Discourse Of Corruption Research Articles

Corruption: From International Law and Ethics to Realpolitik and Amoralism

Abstract In this essay, a philosophical and critical lens is applied to the case of corruption. For reasons having to do with both analysis and assessment of the framework of the only specialized convention at the international level of law, namely the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (uncac), the author takes a closer look at several aspects and areas that somehow fade into the background of the discourse or even fall out of the legal corruption equation itself despite their centrality to the topic. Examples include considerations of market theory, marginalization and discrimination, human rights, ethics, realpolitik, structural violence and corruption prevention, and norms of general international law. The essay also makes use of some country-specific scenarios, in part, to raise questions about possible ‘cracks’ in political governance typology. The essay is divided into two individual articles, Part i: ‘Perspectives on the Corruption Discourse’ and Part ii: ‘The Macro Area’.

The Cold War History of Wheat Flour in South Korea, 1945–1960: the Discourse of Corruption and the April Revolution of 1960

ABSTRACT One way that the United States conducted the Cold War was through its surplus food programmes (Public Law 480), which fed the hungry and supported anticommunist regimes. Consequently, South Koreans consumed over fourteen times more wheat flour by 1960 than during the preceding Japanese colonial period. This study presents a nuanced exploration of 1950s South Korea, using wheat flour — a central commodity in US aid — as a focal point to unravel complex political dynamics. It challenges the traditional binary narrative of authoritarianism versus liberalism, demonstrating how the Rhee regime’s promotion of wheat flour consumption reflected multifaceted strategies of corruption. This article underscores the unintended consequences of US aid, highlighting the intricate interactions between foreign assistance and local political, economic and social forces. By analysing the local responses to wheat flour distribution, it reveals how US aid, while aimed at bolstering anticommunism, inadvertently facilitated corruption and influenced public sentiment.

Between Eating and Being Fed: Competing Ethics of Community-Based Road Building in Nepal

ABSTRACT: This paper explores locally-situated logics of ethical judgment underpinning practices of road building in Nepal, and how those logics are attuned to the challenges of navigating complex socio-political dynamics, socio-natural environments, and regional political economies. In so doing it challenges homogenizing discourses of corruption that commonly surround infrastructure development. Building on ethnographic research on rural road construction in two agrarian districts, we argue that different understandings of who is responsible for contributing to infrastructure development, and what forms of private gain from public road budgets are justifiable, do not always conform to official understandings of the public good. Such discrepancies arise, we suggest, from the practical role that certain forms of rule breaking play in getting roads built, as well as from the contested legitimacy of the rules themselves. The politics of participatory development bring to light the ambivalent morality of certain forms of public/private transgressions, and tensions between competing imaginaries of the "public" nature of "local" rural roads—which constitute important, and largely overlooked, dynamics in infrastructure development. Attention to such dynamics is needed to better understand the challenge of building high-quality rural roads and, we contend, to inform just and sustainable approaches to infrastructure development.

Anticorruption, Development, and the Indian State

This essay studies the evolution of India's anticorruption machinery and discourses of corruption from the 1940s to the 1960s as a tussle between the logics of bureaucracy and democracy playing out as part of decolonization. Anticorruption began as a way of safeguarding the British Government of India's war effort from wayward officials pilfering supplies. As the postcolonial government retooled coercive wartime laws and empowered an increasing number of bureaucrats to manage the economy for developmental purposes, anticorruption evolved into a key demonstration of accountability by the state to the Indian people. Meanwhile, discourses of corruption became increasingly politically potent as India's imperial subjects became voting citizens. These discourses created pressure for a reform of the anticorruption machinery. But the mechanisms resisted full democratization and continued to privilege the executive branch as they had in colonial times. Anticorruption mechanisms became used to subdue challenges to power that took place. They were themselves corrupted.

The Rule-of-Law as a Problem Space: Wāsṭa and the Paradox of Justice in Jordan

AbstractThis article explores structural entanglements between the rule-of-law, as a globalized aspirational horizon in post-Cold War politics, and corruption, as a highly salient malaise, by way of an ethnography of wāsṭa, an institutionalized practice of patronage in Jordan, and a salient object of corruption discourse in recent years. The article follows wāsṭa and anti-corruption practices in various sites where wāsṭa is most salient and most problematized and situates the contemporary practice in relation to historical transformations in Jordan’s political economy and global discourses on justice and development. While globalized anti-corruption discourses pit practices of patronage and brokerage like wāsṭa against the rule-of-law, an ethnographic and historical view illustrates how the latter is the condition of possibility of the former, the framework by which it is diagnosed, and its presumed cure. Thus, I argue that the rule-of-law should be understood as a historically specific “problem space” that posits corruption as a prime diagnostic of the ills of state and society while generating practical paradoxes and a perpetual sense of temporal out-of-jointedness for “developing” countries.

