Abstract
9/11 is a historically significant event that was hastily designated by authorities as an act of both terrorism and war. It led to a call for forensics investigations and commissions of inquiry, notably the 9/11 Commission, which reported famously on alleged lapses in intelligence, preparedness and bureaucratic imagination. Some high profile crime events may be understood as ‘apex crimes’, conceptualized here as a subtype of political crime in which the ideological order, official narrative, contested and problematic forensics and third party review are each constitutive features. In support of a sociology of 9/11 as a criminal event and apex crime, the paper considers how 9/11 has ‘played out’ or been understood in criminology. The implication of the analysis is that the absence of serious academic engagement with 9/11 as a crime event is indicative of a lack of critical scrutiny of high-level political crimes in scholarly discourse (in criminology and other disciplines) and that this gives a pass to one of the most significant crime events in the past 50 years.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1157-1177 |
Number of pages | 21 |
Journal | Globalizations |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2 Oct 2020 |
Keywords
- 9/11
- critical criminology
- political crime
- disciplinary knowledge