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Criminogenic Policy Antithetical to Peace Policy: A Case Study of NAFTA as a Violation of International Law
Abstract
Successful peace policy that enshrines human rights allows individuals to thrive economically, politically, and socially with minimal conflict. Building from literature on crimes of globalization, genocide, and human rights, the current research investigates the concept of a criminogenic policy that at its core is antithetical to peace policy. Using case study analysis, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is found to be both criminal and criminogenic in violation of international law for two primary reasons. First, the NAFTA negotiation process was criminal and criminogenic for three interrelated reasons: (1) powerful elites heavily influenced the outcome, (2) it was undemocratic, and (3) the opposition was often repressed. Second, the NAFTA policy itself was criminal and criminogenic for two reasons: (1) NAFTA as a policy ignored all of the critical voices that predicted negative outcomes and (2) the written text of NAFTA is criminal for failing to include human rights protections while offering a litany of rights to protect business investment.
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State-corporate crime frameworks have typically been applied to crimes committed by a single state. In a globalizing world, multiple states are more likely than ever before to commit crime in collusion as evinced in the growing crimes of the powerful literature. Studying international policy formation offers one unique avenue for investigating social harms that may arise from policy or its consequential conditions. Using traditional state-corporate crime frameworks (Kramer and Michalowski in Michalowski, Kramer (eds.) State-corporate crime: wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2006; Rothe and Mullins in Int J Comp Appl Crim Justice 33(1):97–118, 2009), the current research applies these frameworks to international policy formation by focusing on overlapping motivations, opportunities, and lax controls and constraints by multiple states, corporations, and other organizations involved in policy formation. Furthermore, the concept of a transnational capitalist class is integrated with this framework to better understand the connections between elites influencing policy. To demonstrate this novel approach, the current research is a case study of NAFTA’s negotiation process. It is argued that NAFTA was a criminogenic policy—an agreement that created conditions conducive for social harm—evinced by a North American transnational class that colluded to create a policy favorable to their motivations while neglecting, censoring, or even oppressing the opposition. The result was an exclusionary policy capable of producing social harm. Future criminologists should seek ways to detect criminogenic policies during formation and implement safeguards against them, and the current renegotiation of NAFTA is one place to start.
Cet article fait part d'une enquete concernant les consequences politiques et economiques du developpement du commerce international entre pays industrialises et pays en developpement. les AA. s'interessent particulierement aux comportements des firmes multinationales americaines et a leurs strategies de reseaux de securisation et d'assises legales de leur predominance sur tous les marches couverts par l'OMC
This essay examines factors that produce political unity among large U.S. corporations advocating free trade. Expanding on old debates, these data and analyses validate the importance of organizational and class cohesion approaches to corporate political action. Methodologically, the political unity of pairs (dyads) of firms in trade policy activism is analyzed with quadratic assignment procedure regression. Shared membership in prominent policy networks and board interlocks positively predict corporate political unity across three areas of trade policy influence, from the executive branch to the legislature. Non-network organizational indicators also significantly predicted corporate trade policy activism. The findings support business unity accounts of corporate political action and suggest that higher levels of firm embeddedness within intercorporate networks facilitate collective corporate political action.
The purpose of this article is to use Lonnie Athens’ violentization theory to explain the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. These two case studies are used to compare and contrast how the brutalization, defiance, violent dominance engagements, and virulency stages emerged prior to and during the genocides. Using published texts such as interviews with perpetrators, human rights reports, and court transcripts, qualitative content analysis is employed to test the fit between violentization theory and the two case studies. The results demonstrate that violentization theory is consistent with the data and provides an explanation of how the genocides developed and were enacted. Similarities and differences between Rwanda and Bosnia are described to explain how the perpetrators went through the violentization process, and an additional stage is added to illustrate extreme violence. Suggestions for further research using this model are provided.
After more than two years of negotiations, in December 1992, the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the months leading up to the signing, labor, industry, environment, and religious groups from the three countries actively debated and lobbied their respective trade negotiators to gain support for their particular concerns. Lobbying by these groups continues as policy deliberations shift from treaty negotiations to the submission of enabling legislation and, ultimately in the United States, congressional authorization.
This volume brings together key spokespeople from labor, industry, and government and presents the main arguments for and against the Free Trade Agreement as well as views on the Agreement's impact. The book is intended for policy makers, business managers, labor organizations, environmentalists, academics, students, and others who have an interest in understanding and exploring the issues surrounding the NAFTA debate.
