institutionalised discrimination in parts of Rakhine state began in the 1970s when Muslim businesses were systematically closed in towns and cities and Rohingya were removed from civil service positions (Greenet al., 2018). Various forms of violence through law played a key role in the preparation for mass physical violence of 2016–17.
One significant example of legal harassment is found in what came to beknown as the Protection of Race and Religion laws Institutionalised discrimination and stigmatisation formed the ideological backdrop for organised violence against the Rohingya in June and October 2012.
The planned and targeted destruction of Rohingya neighbourhoods in Sittee, the capital of Rakhine state, leftover 200 Rohingya men, women and children dead, and an estimated125,000 displaced.
Hundreds of homes, the vast majority belonging to Rohingya people, were destroyed. In the ensuing violence 60 Rakhine people were also killed and 15,000 displaced (PHR, 2016). Evidence shows the carefully planned nature of these attacks, the role of the state and the impunity which accompanied the massacre (Greenet al., 2015). Stage three: isolation
The 2012 violence was, however, to prove critical in progressing the next stage of the genocide. As a result of the torching of their neighbourhoods some 125,000 fleeing Rohingya people were for cedant an isolated, inhospitable area just outside Sittee.
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This state-sanctioned weakening is manifested in the form of hunger and illness based on the denial of health care, restriction of food and complete denial of livelihood means. Rohingya people living in the ghetto, camps, and villages in and around Sittee suffered wretched living conditions; characterised by overcrowding, hunger, illness and despair (Green et al., 2015).
Here, the displaced Rohingya were for cento live in detention-camp conditions, separated and segregated from their former (now hostile) Rakhine neighbours. Rigid travel restrictions were imposed on the Rohingya and ear of violence outside the camps ensured almost complete isolation.
A further 4500 Rohingya people remained confined to a squalid and increasingly impoverished ghetto in the heart of Sittee – a ghetto policed by seven military checkpoints. In this stage the physical bonds of community, social cohesion and responsibility as understood in the old life are broken irreparably. Stage four: systematic weakening Once physically and socially isolated and securitised, the targeted group becomes vulnerable to systematic weakening by genocide perpetrators (Feierstein, 2014).
Rakhine state, the systematic intimidation of Rohingya leaders and the build-up of increasingly repressive restrictions of movement, ever expanding curfews and the weakening of Rohingya means of survival. It also detailed what is seen as the final stage of genocide –symbolic enactment – the systematic removal of the victim group from Myanmar’s collective history.
During this ongoing stage the Myanmar state perpetrators have effectively removed all evidence of Rohingya life and culture from Rakhine state including the bulldozing of the remnants of villages and the destruction of mosques, marketplaces, forest areas and identifying environmental features which tied the Rohingya to their land (Green et al., 2018; United Nations Human Rights Council, 2018).
The Myanmar state has continued its drive to
recast the demographic landscape by offering relocation inducements to Buddhist citizens and has securitised the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh Civil society and genocide
As you read above, civil society often has a highly ambiguous role regarding state crime – and you have seen this in relation to the Rohingya genocide. The Rohingya in fact had few friends inside their own country.
Even Myanmar’s large and active human-rights community (who for decades resisted military dictatorship under conditions of brutal repression and endured the junta’s squalid prison cells), adopted the regime’s stereotype of the Rohingya as ‘illegal Bengali immigrants’ and ‘Islamic terrorists.
These activists, encouraged by a deeply racist and Islamophobic national impulse, regard the Rohingya as representing an immigration and security threat, not a human-rights concern, and this in turn is used to justify indifference to their suffering at best and complicity with genocide at worst.
Rakhine Sos (who at the same time engage in struggles for women’s rights and against corporate and military land grabbing) actively promote anti-Muslim hatred (Green et al., 2015, 2018; Lee, 2020).
Elements of the Buddhist Sangha have played perhaps the most critical role in the stigmatisation and harassment of Rohingya. Monks hold an especially revered position in Myanmar society, their sermons seen a ‘blueprints for proper moral conduct’ (Walton and Hayward, 2014, pp. 29–30).
Claiming a fear that the very nature of Buddhism is threatened by the presence of Muslims in Myanmar, leading monk Ashin Wirathu publicly denounced Muslims on the basis that they ‘breed quickly and they are very violent, and they eat their own’ (Kyaw,2016, p. 15).
Extremist Sangha organisations such as Ma Ba The (led by Wirathu) organised virulent anti-Muslim hate campaigns throughout Myanmar but particularly in Rakhine state, where the Rakhine ethnic majority were particularly receptive to campaigns scapegoating other ethnic minorities by virtue of their own tenuous states and poverty. Inan example of the ambiguous status of civil society a local Rakhine human-rights organisation quoted the following in a report funded birth:
‘… these Bengalis are not like humans – they are intolerandemons which spill blood and inflict pain and suffering on others. Thus, we must resist them’ (Arakan Human Rights and Development Organisation, 2013, cited in Green et al., 2015, p. 53).
