This book offers a distinctive and novel approach to state-sponsored violence, one of the major problems facing humanity in the previous and now the twenty-first century. It addresses the question: how is it possible that large numbers of ordinary men and women are able to do the killing, torturing and violence that defines crimes against humanity? In his striking analysis, Rob Watts shows how and why states, of all political persuasions, engage in crimes against humanity, including: genocide, homicide, torture, kidnapping, illegal surveillance and detention.

At once challenging and highly accessible, the book reveals the policy-making processes that produce state crime as well as showing how ordinary people do the state's dirty work.

Rob Watts is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University, Australia. His previous publications include The Foundations of the National Welfare State (1987), Arguing About the Australian Welfare State (1992), Discovering Risk (2006), Talking Policy: Australian Social Policy (2007) and International Criminology: A Critical Introduction (2009).

Introduction.- Chapter 1. Criminology and Crimes of the State.- Chapter 2. Thinking About Civilization, Violence and the State.- Chapter 3. Thinking the Unthinkable: The State and Crimes of the State.- Chapter 4. Stalin and Crimes of the State: The Soviet Terror, 1936-37.- Chapter 5. 'The Day the Police Came': Welfare Policy as State Crime.- Chapter 6. The United States of Exception: Crimes Of The State And The War On Terror, 2001-2015.- Chapter 7. Criminology, Society and the Ethical.- Chapter 8. Making Sense of Wickedness.- Chapter 9. Why Ordinary People Do Bad Things for the State.- Conclusion.