Green Criminology and State-Corporate Crime: The Ecocide-Genocide Nexus with Examples from Nigeria

Abstract

ABSTRACT Following the lead of researchers in other disciplines, a handful of state and corporate crime, and green criminological researchers have addressed crimes such as genocide and ecocide. Criminologists have drawn attention to the intersection of state and corporate crimes (i.e. state-corporate crime), and illustrated how state and corporate crimes victimized, among other groups and other places, citizens of African nations. More recently, criminologists, particularly green criminologists, have begun to examine the connection between genocide and ecocide, or how the human destruction of ecosystems and people are inter-related, and reflect features of state-corporate crime. The current study examines these issues and extends that discussion by describing how the intersection of genocide-ecocide can be linked to treadmill of production arguments and related approaches in environmental sociology. Specifically, we suggest that the ecocide-genocide nexus is useful for understanding how the destruction of people and ecosystems by states and corporations intersect throughout the history of capitalism, with evidence that many contemporary genocides are driven by ecocide and efforts to expand raw material resource withdrawals controlled by the capitalist treadmill of production. This perspective is then applied to the case of Nigeria to illustrate how the oil-related treadmill of production and the history of governance in Nigeria facilitated eco-genocide, or the genocide of Native Nigerians through ecological destruction over the past half century. Our argument links concepts and theory from environmental sociology, state-corporate crime research, green criminology, ecological Marxism, human rights scholarship and various other literatures addressing ecocide and genocide. We describe how the capitalist treadmill of production, as a specific phase in the history of capitalism, continues the historical tendencies toward ecocide-genocide generated by colonial capitalism, and how the interaction between state and corporate behaviour facilitates expanded production and profit making through accelerated rates of ecological withdrawal which then promotes ecologically induced genocide.