Resistance to State-Corporate Crime: The Case of Pike River

This thesis explores the nature of resistance in the context of state-corporate safety crimes, specifically with regard to the 2010 Pike River mine disaster in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite the vast amount of state-corporate crime scholarship, including literature focused on the context of work, there is little known about the nature of resistance. Therefore, this thesis contributes to existing criminological scholarship by illuminating how resistance emerges under the conditions of state-corporate safety crimes. The researcher conducted 22 semi-structured interviews: nine with key informants and thirteen with family members bereaved by the disaster. Interviewing people with different relationships to the disaster enabled a critical examination of the various factors that encouraged, fostered, and influenced resistance efforts, as well as those that worked to inhibit, quash, and dispel resistance. The findings determined that there is a ripple-effect of resistance, whereby those impacted by the disaster engaged a wide-variety of resistance efforts, ranging from small to large-scale activities, across micro, meso, and macro levels. And, that involvement in resistance shifted over time and was affected by wider state and corporate responses to the disaster. The findings demonstrate that state-corporate safety crimes under neoliberal-capitalist governance amount to a form of structural violence that can be classed as ‘social murder’. The use of a ‘resistance continuum’ is proposed as an appropriate tool to visibilise the diverse and rich broad spectrum of resistance efforts against state-corporate safety crimes. The argument concludes that resistance must be underpinned by a commitment to radical transformative change to fundamentally overcome the harmful and oppressive structures of power that generate safety crimes, and that dictate who is victimised who is made accountable.