Violence and the State

This chapter is concerned with ‘organized physical violence in the most material sense of the term: violence to the body’ (Poulantzas, 1978b: 29). There may be a good case for defining violence more broadly in some criminological contexts (Salmi, 2004; Tombs, 2007), but what concerns us here is the close relationship between organized physical violence and the state. Not only do modern states claim a monopoly of legitimate violence in this sense (Weber, 1968); they also perpetrate or instigate most of the world's serious violent crime: the infliction of pain, injury or death in contravention of legal or moral norms (Green and Ward, 2004). It is this illegitimate violence, or state crime, that concerns us here.