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

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 paper presents a comparative study of two cases – using a range of primary materials – where sabotage was deployed by social movements to dramatically stigmatise 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 organisational actors otherwise indifferent to, and alienated from, the significant harms their operations’ produced.