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Title
States of Violence and the Civilising Process : On Criminology and State Crime / by Rob Watts.
ISBN
9781137499417 (electronic book)
1137499419 (electronic book)
1137499400
9781137499400
Publication Details
2016.
Published
London Palgrave Macmillan UK 2016
Language
English
Description
1 online resources (xii, 413 pages)
Item Number
9781137499400
Call Number
HV6001-HV7220.5
Dewey Decimal Classification
364
Summary
This book offers a distinctive and novel approach to state-sponsored violence, one of the major problems facing humanity in the previous and now the twenty-first century. It addresses the question: how is it possible that large numbers of ordinary men and women are able to do the killing, torturing and violence that defines crimes against humanity? In his striking analysis, Rob Watts shows how and why states, of all political persuasions, engage in crimes against humanity, including: genocide, homicide, torture, kidnapping, illegal surveillance and detention. This book advances a new interpretive frame. It argues against the ‘civilizing process’ model, showing how both states and social sciences like sociology and criminology have been complicit in splitting 'the social' from 'the ethical' while accepting too complacently that modern states are the exemplars of morality and rationality. The book makes the case that it is possible to bring together in the one interpretative frame, our understanding of social action involving personal motivation and ethical responsibility and patterns of collective social action operating in terms of the agencies of ‘the State’. Rob Watts identifies and charts the pathways of action and ‘practical’ (i.e. ethical) judgements which the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity constructed for themselves to make sense of what they were doing. At once challenging and highly accessible, the book reveals the policy-making processes that produce state crime as well as showing how ordinary people do the state’s dirty work. Rob Watts is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University, Australia. His previous publications include The Foundations of the National Welfare State (1987), Arguing About the Australian Welfare State (1992), Discovering Risk (2006), Talking Policy: Australian Social Policy (2007) and International Criminology: A Critical Introduction (2009).
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Series
Critical criminological perspectives.
Available in Other Form
Print version: 9781137499400
Introduction
Chapter 1. Criminology and Crimes of the State
Chapter 2. Thinking About Civilization, Violence and the State
Chapter 3. Thinking the Unthinkable: The State and Crimes of the State
Chapter 4. Stalin and Crimes of the State: The Soviet Terror, 1936-37
Chapter 5. 'The Day the Police Came': Welfare Policy as State Crime
Chapter 6. The United States of Exception: Crimes Of The State And The War On Terror, 2001-2015
Chapter 7. Criminology, Society and the Ethical
Chapter 8. Making Sense of Wickedness
Chapter 9. Why Ordinary People Do Bad Things for the State
Conclusion.
