Environmental Engineering Reference
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violence (armed protection or response), wildlife trade, money laundering and arms
trade are just a few examples of the illegal goods and services encountered in the regions
studied. The violence perpetrated by '
pistoleros
', paramilitary forces or some individ-
ual actors in the regions dealt with by the LAR project often has ramifications for or
overlaps with some of the violence deployed by organized crime in the protection and
regulation of illegal businesses such as cocaine production and trafficking.
These illegal businesses, and the actors involved in them, therefore often overlap or
have close connections with political or economic actors that deal with the exploita-
tion of natural resources in conflict regions. Moreover, it is interesting to note that
illegally exploited resources (e.g. illegal timber) generally end up as legal products in
the global economy, showing a parasitic or symbiotic relationship between the illegal
'underworld' and the legal 'upperworld' (Passas 2002).
Before examining the added value of green criminology to the study of conflict and
natural resources, we present a final relevant contribution to expand the boundaries of
criminology beyond legalistic notions of crime, the so-called 'social harm perspective'
(Hillyard et al. 2004; Hillyard and Tombs 2004; Pemberton 2004; 2007). Social harm
theorists actually propose abandoning the 'myth of crime' and criminology's fixation
with individual notions of responsibility and intent altogether (Hillyard and Tombs
2004). In contrast, they emphasize placing 'social harm' at the center of the debate,
focusing on the
social
origin of harm and the centrality of indifference (omission,
negligence, denial) in the production of harm (Pemberton 2004). Instead of making
sterile distinctions between criminal and non-criminal harms (that says very little about
the seriousness of harms and a lot about differential power to criminalize behaviour),
social harm theory actually makes no distinction between crimes, outcomes of the
market economy, accidents, mistakes, war, disease, or any other form in which harm
manifests itself. This approach has interesting policy implications, as any policy should
be directed to minimizing (social) harms and suffering, both of which are always
the result of various combinations of legal and illegal behaviours, mechanisms and
happenings, be they intended or unintended.
Far from constituting diverging theories or paradigms, the approaches presented
above all have two or three basic ideas in common: crime is socially constructed; crim-
inalization reflects power relations; and criminology should focus on harms and not
only on crimes. Moreover, they all have gradually contributed to the development of a
critical criminological perspective of the crimes of the powerful. It is within this critical
perspective that the expanding field of green criminology offers the most promising
prospects for tackling the crimes concerning natural resource exploitation.
6.3 GREEN CRIMINOLOGY
Green criminology explicitly takes the concept of harm as a point of departure: harm
against environments, humanity and other animals (Beirne and South 2007; White
2010). While the harm concept, as explained above, is not new to criminology, green
criminology has widened the concept of victimization. As such, green criminology
transcends criminology's traditional anthropocentrism to include nonhumans such as
(other) animals or eco-systems within the parameters of what is considered a vic-
tim of harmful behaviour (White 2008). Green criminology usually departs from an
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