Conflict-Criminological Paradigm of Corruption (Article 2)

Abstract

The second part of the study pays special attention to the disputable issues of defining the concept of «corruption» and different research strategies of analyzing corruption practices and schemes of corrupt behavior through the prism of conflict social interactions. Corruption is characterized as the process and result of illegal conversion of the resources of public officials and private persons that trespasses the boundaries of social contract. The authors view corruption as a method through which capital is seeking to include material and moral elements of society into its movement. These elements, due to evident social and political necessity, cannot belong to private persons and should (could) only exist as a public whole, as public property. The analysis of contemporary research publications shows that the conceptual field of criminology uses the concept of «corruption» in two senses: in the broad sense, which includes all the manifestations of the «corruption» of power and the intentional abuse of office, status and authority by public officials with the purpose of personal enrichment or pursuing group interests, and in the narrow sense - the aggregate of the elements of offences with the corresponding qualifying characteristics and measures of legal liability. The authors conclude that corruption is a latent process of transforming the results of actions into a commodity of a «non-commodity» nature which cannot be the object of exchange within the legal field. Corruption relations are analyzed as such situations of forfeiting the public good to individual private beneficiaries when public officials receive a compensation for transferring to private persons the resources and benefits that do not rightfully belong to them. The authors prove the necessity of identifying the removal of economic, political and symbolic capital from public circulation for the benefit of private persons. They determine the challenges of transferring corruption counteraction from the regional and international perspective to the coordination of legal methods and highlight the conflicts between legal constructs in the development of anti-corruption measures.