Immortan Joe: the warlord, the water and green criminology

There is one image that sums up half the film without needing a single line of dialogue: a parched crowd, mouths open toward the sky, waiting for the stream that one man decides to turn on or off from atop a rock. Immortan Joe does not rule the Citadel with an army, though he has one. He rules it with a valve. The water —his «Aqua-Cola»— falls for a few seconds, the people lunge, and he shuts it off again before anyone drinks too much. In that tiny gesture lies his entire regime: whoever controls the vital resource controls the bodies that depend on it.

«Furiosa» (2024) and «Mad Max: Fury Road» (2015) build this warlord as the master of a wasteland where the planet has already blown up. And here it is worth stating this house's principle before going on: to explain is not to excuse. Analyzing how a common good is hoarded and turned into a whip does not excuse whoever cracks the whip; it makes him more legible. Immortan Joe serves as a lens for a very real question, the one green criminology asks: what happens when the greatest harm in a society is not classified as a crime because it is committed by whoever writes the rules?

// The theorythe criminology that looks beyond the penal code

For more than a century, criminology looked almost exclusively at the State's catalogue of offenses: theft, homicide, fraud. In 1990, Michael Lynch proposed «greening» that gaze. His idea was uncomfortable: the gravest and most massive harms —the pollution that sickens entire neighborhoods, deforestation, the poisoning of water— are often not crimes, because they are committed by corporations and powers that take part in drafting what counts as a crime and what does not.

Nigel South widened the frame: he proposed a «green field» for criminology, one that would take environmental harm seriously as an object in its own right and not as a footnote. And Rob White, in «Crimes Against Nature», systematized the idea of an ecological justice: there are human victims, yes, but also non-human ones —species, ecosystems, generations not yet born— that never take a seat in a courtroom. Green criminology does not only ask «is it legal?». It asks «is it harmful, and to whom?».

The turn is more radical than it seems. For decades, the discipline assumed that the criminologist's object was defined by the State: if the code did not call it a crime, it was none of its business. The green current breaks that contract. It holds that the criminologist can —and must— study social and ecological harm in its own right, measuring it by its real consequences on bodies, waters and soils, and not by the label the power of the moment puts on it. It is a change of compass: from the legal catalogue to the map of suffering.

That distinction between crime and harm is the key. In the Citadel, rationing water to the point of thirst violates no law: Immortan Joe is the law. And yet, measured in suffering, it is the most criminal act in the wasteland. Green criminology exists precisely to name what power prefers to leave unnamed.

// The mechanismturning a common good into a scepter

Water, air, fertile land: theorists call them commons, resources that in principle everyone depends on and that no one should be able to confiscate. Immortan Joe's art —and that of real environmental predators— consists of breaking that logic: fencing off the commons, putting a valve on it, and rationing it in such a way that physical dependence turns into political obedience. You don't need to chain anyone if you control what they drink.

And he does not stop at water. He hoards the fuel, the «mother's milk» of his captives, the bodies turned into reproductive objects or into war fodder. It is the same grammar applied to every resource: scarcity administered from above. Vittorio Ruggiero and Nigel South described it as crimes of the economy: environmental and human harms that spring not from society's margins, but from its productive center, from the logic of accumulating without limit. Immortan Joe is feudal in his aesthetics and perfectly capitalist at heart.

Notice how he armors the system: he not only controls the tap, he also manufactures the faith that sustains it. He promises his War Boys a glorious reward for dying in his name, wraps the rationing in liturgy and presents scarcity as an almost divine will. It is the cultural alibi of ecocide, the one that turns dispossession into natural order. Green criminology stresses exactly this: great environmental harms are rarely imposed by force alone; they are also sustained by narratives that make them seem inevitable, necessary or deserved.

// The victimswho suffers the ecocide, inside and outside the frame

Green criminology arranges the victims in circles. The first is human and unequal: in the real world, pollution and the lack of water strike the poor first, the peoples without the power to litigate. This is what is called environmental justice, and it fits with what the political economy of punishment studies: harm and its distribution follow the lines of power. In the Citadel, those below die of thirst while the War Boys receive their ration; the geography of water is the geography of hierarchy.

The second circle is the one we usually forget: the earth itself, the ruined ecosystem, the future generations condemned to inherit a desert. White insisted that ecological justice compels us to count among the victims those who cannot sue: the dried-up rivers, the extinct species, the children who do not yet exist and have already been stripped of their share of the world. Here pop fiction acts as a mirror. Think of the Once-ler felling the last truffula tree out of pure greed, of Hexxus as pollution made flesh, of the Shinra corporation sucking out the living energy of the planet, or of Ratcliffe gutting a land not his own in search of gold. They are all variations of the same Immortan Joe: the one who treats a living world as a private pantry.

The caution of critical criminology, the elder sister of the green one, is fitting: pointing to structural harm does not erase individual choice. The wasteland did not force Immortan Joe to shut the valve; he chose rationing as a method of domination. Risk is not destiny, and context is not an alibi. Green criminology widens the focus without switching off the responsibility of whoever decides.