After more than two years of negotiations, in December 1992, the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the months leading up to the signing, labor, industry, environment, and religious groups from the three countries actively debated and lobbied their respective trade negotiators to gain support for their particular concerns. Lobbying by these groups continues as policy deliberations shift from treaty negotiations to the submission of enabling legislation and, ultimately in the United States, congressional authorization.
This volume brings together key spokespeople from labor, industry, and government and presents the main arguments for and against the Free Trade Agreement as well as views on the Agreement's impact. The book is intended for policy makers, business managers, labor organizations, environmentalists, academics, students, and others who have an interest in understanding and exploring the issues surrounding the NAFTA debate.
After more than two years of negotiations, in December 1992, the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the months leading up to the signing, labor, industry, environment, and religious groups from the three countries actively debated and lobbied their respective trade negotiators to gain support for their particular concerns. Lobbying by these groups continues as policy deliberations shift from treaty negotiations to the submission of enabling legislation and, ultimately in the United States, congressional authorization.
This volume brings together key spokespeople from labor, industry, and government and presents the main arguments for and against the Free Trade Agreement as well as views on the Agreement's impact. The book is intended for policy makers, business managers, labor organizations, environmentalists, academics, students, and others who have an interest in understanding and exploring the issues surrounding the NAFTA debate.
After more than two years of negotiations, in December 1992, the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the months leading up to the signing, labor, industry, environment, and religious groups from the three countries actively debated and lobbied their respective trade negotiators to gain support for their particular concerns. Lobbying by these groups continues as policy deliberations shift from treaty negotiations to the submission of enabling legislation and, ultimately in the United States, congressional authorization.
This volume brings together key spokespeople from labor, industry, and government and presents the main arguments for and against the Free Trade Agreement as well as views on the Agreement's impact. The book is intended for policy makers, business managers, labor organizations, environmentalists, academics, students, and others who have an interest in understanding and exploring the issues surrounding the NAFTA debate.
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Preferential trade agreements have become common ways to protect or restrict access to national markets in products and services. The United States has signed trade agreements with almost two dozen countries as close as Mexico and Canada and as distant as Morocco and Australia. The European Union has done the same. In addition to addressing economic issues, these agreements also regulate the protection of human rights. In Forced to Be Good, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton tells the story of the politics of such agreements and of the ways in which governments pursue market integration policies that advance their own political interests, including human rights. How and why do global norms for social justice become international regulations linked to seemingly unrelated issues, such as trade? Hafner-Burton finds that the process has been unconventional. Efforts by human rights advocates and labor unions to spread human rights ideals, for example, do not explain why American and European governments employ preferential trade agreements to protect human rights. Instead, most of the regulations protecting human rights are codified in global moral principles and laws only because they serve policymakers' interests in accumulating power or resources or solving other problems. Otherwise, demands by moral advocates are tossed aside. And, as Hafner-Burton shows, even the inclusion of human rights protections in trade agreements is no guarantee of real change, because many of the governments that sign on to fair trade regulations oppose such protections and do not intend to force their implementation. Ultimately, Hafner-Burton finds that, despite the difficulty of enforcing good regulations and the less-than-noble motives for including them, trade agreements that include human rights provisions have made a positive difference in the lives of some of the people they are intended-on paper, at least-to protect.
The environment has recently emerged as an important dimension of the public debate over international trade. For the first time in the history of trade negotiations, governments must respond to concerns about the environmental consequences of trade policy. These concerns reflect a growing recognition that current attempts to revise the rules governing regional and global trade threaten environmental protection efforts worldwide.
Oil is at the very core of U.S. geopolitical interests in North American economic integration; a major U.S. objective in trade negotiations with Mexico and Canada has been to gain secure access to the petroleum resources of its neighbors. Unrestricted access to Canadian and Mexican petroleum reserves represents more than just one more “side payment” attached to a trade agreement. With crude oil reserves equivalent to only nine years of production, and dependence on imports growing, the Bush administration’s energy strategy calls for greater reliance on imports from countries outside the Persian Gulf, such as Canada and Mexico. U.S. geopolitical interests demand that Mexico and Canada concede substantial control over energy as the price for a broad trade agreement.
The process of political coalition building surrounding trade reform in Mexico had implications for the 1994-95 peso crisis. This article traces the formation of a free trade coalition between state and business elites across several episodes of trade opening, focusing on the NAFTA negotiations. The consolidation of this powerful but narrow coalition helped to cement the Salinas government's neoliberal reform agenda, boost investor confidence, and restore moderate levels of low-inflation growth in the early 1990s, but it also gave rise to the macroeconomic imbalances and political instability that led to the 1994 crisis. Since then, the economic basis of the neoliberal coalition may have recovered, but its political viability may be questionable.
Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA provides the only book-length study of the impact on residents of the US-Mexico border of NAFTA’s Environmental and Labor Side Accords, which required each state to enforce labor and environmental regulations. Through field research in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, anthropologist Suzanne Simon tests the premise that the side accords would encourage Mexican grassroots democratization. The effectiveness of the side accords was tied to transparency and accountability, and practically bound to opportunities for Mexican border populations to participate in the side accord petitioning and civil society input mechanisms. Simon conducted sixteen months of fieldwork with both a group of environmental activists and a group of those fighting for labor justice in Mexico. Both of these groups became enmeshed in the types of cross-border advocacy networks and coalition building efforts that are typical of the NAFTA era. Although the key to the side accords’ anticipated success lay in their ostensibly generous participatory, civil society inclusion and sustainable development opportunities, Sustaining the Borderlands reveals that the Mexican border populations for which they were largely created are effectively excluded from participating. This is due to the ongoing online, territorial, class, and cultural barriers that shape the borderlands. Rather than experiencing the side accords and their companion institutions as transparent and accessible, residents experienced them as opaque and indecipherable. Simon concludes that the side accords have failed to deliver on their promise of bringing democracy to Mexico because practical mechanisms that would ensure their effective implementation were never put in place. NAFTA took effect at a time when Mexico was undergoing a democratic transition. The treaty was supposed to encourage this transition and improve environmental and labor conditions on the US-Mexico border. This book demonstrates that, twenty years later, the promises of NAFTA have not come to pass.
In 2004, the State Department gathered more than a thousand interviews from refugees in Chad that verified Colin Powell’s U.N. and congressional testimonies about the Darfur genocide. The survey cost nearly a million dollars to conduct and yet it languished in the archives as the killing continued, claiming hundreds of thousands of murder and rape victims and restricting several million survivors to camps. This book for the first time fully examines that survey and its heartbreaking accounts. It documents the Sudanese government’s enlistment of Arab Janjaweed militias in destroying black African communities. The central questions are: Why is the United States so ambivalent to genocide? Why do so many scholars deemphasize racial aspects of genocide? How can the science of criminology advance understanding and protection against genocide? This book gives a vivid firsthand account and voice to the survivors of genocide in Darfur.
This book presents a historical perspective on patterns of human rights abuse in Cuba, El Salvador and Nicaragua and incorporates international relations in to the traditional theories of state repression found within the social sciences.
Canada has undergone massive economic restructuring since implementing the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA). Mexico is planning to enter into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) after a period of dramatic economic and social restructuring. Is it merely fortuitous that both "free trade" arrangements are closely associated with neoliberal restructuring? This paper looks at how free trade arrangements (FTAs) centred in Washington serve as a restructuring tool or, put differently, as a conditioning institutional framework that promotes and consolidates neoliberal restructuring.
John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond proposed a collective action theory of genocide in their book ‘Darfur and the Crime of Genocide’. They then tested their theory using data from the Atrocities Documentation Survey conducted in Chad. The theory explains the Darfur genocide well and is supported by empirical data. Since there is little criminological theoretical work on genocide, the collective action theory was a great step forward. The next step in the process should be to see if the theory is generalisable to other instances of genocide. There may be much to learn in testing Hagan and Rymond-Richmond’s theory for generalisability including identifying any modifications that may advance the current theoretical work on the criminology of genocide.
Can general criminological theories of crime explain mass participation in genocide? Can seemingly conflicting theories be reconciled? And, if so, how? Only a small number of studies have attempted to explore the application of general criminological theories to international crimes. Also, there have been few attempts to integrate micro-level theories with macro-level theories. In this paper, I propose a macro-micro integrated theoretical model of mass participation in genocide. The proposed framework combines micro-(e. g. social control theories) and macro-level theories (e. g. strain theories), thereby recognizing that no single factor can explain people's involvement in genocidal violence perpetration. Finally, the central element of my conceptual framework is the notion of cognitive dissonance (CD). I contend that CD can act as a structuring concept which allows for the development of a comprehensive criminological explanation for mass participation in genocide.
