The barbarism of indifference: Sabotage, resistance and state–corporate crime

Abstract

Increasingly, state crime scholarship frames criminality as a social property that attaches to particular illegitimate state practices through a mediated process of struggle from below. Building on this foundation, the following article presents a comparative study of two cases—using a range of primary materials—where sabotage was deployed by social movements to stigmatize, dramatically, illegitimate state–corporate conduct. In order to understand the symbolic and practical significance of this exchange, a theory of indifference will be developed. It will be argued that in the cases observed sabotage acted as a device which social movements could employ to impose a sense of consequence on organizational actors otherwise indifferent to, and alienated from, the significant harms their operations’ produced.