ESC Mini-Series 2: Extractivism in Latin America as State-corporate Crime

In this episode, Dr Amanda Kramer interviews Dr María Laura Böhm (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany). This episode explores María Laura’s research on extractive industry activity in Latin America as a form of state-corporate crime. She outlines a variety of harms caused by the extractive industries that have significant consequences for the environment, individuals, and broader communities, such as environmental destruction, long term illness, displacement, and death. She explains how the causes of these harms are multifaceted and complex, but that the lack of regulation and control allows asymmetrical power relationships to flourish, enabling this type of state-corporate crime. María Laura also introduces listeners to her concept of the ‘crime of maldevelopment’ as a new way of understanding the global and regional criminogenic context, and as a new way for understanding how to implement more effective solutions.

This is the second in a special series of LawPod recorded at the European Society of Criminology Conference in Malaga, Spain, in September 2022. You can listen to the rest of the series https://lawpod.org/taking-lawpod-on-tour/.

Our interviewee, María Laura Böhm, has published extensively on this topic. Two of her recent English language publications include:

María Laura Böhm (2019) The Crime of Maldevelopment: Economic Deregulation and Violence in the Global South: https://www.routledge.com/The-Crime-of-Maldevelopment-Economic-Deregulation-and-Violence-in-the-Global/Bohm/p/book/9780367483586#

María Laura Böhm (2020) ‘Criminal Business Relationships between Commodity Regions and Industrialized Countries: The Hard Road from Raw Material to New Technology’ in Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, 1(1), 34-39: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2631309X19887681

You can find more information about María Laura Böhm’s teaching and research here: https://www.jura.uni-muenchen.de/personen/b/boehm_maria_laura/index.html

https://lmu-munich.academia.edu/Mar%C3%ADaLauraB%C3%B6hm

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mar%C3%ADa-laura-b%C3%B6hm-59a6262a/?originalSubdomain=de