As free trade agreements proliferate, the relationship between trade and human rights continues to attract attention across academic disciplines. The linkages between human rights and liberal trade rules have been the subject of debate for some time. Since most countries tend to afford constitutional protection to both human rights and freedom of trade, there appears to be an inescapable connection between the two regimes. In theory, at least, economic growth should improve human rights standards and conditionality can be one way through which human rights compliance is achieved. However, in practice, States often pursue economic objectives that conflict with their human rights obligations. This article explores the linkages and potential conflicts between human rights and trade in the context of regional trade agreements, with a focus on the interim Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and the Southern African Development Community Group.
This article argues that the EPAs initialled between the EU and less than half of the ACP countries do not represent a ‘historic step’ in EU-ACP relations, but are the outcome of asymmetric power relations. Many ACP countries submitted hastily drawn up liberalisation schedules that did not consider whether their commitments were in line with those of their neighbours — with significant implications for regional integration processes. Further, the enforcement of EPAs is unlikely in some cases, given the decreasing attractiveness of the EU market and the Commission's dwindling capacity to sanction non-compliance by withdrawing preferences. If the EU wants to see EPAs implemented, it is vital that the process and outcome are owned and supported by both sides.
Why did globalization happen? Current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s. Such accounts disagree, however, about the key actors involved. This article provides a reconciliation, showing how two different combinations of actors, and two different political economic pathways, have led to globalization in recent decades. In developed countries, mobilization by business has been central; elsewhere, technocrats both constrained and empowered by international finance have pursued globalization more independently of business. In both contexts, economists’ technical authority has helped legitimate liberalization, despite the limited diffusion of their ideas. The article validates and elaborates this model using a comparative-historical study of how the United States, Can- ada, and Mexico proposed, negotiated, and ratified agreements for free trade in North America.
The focus of this article is the effect of globalization on the protection of human rights, particularly the protection of human rights through international human rights law. This effect of globalization must be considered because, as the former Secretary General of the United Nations noted: [t]echnological advances are altering the nature and the expectation of life all over the globe. The revolution in communication has united the world in awareness, in aspiration and in greater solidarity against injustice. But progress also brings new risks for stability: ecological damage, disruption of family and community life, greater intrusion into the lives and rights of individuals. This article examines the processes of globalization and of international human rights law, as well as the impact of the economic processes of globalization on the protection of some human rights. Examples from Africa are primarily used here because the impact can be seen most clearly there. In this analysis, the consequences of globalization, including both the opportunities and dangers that it creates, are considered not only with regard to the protection of human rights, but also in terms of globalization's effect on the international legal order, of which international human rights law forms a part.
The increasing importance of ideas and practices of free trade in the world economy requires a better understanding of the role of trade in creating opportunities for development. This study analyzes new forms of governance created in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It finds that environmental groups' participation in NAFTA's implementation has declined while market actors have become increasingly empowered. The study finds that 8 years after NAFTA's passage there are generally diminished expectations that the agreement's environmental provisions and institutional frameworks will help control negative environmental consequences of increased trade between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This brings into question NAFTA's reputation as a “green” trade agreement. The narrow and technical interpretation of the NAFTA's provisions has been oriented toward avoiding trade barriers rather than understanding and improving the complex interactions between trade, the environment, and development.
NAFTA is not about free trade in labor. Workers do not have the legal right to search out the markets where wages are highest in the same way that capital can seek the highest profit. Without free trade for workers, employers in US agriculture will continue to take advantage of the illegal status of many farmworkers to keep wages low and workers acquiescent. The only way that free trade will ever be fair trade for workers is to adopt a system similar to the European Community's, where workers are free to seek work in any country in the Community on a nondiscriminatory basis and stringent measures are proposed to ensure that the harmonization of work and wages will be upward, not downward. This necessitates not only a strict social charter and enforcement mechanisms but also funds to help bring up the standards in the poorer countries. NATFA provides for none of this. -from Author
By analyzing the current employment situation in Mexico and identifying the most important changes in recent years, we argue that net job creation derived from U.S. foreign investment as a result of NAFTA will be almost nil and will not compensate for the lack of good quality employment opportunities during the eighties.
In shifting from nationalist/statist to neoliberal economic policies, states seek out and build alliances with other advocates—especially large capital—and work to disorganize political opponents—including small business. This article examines the politics of the private sector's involvement in trade liberalization in the developing world through a study of Mexico's proposal, negotiation, and ratification of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The article identifies three instruments that the Mexican state used to construct politically crucial support for NAFTA on the part of domestic business: control over political representation, material concessions to potential critics, and careful strategic framing.