Despite the effective state ‘capture’ of civil society inside Myanmar (at least with respect to the Rohingya human rights) so that CSOs did not resist but even furthered the genocide, small pockets of solidarity did exist in Myanmar and civil society remains the primary source of outside knowledge of the genocide.
More specifically, it was the critical investigative and campaigning work of small groups of organised Rohingya people inside Myanmar and among the diaspora (such as the
Burma Rohingya Organisation UK), regional and international CSOs (the Burma Human Rights Network, Amnesty International,
.
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One of the deadliest tools employed by the authorities to weaken the Rohingya, up until the genocidal clearances of 2016/17, was the denial of healthcare: In the camps around Sittee and Mrauk U and inside Unmingle ghetto [there was] a visible health crisis, with empty, largely unstaffed clinics; minimal or no medical equipment; and reported healthcare visits from Rakhine doctors once or twice a week for up to two hours.
A Rohingya man expressed his frustration at the health situation in Sittee’s Rohingya camp complex, ‘The government builds clinics, but there are no doctors’. ISCI researchers observed sick, dying and dead children… all from apparently preventable disease. (Green et al., 2015, p. 93)
In February 2014, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was expelled from Myanmar following its account of treatment of 22 Rohingya victims following a massacre in the northern Rakhine state village of Du Cheya Tan. At the time, MSF was the only provider of emergency referrals and healthcare services to the Rohingya in northern Rakhine state. According to the Myanmar government, MSF was expelled for making false and ‘provocative’ claims (Green et al., 2015, p. 93).
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) found that the wide-ranging human-rights violations inflicted upon the Rohingya, particularly in northern Rakhine state ‘severely impact their ability to survive, to access health care, and to provide for their families’ (PHR, 2016).Before July 2017 the World Food Programme (WFP) warned that motion 80,000 children under five living in northern Rakhine state were experiencing potentially fatal ‘wasting’ and that a third of households in Maungdaw were experiencing extreme food deprive(Holmes, 2017).
Genocide, however, is a process with no clearly defined end – the Rohingya people remaining inside Myanmar risk violent intimidation enforced starvation and untreated illness in the camps, ghetto and ‘prison villages’ of Rakhine state. The mass expulsion of the Rohingya makeshift camps in one of the world’s poorest countries, where the refugees face ongoing systematic weakening, including death, must also be understood as part of Myanmar’s strategy of genocide.
By the end of 2017 the genocide had progressed through the final stages. The ISCI’s second report on the genocide, Genocide achieved, genocide continues: Myanmar’s annihilation of the Rohingya (Greenet al., 2018) details in depth the pattern of state organisational deviance including the organised deployment and mobilisation of troops into northern
Fortify Rights and Human Rights Watch); academic research (Green et al.,2015; Zarni and Cowley, 2014), and investigative photography, film and journalism (Constantine,2012; Rahman, 2017; Wade, 2017), which brought the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya to the global stage. One powerful example is the Permanent People’s Tribunal on Myanmar’s state crimes against Rohingya, Kachin and other groups co-organised and led by the ISCI.
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The first hearing, during which a wide range of testimony was presented and considered, was held at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, and the final hearing was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In all these activities the genocidal harms inflicted on the Rohingya by the Myanmar state were identified, exposed and challenged. These harms – variously described as crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and persecution – ultimately conform to the state crime of genocide, that is the structural and systematic attempt to destroy in whole or part a minority ethnic Muslim group in the interests of the Myanmar state’s racist goal of a unified, Burmese-Buddhist society.
This chapter began with a discussion of two perspectives equipped to explain crimes of the powerful – state harm and state crime. While acknowledging the value of a state-harm approach in understanding the structural determinants of state criminality, its lack of specificity reduces its explanatory power for the criminologist concerned with rules, rule breaking and social control. The state-crime framework embodies four essential elements:
- a concern with human rights
- the structural rather than individual nature of organizational deviance
- an understanding of state crime as a process and not simply a discrete event
- the critical role of civil society in naming, exposing and challenging state crime.
You have explored one form of state crime, genocide, and specifically the Myanmar state’s genocide of the Rohingya, illuminating the explanatory powers of the state-crime perspective. In this case persistent and ongoing institutionalised discrimination, dehumanisation and violence; physical and social isolation from the rest of Myanmar society; systematic weakening; denial of healthcare; mass killings and village destructions all constituted extreme human rights violations.
The confluence of interest between the military and government in destroying the Rohingya identity and the shared ethno-nationalist goals of eliminating the Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar revealed organisational deviance on a coordinated and grand scale; and despite the reactionary role played by some Myanmar CSOs it was international civil society which resoundingly brought the genocide to the world’s attention
Some parts of the blog have been copying from The Open University, Milton Keynes, 2025
