State Crime on the Margins of Empire: Rio Tinto, the War on Bougainville and Resistance to Mining

This book offers a pioneering window into the elusive workings of state-corporate crime within the extractive industries. It follows a campaign of resistance organised by indigenous activists on the island of Bougainville, designed to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine, and investigates the subsequent state-corporate response, which led to the loss of approximately 10,000 lives. Drawing on internal records and interviews with senior officials, this book examines how an articulation of capitalist transition mediated through patrimonial politics, imperial state-power, large-scale mining, and clan-based, rural society, prompted an ostensibly ‘responsible’ corporate citizen, and liberal state actors, to organise a counterinsurgency campaign punctuated with gross human rights abuses. State Crime on the Margins of Empire represents a unique intervention rooted in a classical Marxist tradition that challenges positivist streams of criminological scholarship, in order to illuminate with greater detail the historical forces faced by communities in the global south caught in the increasingly violent dynamics of the extractive industries.