Regimes of Extreme Permission in Southeast Asia: Theorizing State-Corporate Crime in the Global South.

This article examines the role of state-corporate power in facilitating neo-imperialist accumulation strategies in the Global South, focusing on two regimes of extreme permission in Southeast Asia: Indonesian palm oil plantations and Export Processing Zones (EPZs) for garment production in the Greater Mekong Subregion. It argues that these regimes are characterized by weakened or unstable hegemonic consent, extensive deregulation, state-sanctioned violence, and socio-environmental harms, enabling corporations to pursue profit with minimal accountability. The analysis highlights how states and corporations co-produce repressive socio-political conditions that sustain exploitative labor practices, environmental degradation, and dispossession, while legitimacy is often constructed through selective governance and certification schemes. The article contributes to Southern criminology by theorizing neo-colonial corporate accumulation as a form of state-corporate crime embedded in imperialist global inequalities.