‘Our Enemies Are Swindlers’! Conceptualising Anti-Corruption Legalism as a Securitising Device

Abstract

This article seeks to conceptualise anti-corruption legalism as a symptom of a broader phenomenon: the securitisation of corruption. Securitisation refers to the complex social processes through which political actors frame corruption as an existential threat to valued referent objects; construct it as a security problem; and, in turn, acquire broad mandates to tackle it by recourse to emergency measures. By building on case studies from contemporary Nigerian legal history, this article argues that the securitisation of corruption is mediated, to a considerable extent, by anti-corruption legalism - defined as a repertoire of legalistic rules, discourses, and practices that perform a regulatory crackdown on corruption. As a constitutive element of the securitisation of corruption, anti-corruption legalism excises corruption from legal and other normative frameworks applicable to other crimes with a view to tackling it through a repressive national security paradigm. Securitisation, in turn, catalyses the decline of the rule of law through its corrosive effects on judicial power, judicial independence, and human rights. Taken together, securitisation and anti-corruption legalism are counterproductive approaches insofar as they undermine the evolution of democratic values, political accountability mechanisms, and independent constitutional institutions that form the bedrock of meaningful and sustainable anti-corruption strategies.