sciences like sociology and criminology have been complicit in splitting 'the social' from 'the ethical' while accepting too complacently that modern states are the exemplars of morality and rationality. The book makes the case that it is possible to bring together in the one interpretative frame, our understanding of social action involving personal motivation and ethical responsibility and patterns of collective social action operating in terms of the agencies of ¿the State¿. Rob Watts identifies and charts the pathways of action and ¿practical¿ (i.e. ethical) judgements which the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity constructed for themselves to make sense of what they were doing. At once challenging and highly accessible, the book reveals the policy-making processes that produce state crime as well as showing how ordinary people do the state¿s dirty work.