British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on April 19, 2005
British Journal of Criminology 2005 45(4):434-445; doi:10.1093/bjc/azi031
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The British Journal of Criminology 45:434-445 (2005)
© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org
State Crime in the Heart of Darkness
* Tony Ward, Department of Law, University of Hull; a.ward{at}hull.ac.uk.
A central task for a criminology of state crime is to explain why the cruelty and destructiveness of regimes of terror so often seem to exceed anything required by the rational pursuit of organizational goals. This article explores competing explanations of terror through a case study of the Congo Free State (18851908) and argues that excesses are committed in circumstances where it is rational for organizations and individual actors to minimize the moral costs of cruelty.