Rural corporate and state crimes disproportionately impact people, communities and environments in rural areas. These crimes vary across localities, states, regions and continents, and involve a large array of actors – making them, and their study, complex. Examples include, although not limited to, atrocity crimes, toxic waste dumping, environmental harms such as corporate polluting and employment abuses such as the exploitation and violation of the rights of workers across many industries that depend on rural populations (such as fossil fuels, sweatshops, farming and so on). To understand the complexity of rural corporate and state crimes it is necessary to define the terms ‘corporate crime’ and ‘state crime’.

Corporate crime

Corporate crimes are illegal behaviours or acts committed by corporations or those working for or on behalf of a corporation. The criminological study of corporate crime falls under the larger field of white-collar crime attributed to Edwin H. Sutherland (1940). In his seminal address to the American Sociological Society in 1939, Sutherland drew academic and public attention to crimes committed by those in the upper classes, including those in respected business.

In his later work, White Collar Crime published in 1949, Sutherland explored the different forms of harm committed by major corporations as well as those in the upper classes protecting their own interests. He included both the organizational deviance of corporations, but also heavily emphasized an individualistic framework. The variability in which Sutherland used the term created significant ambiguity about the ‘proper’ definition, leading to a decades-long definitional debate. Independent of the specifics of the debate, what is important here is that two core types of white-collar crime emerged: corporate (organizational) and occupational crime.

State crime

Like corporate crime, state crime can also be considered under the broader definition of white-collar crime. Introduced as a concept by William Chambliss’ 1989 seminal address to the American Society of Criminology, state crime addresses the harms perpetrated by states, their governments, militaries and actors both historically and in modern times.

There is also a definitional quagmire surrounding the topic, with two dominating competing definitional frameworks having been advanced: the social harms or zemiological perspective and the legalistic perspective.