Redefining the Criminal Matter: State Crime, Mass Atrocities and Social Harm: Preface

Abstract

The special issue (nº 5, 2013) of Critica Penal y Poder is the result of a research that has been developing in the last four years. Indeed, since we thought in 2009 on the translation of Wayne Morrison's book entitled Criminology, Civilization, and the New World Order, (Barcelona, Anthropos - OSPDH, 2012) in the OPSHR, we have been questioning ourselves about the meanings that criminology and sociology of penal-law might have within the 21st century as well as the researches that would thrive from them in the coming decades. Besides the questions referring to the 19th and the 20th centuries atrocities, wars, and genocides and the fact that criminology until the 1990s has replied with an unjustifiably silence, new questions came up over. Indeed, these new worries depicted questions like what should the latter disciplines accomplish (if they should do so) over great problems related to the sufferings that are happening in all around the globe. Which have as perpetrator(s) a relationships network of more complexity than those usually associated with the binomial offender - victim and that go beyond the own regulatory and sanctioning capacity of the nation States and their agencies of punitive social control. Through the latter, to our growing interest over criminalities committed by States, such as genocides and international crimes, has brought up the study of the concept of Social Harm.