In the first decades of the twentieth century, ownership of a motor car remained largely the preserve of the wealthy and aristocratic. However, by the outbreak of the second World War there were around two-and-a-half million automobiles on the roads of Britain. This rapid growth brought with it a concomitant increase in friction between the wealthy private motor-owning population, the police and the magistracy, both for regulatory breaches and driving behaviour-related offences. Motorists became, as Rick Clapton states, ‘the most regulated group in Western society between 1905 and 1950’.

The meteoric triumph of the automobile (in all its various forms) in the first decades of the twentieth century was clearly reflected in magistrates’ Petty Sessions registers of the time, as well as in contemporary news publications. Using court records, newspaper reports, Parliamentary and other contemporary records, this paper seeks to investigate the responses of the magistracy to the growing prevalence of the motor car as a private and predominantly middle- and upper-class means of road transport; the ways in which such responses both changed over time, and how such responses were regarded by both the motorists concerned and the general public. By looking at the numerous documented interactions between one particular wealthy motoring aristocrat, Lord Tollemache of Peckforton Hall and the magistracy, this paper will investigate and interpolate the English magistracy’s response to the challenges of how to deal with the recently invented internal combustion engine and its owner/drivers who broke the law.

Despite the growth of green criminological approaches, and increasing alarm about the depth and urgency of the climate and ecological crises, there remains relatively little discussion of how to prevent environmental harm from happening in the first place. This qualitative research project sought to help address this gap, based around 40 semi-structured interviews with environmental activists in the UK, and 8 focus groups with young people aged 13-21 in the North East of England. It sought to do this from a gender-transformative perspective, in recognition that environmental harms are deeply gendered. For instance, norms of masculinity can be seen as significant drivers of the domination of nature, whether that is in the boardrooms of extractive industries, the hallways of dallying political decision-makers, the masculinist logics of climate denialism, or the commitment to the consumption of non-human animals and fossil fuels. Meanwhile, women appear to be more likely to be involved in the environmental movement, more willing to express worries about climate change, and more motivated to engage in sustainable everyday practices. The project found that gendered norms and expectations had influenced participants’ perceptions of the climate crisis and their relationships with nature in a number of different ways, and in many cases had inhibited them from feeling able to express their concerns about the destruction of the environment. It has generated several recommendations on how to engage with men and boys about developing an ethic of care for the environment and letting go of masculine notions of dominance and control, as a way of preventing environmental harm and men’s violences more broadly.

State-corporate green crimes are legal and illegal harms to the environment and to human and non-human life, resulting from a state-corporate symbiosis that produces harmful state and corporate actions or omissions. While there is a substantial body of criminological work documenting green crimes and state-corporate involvement, as well as a broader multi-disciplinary literature on environmental activism, the socio-political dynamics of resistance to state-corporate green crimes by victims-turned-activists has received relatively little attention from a criminological perspective. Drawing on and linking green criminology, resistance studies and state-corporate crime framework, and utilizing Hillyard’s (1993) concept of suspect community, this paper aims to address this gap through an analysis of the Munzur Valley anti-dam movement led by an ethno-religious minority - the Kurdish Alevis - in Turkey. The long history of Kurdish Alevis in the Munzur Valley has been marked by both state oppression and armed resistance against it. The area has been a hotbed of leftist insurgency from the 1970s onwards. This antagonistic relationship with the (capitalist) state still continues to shape identities and politics in the Munzur Valley which is under constant state surveillance, rendering its locals a ‘suspect community’. Since the 2010s, a new source of conflict has been several state-commissioned and corporate-owned dams planned in the valley, with significant socio-environmental harms such as habitat destruction, dispossession and displacement. Based on semi-structured interviews with the activists, participant observation and documentary analysis, this paper scrutinizes the mobilizing discourses of the Munzur Valley anti-dam movement against state and state-facilitated corporate activity in the area, situating these discourses within the context of a deep-seated mutual distrust and suspicion. A key focus of discussion is how grassroots mobilization against state-corporate green crimes intersects with everyday and long-term practices of survival and resistance in the face of broader state oppression in such suspect communities.