Epilogue: Toward a public criminology of state crime

The chapters written for this volume have documented that state crimes are, by far, the most destructive of all crimes. War, the terror bombing of civilians, genocide, torture, imperial domination, structural violence, wrongful convictions and judicial errors, along with myriad other crimes of political power, fill the world daily with death and devastation, misery and want, far beyond the harms caused by common criminals who remain, to this day, the primary topic of inquiry among most criminologists. These chapters also document that the social control efforts by international legal bodies, bystander states or governments of offending states have been dismayingly inadequate when it comes to preventing or halting state crimes. In the Introduction we analyzed some of the reasons why the discipline of criminology has traditionally failed to address the issue of state crime and its control. In this concluding chapter we offer some reflections on the role that criminologists could play in preventing and controlling this destructive form of criminality and argue for what Bourdieu (2003) calls ‘scholarship with commitment’ that we hope can produce a public criminology of state crime.