State Violence

State violence is the use of legitimate governmental authority to cause unnecessary harm and suffering to groups, individuals, and states. State violence stems from the desire of official state actors to reach the organizational goals of a state or governmental agency. The goals may be implicit or explicit and are often related to building or preserving hegemony and control, racial and ethnic exclusivity, imperialism, or facilitating the accumulation of capital or scarce resources such as oil. The most common forms of state violence are human rights violations, crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, torture, prisoner abuse, and the oppression of racial, ethnic, gender, religious, or political minorities. These acts are prohibited by several international laws and agreements (e.g., the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva and Genocide Conventions) and some domestic legal codes (e.g., the United States Constitution). The September 11, 2001, attack on the United States is not conceptualized as state violence since Al-Qaida was and is not a legitimate state entity, although the violence was the result of the group's attempt to reach its organizational goals.

State violence in pursuit of organizational goals is both historically and contemporarily ubiquitous. Wars of aggression (i.e., those not fought in self-defense) number in the thousands, have claimed tens of millions of lives, and have resulted in innumerable injuries. State-organized genocides, such as the Nazis' systematic killings of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals during World War II ended over 6 million lives in horror. Instances of state violence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are numerous: Genocide has been documented in the Darfur region of the Sudan, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Albania; violent suppression of dissent has been ordered by governmental officials in Columbia and China; illegal wars have been commenced, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Serbian aggression in the former Yugoslavia, specifically Kosovo, in the 1990s, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, all of which were [Page 689]military actions prosecuted without the legally required UN Security Council approval, as specified in the UN Charter; and thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by military personnel in the process of conquering regions in times of war (e.g., recent conflicts in Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia). Although violent acts by individuals not in positions of state power are disproportionately discussed in the popular press, governmental crime reports, and in popular cultures, violence by legitimate states and state actors pursuing organizational goals dwarfs the injuries caused by traditional street crimes.

There is considerable debate on whether all forms of state violence are appropriately classified as criminal. One school of thought, the legalistic perspective, considers only those behaviors that violate codified national or international law to constitute criminality. The major competing position, proposed by sociologists and critical criminologists, is that a crime is not only a violation of law, but also an act or omission that is analogous to legally prohibited behavior. From this perspective, violence by a state need not be specifically identified in international or domestic law as a criminal violation but is one that is comparable or that is similarly or more harmful.

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