State-corporate Hegemony and Institutional Anomie Revisited: A Case Study of the Nicaragua Canal

The Nicaraguan Canal is a multi-billion dollar project of civil engineering that would commercialize the degradation of Nicaragua’s environment and the breakdown of human rights. Specifically, the project—yet to be undertaken—would have an irrevocable impact on the environment, ecology, and humans by damaging delicate reserves, prompting mass evictions, and destroying the livelihoods of locals and tribal communities as well as those of future generations. Further, the instability created contributes to a state conducive to interpersonal and violent crime, while the project itself has already encouraged instances of state-corporate crime such as (Agnew, 2011). While such a canal would be devastating to local and global communities alike, the modern capitalist values that permeate the global economy ensures the prioritization of the financial institution over all other institutions, such that—were funding secured—the canal would inevitably come to pass. Through the theoretical framework of Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory (1994), this study conducts a critical discourse analysis on various news and report sources to explore how organizations in power legitimize objectively harmful actions against people and the environment. Applied to the Nicaraguan Canal and utilizing Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory, it is predicted that the stalled status of the project is attributed not to the plethora of scientific and normative arguments against it, as is the case within and across nonprofit organizations and news reports, but due to a current lapse in the availability of capital. As this thesis argues, in the current neoliberal governance climate that systematically incorporates my theorized iteration of institutional anomie, the Nicaragua Canal’s success or failure will be predominately determined by the logics of capital.Keywords: green criminology, Nicaraguan Canal, HKND Group, Panama Canal, environmental crime, state-corporate crime

Author

• Fairchild, Rachel E.

Language

• en

Keyword

• green criminology
• environmental sociology
• white collar crime
• institutional anomie
• state corporate
• Nicaragua Canal

Date created

• 2018

Type of Work

• Master's Thesis

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Criminology

Degree

• M.A.

Advisor

• Leon, Kenneth S

Committee Member(s)

• Ken, Ivy

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/1v53jx28q