Tolerating State Violence

Reviews / Votes

In Tolerating State Violence, Elizabeth Stanley solidifies her status as a leading authority in state crime studies by addressing the paradox of powerful states and corporations inflicting serious harms and crimes with remarkable openness and minimal consequences. Stanley effectively illustrates how states and their corporate allies (re)construct the social, legal, political, and economic systems that not only enable these abuses of power but also obscure them by continuously misleading the public about the purported benevolence of states and their operatives. This book is essential reading for those wishing to understand the real threats facing contemporary society and to investigate avenues for resisting and transforming their attendant structural forces.

Steven Bittle, Professor of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Canada

In this timely take on the role and responsibilities of states in inflicting and facilitating harm, this book takes us through the insidious mechanisms by which societies come to tolerate endemic violence. Stanley meticulously documents multifarious state crimes and harms, as well as collective resistance - A searing critique from a leading state crime scholar.

Victoria Canning, Professor of Criminology, Lancaster University, UK

In our current existential crises of genocide, immiseration, institutional corruption and environmental collapse, it's hard to imagine anything more compelling than Elizabeth Stanley's new book. She demonstrates how states and their corporate partners routinely and violently work against our common interests and needs. It is a must read for all who are engaged in the struggle against violence by the powerful.

Chris Cunneen, Professor of Criminology, Jumbunna Indigenous Research Institute, Australia

Elizabeth Stanley has been at the forefront of the criminological analysis of state violence. In this important book, she helps us understand how historical social structures produce the normalization and tolerance of such harms. A critical contribution that informs honest resistance to state-corporate crimes and the existential threats they pose.

Ronald C. Kramer, Professor of Sociology, Western Michigan University, USA

How do states perpetrate violence while building tolerance for such violations amongst populations that express commitment to peace, social justice and human rights? Stanley provides a commanding overview of the devastating harms committed by states, how they get away with it, and how we might and must resist. Essential reading for criminologists, social scientists, legal scholars, activists and our times.

Jude McCulloch, Emeritus Professor of Criminology, Monash University, Australia

The suffering of victims of state violence is often viewed as a spectacle producing affect but not effect, distress without redress. Elizabeth Stanley's unparalleled analysis reveals that the tragedies, disasters and human wastage central to this study are neither natural nor aberrations but are the consequences of state action and inaction.

Tracey McIntosh, Professor of Indigenous Studies, Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand


Challenging, authoritative, accessible, impassioned, Stanley foregrounds the personal pains and institutional denials of structural violence and violations sustained by political marginalisation and societal inequalities. Exposing the myth of the benign, responsive, liberal -democratic state she reveals the complex, oppressive realities of institutionalised socio-political forces underpinning, maintaining and reproducing profound harms inflicted on 'others' in 'our name'. A tour de force.

Phil Scraton, Emeritus Professor, Queen's University of Belfast, UK

Tolerating State Violence is a searing and exceptional contribution to our understanding of state harms and crimes. It challenges everyone - particularly those who claim to uphold 'human rights' - to re-examine their understanding of state power. Elizabeth Stanley's must-read book makes clear that confronting the violence of the powerful is an urgent task for humanity.

Waqas Tufail, Reader in Criminology, Leeds Beckett University, UK

Tolerating State Violence will inevitably be compared with Stan Cohen's 2001 States of Denial, although it brilliantly extends and updates that iconic text. It is a deep meditation on the seemingly endless accumulation of systemic threats to both human and planetary wellbeing that are often generated, or exacerbated, by states and third party actors. Stanley explains that wide-ranging forms of state-sanctioned violence that we see, or often do not see, around us are not 'aberrational' but are deeply embedded into political and economic systems. With authoritarian governance and disinformation both on the rise, understanding how these practices become tolerated and normalised in contemporary societies is an urgent priority. Tolerating State Violence is a monumental work that rises to this challenge and connects profoundly with our troubled times.

Leanne Weber, Adjunct Professor of Criminology, Canberra Law School, University of Canberra, Australia

This is a hugely illuminating and original contribution to our knowledge about state violence, marking out a sharp and powerful understanding of the savagery of our times. Stripping away the liberal facade of democracy to reveal a core of barbarism at the heart of the Western state system, Elizabeth Stanley asks some of the most important questions for our time: How are states able to normalise and sustain such extreme forms of violence? How are they able to impose a seemingly endless repeat pattern of terror and trauma on the majority of the world's population? And how do they get away with it? Most importantly, Stanley is brutally honest about the limits on strategies of reforming our dominant state and corporate institutions, whilst offering an utterly convincing guide to how we can build enduring structures of resistance and emancipatory forms of social organisation.

David Whyte, Professor of Climate Justice, QMUL, UK