In 2011, ISCI was awarded £830,000 by the United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a project entitled, ‘Resisting State Crime: A Comparative Study of Civil Society’ (ES/I030816/1).
The project aims to study the role of civil society organisations in defining, censuring and resisting criminal acts committed, instigated or condoned by state agencies.
The project will explore the ‘life histories’ of a range of grass roots civil society organisations dedicated to challenging state violence and corruption.
ISCI has also been awarded funding by King's College, London and the Pluto Education Trust, to build an interactive website devoted to state crime studies.
The participants discussed the peculiar difficulties and successes of securing access to both authoritarian elites and vulnerable victims, negotiating translators, government minders, researcher uses of deception, the relationship between method and theory, and ethnographic experiences.
In June 2013, The Independent's Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk launched ISCI along with Yusuf Sayman, a New York-based photographer, who also held a photography and video exhibition.