Who can organize and exercise effective resistance? A southern criminology perspective on the victimology of state crime
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221135598 |
| Author | Valeria Vegh Weis |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
Who can organize and exercise
effective resistance? A southern
criminology perspective on the
victimology of state crime
Valeria Vegh Weis
Konstanz Universität, Germany
Buenos Aires University, Argentina
Abstract
More than 75 million people were killed in wars, dictatorships and civil conflicts in the
20th century alone. To date, states and international organizations have been regarded as
the reliable entities for addressing these atrocities. However, these agencies are often
perpetrators (or bystanders) that even deny their crimes. Based on a southern crimin-
ology approach, the article examines whether challengingatrocities becomes more feas-
ible if organizations led by the victim-survivors themselves take precedence over
established state-based or international entities. The key hypothesis is that the degree
of effective resistance is directly related to the degree of victims’involvement in the pro-
cess. Moreover, this article will go beyond the state of the art (based on victim partici-
pation) by advocating a victim-drivenmodel, where victims’networks play a leading role
that is independent from the state and international organizations.
Keywords
Atrocity crimes, democracy, human rights, social change, southern criminology, state crime, victims
More than 75 million people have been killed in wars, dictatorships and civil conflicts in
the 20th century alone (Morrison, 2013), and the death toll keeps on dramatically increas-
ing even today (Myanmar, Syria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Ukraine). When we also take
Corresponding author:
Valeria Vegh Weis, Konstanz Universität, Universitätsstraße 10, 78464 Konstanz, Germany.
Email: valeria.vegh-weis@uni-konstanz.de
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(3) 381–403
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806221135598
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
into consideration historical injustices (Cunneen, 2016) as well as everyday institutional
violence, environmental destruction and organized corruption, it becomes clear that
crimes and harms committed by states, corporations and international organizations far
outweigh those by individuals (Barak, 1990; Michalowski, 2011). Based on these obser-
vations, state crime criminology has successfully called attention to the fact that powerful
actors and particularly the state, the agency charged with protecting its people, are often
the ones perpetrating atrocities (Cohen, 2001).
However, how these crimes are resisted is still under-researched (Stanley and
McCulloch, 2013). Considering this knowledge gap and focusing on a specific set of
state crimes, largely regarded as the most egregious, so-called ‘atrocity crimes’
(Karstedt, 2009), inclusive of state extrajudicial killings, torture and enforced disappear-
ance, this article will address a pending and pressing question: who is the social actor that
can more effectively organize and exercise resistance?
Searching for answers, this study will look beyond the northern echo chambers
(Carrington et al., 2018) and, building upon the analysis of different Global South exam-
ples, will examine whether challenging state crimes becomes more feasible if organiza-
tions led by the victim-survivors themselves take precedence over established state-based
or international entities. The key hypothesis is that the degree of effective resistance is
directly related to the degree of victims’involvement in the process. Moreover, this
article will go beyond the state of the art (based on the passage from victims’instrumen-
talization to victim participation) by advocating a victim-driven model, where victims’
networks play a leading role that is independent from the state and international
organizations.
In this vein, the article will include references to a broad range of case studies located
in the Global South to analyse the different degrees of victims’involvement and, in the
last section, it will particularly focus on Argentina, where I conducted fieldwork from
2017 to 2020,
1
arguing that it can be considered as a victim-driven case study.
Notably, during the 1970s, Argentina was immersed in Operation Condor, a network
of dictatorships in South America orchestrated with support from the United States to
eliminate left-wing movements amid Cold War geopolitics. The Argentinean dictatorship
lasted from 1976 to 1983 and included the unlawful imprisonment of victims in 340 clan-
destine detention centres spread across the country, in which unprecedented forms of
torture were inflicted. The military implemented an operation consisting of ‘forced disap-
pearances’, a euphemism that glossed over a situation wherein 30,000 people were kid-
napped, tortured and murdered, with their whereabouts never disclosed. Another criminal
innovation by the military included an operation to abduct and unlawfully adopt under a
false identity at least 500 children from pregnant women or young mothers who were kid-
napped as part of the ‘forced disappearances’operation. Since then, victims’organiza-
tions have engaged in leading public policy: they were not just a group of relevant
individuals who were heard and considered in an official process but they provoked
national and international recognition of these crimes, even under the dictatorship.
When democracy returned, they raised their voices against impunity, conducted
fact-finding procedures that became the core evidence of later investigations and led a
cultural shift to avoid recurrence (Vegh Weis, 2017). As Méndez (1997: 58, emphases
added) highlights: ‘in Argentina, the inherent force of the idea of accountability has
382 Theoretical Criminology 27(3)
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