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DAVID O. FRIEDRICHS is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Scranton (Scranton, PA 18510-4605; email: friedrichsdl@uofs.edu). The author of Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society (1996) and Law in Our Lives (2001), he has published on topics such as the legitimation of the legal order, radical/critical criminology, violence, postmodern theory, white-collar crime, and governmental crime. JESSICA FRIEDRICHS graduated from the Schreyer Honors College of Pennsylvania State University, majoring in sociology. She has co-authored a book chapter on postmodern theory and has co-edited Voice of the River: One Thai Villager's Story of the Pak Moon Dam (2000). She has spent time in China, Thailand, and India and currently is working with inner-city children as an Americorp volunteer. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco, November 2000. The authors wish to thank two anonymous Social Justice reviewers for exceptionally helpful suggestions.
Introduction
THE BASIC ISSUE ADDRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE CAN BE CONCISELY STATED: ARE THE policies and practices of an international financial institution (the World Bank), arising in the context of an accelerated globalization, usefully characterized as a form of crime and a criminological phenomenon? What kinds of strategies and actions are available in response to the harm caused by these policies and practices? 1 International financial institutions such as the World Bank are key players in an increasingly globalized capitalist system. The claim that capitalism itself is a criminal enterprise is, of course, an enduring thesis of Marxist thought (e.g., Buchanan, 1983). 2 Moreover, some contemporary critics of globalization -- as a transnational expansion of capitalist free markets -- seem to suggest that globalization per se is a criminal enterprise that ought to be challenged on every level. We do not propose to pursue such sweeping claims here. Rather, we address the narrower claim that at least some of the policies and practices of the World Bank can be validly characterized as criminal. To support our case, we provide a case history of a World Bank-financed dam in Thailand.
A Perspective on Globalization
The policies and practices of international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund can only...