As one would expect in any overview of ‘State Crime and Immorality’, this book covers a broad empirical terrain, and impressively so. Thus the reader is led through explorations of the international drugs trade, with a particular focus on the ‘Iran/Contra’ affair in the 1980s; Murdoch's routine-phone-hacking newspaper empire; the US-led Coalition's destruction of state and civil society in Iraq; what the authors refer to as ‘The Troubles’ in Great Britain and the island of Ireland; and, finally, a juxtaposition of Argentina's Dirty War with the British state's assault on organised labour through the miners’ strike and in particular the symbolic events around Orgreave. Through these empirical foci, Monaghan and Prideaux reflect upon the nature and dimensions of state violence, terrorism, and collusion, not least with the help of an almost-always supine, and at times simply criminal, media, in a rigorous and indeed highly readable fashion.

There is, as is often the case, a price to be paid for this vast terrain of subject matter – a cost in terms of conceptual and theoretical depth, albeit the first three chapters of the book are dedicated to laying the groundwork in these respects. Having set out the significance of ‘rethinking “the crime complex”’ (6) via a focus on ‘non-conventional criminality’ (9) in their Introductory chapter, the authors go on, in Chapters 2 and 3, to elaborate upon a definition of the state and then to explore the relationships between the state, corporations and organised crime, respectively. These two chapters, each seeking to mark out the theoretical, conceptual and empirical terrain of what is to follow, succeed only partially, albeit for different reasons.

Chapter 2 develops two ideas which are central to the book. One is that of the ‘Ideal State’, and its impossibility, an impossibility exacerbated significantly by the emergence of neo-liberalism, the second key idea introduced in the chapter. As the ideal state seeks legitimacy through its (albeit never-realised) ability to generate and maintain social cohesion, the more entrenched that neo-liberalism becomes, the more it manifestly undermines any potential for such cohesion. This, then, generates a discussion of the problem of state crime – a phenomenon effectively denied by the ability of states to legitimise their actions and inactions through their control over the definition of crime, a control challenged by successive scholars of varieties of state crime, as well as by the advocates of the ‘notion’ of social harm, which, according to the authors, is an attempt to impose “an even wider accountability” on governments (56). It presumably matters not at all to readers of this review that I find some of the details of these claims plausible, others less so. But what does seem to me to be slightly problematic here is that these claims are advanced rather assertively, at break-neck speed, with an eclecticism of reference points that requires but does not receive justification and elaboration. Why a Habermassian notion of state contradiction and legitimacy crises? Why a focus on neo-liberalism (through the somewhat dated terminology of ‘The New Right’) rather than capitalism per se? Why immorality and not a-morality or a particular form of neo-liberal morality? And, indeed, why social harm, whether such harm is to be understood in terms of a denial of rights (53) or needs (208) or both?

Chapter 3 then turns to definitional and terminological considerations of state, organised, corporate legality and illegality. These are well known debates within and around criminology, and there is merit in exploring them, but the authors do so in a reviewing sense with “no intention to settle . . . scores” (87). Fair enough, but that leaves me wondering why so much space was devoted to these questions since, and in any case, the authors have already decided to focus broadly across ‘State Crime and Immorality’ not least through reference to a highly elastic notion of ‘social harm’ (and I write as someone sympathetic to that notion, while very much aware that it requires considerable conceptual and theoretical development).

The case studies which follow across five chapters are engaging, and, in their variety, well-chosen. They certainly add to the conclusions that both capitalism and neo-liberalism are “inherently criminal” (42), that existing law, whether national or international, is relatively impotent in the face of state crime and immorality, and that states and key actors within them (and within this book there is a great deal of agency rather than structure) are able systematically to evade accountability for the generation of harms in which they are so clearly implicated. In a review it is not simply possible to do their individual and collective richness any justice whatsoever – you should just get hold of the book and read them.

Then, as with the opening substantive chapters of the book, I found the conclusion a little frustrating. Its six pages do not do justice to the weight of empirical material which has preceded it. Therein, we learn in detail how a variety of states (and, I would argue, state forms) within differing forms of capitalism are violent, corrupt, mendacious – and not just in aberrant, isolated ways, but in the routine administration of political, economic and social life. These points are thoroughly and persuasively made, and the empirical material at the heart of these chapters is the over-riding strength of the book in my view. But beyond this, the authors tell us in their ‘Conclusion’ that: we only see the tip of the iceberg of state crime, albeit citizens of “Western democratic states” are privileged because “we have a relatively free press” (212); there are gaps in criminological knowledge of state crime; that power and influence ‘beget’ power and influence (215) – and thus fuel political violence and corruption; and a social harm “lens” is that most useful for accessing criminal and immoral state “behaviour” (216). Some of these claims are advanced to some extent through the preceding empirical case study chapters, but overall too much is assumed of and for the reader.

Further, I am not sure where any of this leaves us, as academics or activists who might seek to challenge state and corporate power, but I am not sure it adds up to the authors’ parting shot: namely, their “belief that a protracted public moral outrage will act as a catalyst for holding rogue state actions and the corrupt acts of the powerful accountable” (216). Sadly, this belief is rather undermined by the wealth of evidence presented in this significant but ultimately flawed book.