Trapped in Ambiguity: Perspectives on the Art of Corruption

Abstract

State of Corruption, State of Chaos: The Terror of Political Malfeasance. Edited by Michaelene Cox. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. 201 pp., $65.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-739-12388-1). Corruption & Development Aid: Confronting the Challenges. By Georg Cremer. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008. 168 pp., $19.95 (ISBN-13: 978-1-588-26571-5). Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform. By Catherine Weaver. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. 288 pp., $22.95 (ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13819-0). Office holders have often ignored their formal responsibilities and obligations and instead exploited personal or organizational opportunities basically at odds with the ethos of their office. This age-old phenomenon is commonly termed corruption. When corruption goes beyond the individual or small group to include the active participation of many people it has become institutionalized. Institutionalized corruption covers a wide range of practices that involves the exchange of political, economic, and social resources, including bribery, nepotism, various forms of patronage and state capture, among others. While they may seem straightforward, such practices are on closer inspection highly complex, contextually embedded and polyvalent. They are publicly condemned by most people yet often de facto tolerated and sometimes even encouraged. The exchanges and chains of actors engaged stretch across conventional boundaries between the public and private, the national and international. The tacit codes and norms inherent to institutionalized corruption, the informal redistribution of resources, and the types of power and authority involved are all factors that have posed severe constraints for attempts to combat it. Since the 1990s anti-corruption campaigns have become more systematized, however. Significantly, they have “gone international,” reflecting broader ideas concerning how societies and organizations ought to be governed in a world shaped by global neoliberal governance. What has come to be termed “international anti-corruption” is spearheaded by actors such as the World Bank, UN and OECD, Transparency International and some Western governments, particularly the United States (for example, Bukovansky 2006; Bracking 2007; De Sousa, Larmour, and Hindess 2009). These efforts have been translated into a series of international conventions (Webb 2005), all of them premised on the claim that corruption erodes democracy, destroys the fair competition of market economies, hinders economic development, increases inequality and poverty, spoils business reputation, and undermines human rights and security. Closely related …