International State Crime Initiative

The International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) is a community of scholars working to expose, document, explain, and resist state crime. As an interdisciplinary forum for research, reportage and debate, ISCI aims to combine rigorous academic research with emancipatory activism.

ISCI is based at Queen Mary University of London, one of its four partner institutions. The others are the University of Hull, the University of Ulster and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. ISCI was previously based at King's College London until 1 September 2014.

Despite being subject to scrutiny by a variety of disciplines, state crime has traditionally been ignored by criminology. ISCI's founders, Professor Penny Green and Dr Tony Ward, remarked in 2005, that "considering the contribution of state agencies to the world's homicide rates and the scale of their economic crimes, the space devoted to state crime in the literature of our discipline remains pitifully small" (Green and Ward 2005: 432). Green, Ward, and a group of graduate students at King’s were joined by colleagues at Harvard and the University of Ulster in the initiative, which was launched in June 2010 at King's College London, with a keynote address by The Independent's Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk. During his address, "State of Denial: A Reporter in the Middle East", Fisk challenged the supposedly impartial reporting espoused by international media outlets such as the BBC. Fisk’s lecture was followed by a photography and video exhibition by Yusuf Sayman, a New York/Istanbul based photographer whose photojournalism investigates the relationship between the individual and the state.

ISCI is coordinated by an executive board drawn from its four partner institutions. It has three honorary fellows; Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Richard Falk ISCI’s research fellows, researchers, and friends all contribute to its research activities.