Nearly 400,000 Africans may have been killed in racially motivated, lethally destructive, state supported, and militarily unjustified attacks on the farms and villages of the Darfur region of Sudan. Using victimization survey data collected from Darfurian survivors living in refugee camps in Chad, and drawing on conflict theory, we present evidence that the Sudanese government has directly supported violent killings and rapes in a lethally destructive exercise of power and control. In the language of the Geneva Genocide Convention, these attacks have inflicted on African tribal groups “conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.” The data include explicit evidence of the central mediating role played by racism in the attacks. There is little or no evidence from the surveys to support the claim of the Sudanese government that the attacks have been aimed at rebel groups as a counter-insurgency strategy. The Sudanese government claims are by this analysis not credible as self-defense arguments, but rather of the exercise of power and control through denial. Further forms of such denial are considered, including the slowness of modern American criminology to advance the study of genocide.
The world’s second largest maritime disaster occurred on September 26th 2002, the sinking of the Senegal’s state run ferry
Le Joola, killing 1863 passengers. In the wake of the sinking, it became clear that the state of Senegal held liability for
the ferry’s failure; the government readily admitted its errors and several ministers either stepped down or were removed
from their positions. In many ways, this case, at least on the surface, looks like a classic example of a state crime – illegal
activities carried out by the state or state agencies. However, despite unequivocal governmental responsibility, we suggest
that this was not simply a case of state crime. Rather, a thorough investigation and analysis of the reasons and forces behind
the Le Joola sinking suggest that international institutions, primarily the World Bank, bear culpability for the disaster
due to the way in which their policies and economic development demands altered Senegal’s social, economic and political structures.
In conclusion, we offer a criminological analysis of the catalysts leading to the reinstatement of the state run ferry to
the coastal waters and the subsequent actions taken by the State of Senegal and of International Society.
A United States-Mexico agreement to form a free trade area (FTA) is analyzed using an 11-sector, three-country, computable general equilibrium model that explicity models farm programs and labor migration. The model incorporates both rural-urban migration within Mexico and international migration between Mexico and the United States. In the model, sectoral import demands are specified with a flexible functional form, an empirical improvement over earlier specifications, which use a constant elasticity of substitution function. Using the model, we identify trade-offs among bilateral trade growth, labor migration, and agricultural program expenditures under alternative FTA scenarios. Trade liberalization in agriculture greatly increases rural- urban migration within Mexico and migration from Mexico to the United States. Migration is reduced if Mexico grows relative to the United States and also if Mexico retains farm support programs. However, the more support that is provided to the Mexican agricultural sector, the smaller is bilateral trade growth. The results indicate a policy trade-off between rapidly achieving gains from trade liberalization and providing a transition period long enough to assimilate displaced labor in Mexico without undue strain.
The fall in the producer price of maize that will accompany implementation of trade liberalization and NAFTA has led to dire predictions of falling incomes and labor displacement in Mexican agriculture. We use a household survey of the ejido sector to show that a majority of maize producers are in fact not producing for the market and will consequently not be directly affected as producers by a drop in the price of maize, while a significant share will benefit as consumers. For the net sellers, we explore the determinants of two solutions to a falling maize price: diversification toward high value crops and modernization of maize production. For both of these, results show the fundamental importance of reconstructing supportive institutions for marketing, credit, and technical assistance in replacement of the services formerly offered by government and subsequently discontinued under state contraction.
Sumario: Interpreting NAFTA is a history of the agreement's development, from opening talks to final passage. Frederick W. Mayer combines recent work in international relations, comparative politics, interest groups, and public opinion to develop a broad theoretical framework that crosses between international relations and demestic politics
Investigación sobre las expectativas, imaginarios y representaciones sociales sobre el Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (TLC) entre habitantes de México y de los estados norteamericanos de California y Kentucky. Personas jóvenes y ancianas, habitantes de zonas rurales y de zonas urbanas, con diversas perspectivas políticas, ocupaciones y marcas de identidad relatan sus historias acerca de un tratado comercial que llegó ser un elemento permanente en las discusiones relacionadas con las políticas neoliberales y los procesos de globalización en las esferas económica y cultural. Los sujetos manifiestan el sentido y los efectos posibles del TLC en diversos temas, como la agricultura, la imagen estereotipada de los trabajadores, la soberanía nacional y la identidad.
Revisión del impacto económico que ha tenido el Tratado de Libre Comercio de Norteamérica, tanto en los tres países involucrados directamente, como en las naciones con las que éstos mantienen relaciones. El estudio revisa la situación económica de México, Canadá y Estados Unidos antes y después de la puesta en marcha del TLC.