The Discourse of Corruption in Mass Media: Polarization, Ideology, and Challenges

This article presents the opposing point of view between Tempo Newspaper and Media Indonesia in reporting on the revision of the KPK Law after the presidential inauguration. The analysis focuses on the ideology reconstruction of both of those media. The method uses critical discourse analysis to uncover the invisible power, interests, and ideology behind the contents and elements of the articles and the production of a text on Tempo Newspaper and Media Indonesia. The findings that Media Indonesia's ideology in reporting the revision of the KPK Law is based on the political interests of the media owners, thus in this case, Media Indonesia considers the revision of the KPK Law as an effort to improve and strengthen the performance of the KPK with a pro-government narrative. Meanwhile, Tempo's ideology in reporting the revision of the KPK Law was based on elite interests, so the ideology used was investigative ideology by building a criticizing narrative based on the facts found. This study aims to increase public awareness of the importance of critically viewing this polarization; thus, the harmful excesses of political propaganda do not easily provoke them through mass media.

Anti-Corruption in Nigeria: Towards a Critical Discourse Analysis

This paper makes a case for discursive analysis of anticorruption in Nigeria. It argues for an alternative understanding of anti/corruption discourse by examining anticorruption as a discourse shrouded in a complex inter-related process shaped by socio-historical continuities, meaning-making, interests, perceptions and interpretations that (inter)act to impel, and sometimes propel, anticorruption to produce contradictory outcomes. Without impugning on the strides of government, through the efforts of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), in the fight against corruption, this piece interrogates why anticorruption campaign appears to have little or no impact in its fight against corruption in Nigeria and argues it is not unconnected with emphasis on institutions as against interests and meaning-making processes that goes into the making of ‘institutions’. It contends that emphasis on institutions in the campaign against corruption loses sight of and does not take into account what corruption is, what it portends, and whether its re/presentation captures or reflects the needs, views and experience of the society. Grounded in postcolonialism and relying on extant literature on (anti)corruption in Nigeria, this study deploys critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine how the discourse of (anti)corruption in Nigeria is generating a social process of anticorruption with (un)intended consequences. Keywords: Corruption, Anticorruption, Critical Discourse Analysis, Postcolonialism, Institutionalism DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/13-8-01 Publication date: April 30 th 2023

Democracy and the Corruption of Speech

In the developed democracies, the public discourse of political corruption and conspiracy remains stubbornly pervasive, in spite of the fact that these countries are, comparatively, the cleanest in the world. Everyday talk about corruption expresses a politics of distrust and disaffection, corrodes deliberative responses to political conflict and – most alarmingly – can be mobilized by populist authoritarians who would replace democratic institutions with decisionism. The phenomenon that Rosenblum and Muirhead call ‘the new conspiracism’ – assertions of conspiracies without evidence or even claims that could be refuted – is deepening the discourse of corruption, particularly in the United States. These discourses are expressive rather than discursive: they cannot be refuted because they signal fears and discontents rather than positions within public arguments. Because democracies only work when they channel political conflict into credible speech, these developments corrode the life-blood of democracies. A key problem for democrats today is to diagnose this pathology, identify powers of speech and devise responses that might protect the common pool resource of promise and commitment in speech-based politics.

Marielle’s seeds: Contesting the emotional life of corruption talk in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

In this paper, we argue the emotional life of corruption narratives underwrite the rise of the extreme Right in Brazil. Further, we argue that the talk of corruption is pervasive, polysemic, contested, racialized and emotional. It is deeply entwined with social struggles over the form, content and ends of political life. Drawing on this perspective, we analyze discourses of corruption in the wake of a seismic corruption scandal, Operation Lava Jato. We identify two competing narratives of corruption. The hegemonic form uses emotions to create political enemies, promote anti-Black punitivism and uphold social hierarchies. In contrast, a counternarrative of corruption rooted in Black feminist epistemology centers racialized spatial inequality as Brazil’s central challenge and offers pathways to reclaim political life from punitive neoliberalism. We contribute by specifying how the emotional life of corruption talk helps build support for Jair Bolsonaro’s cross-class project of revanchist populism. Ultimately, we argue that the Right has successfully mobilized corruption talk in the service of necropolitics.

Refusing aid

Abstract“Aid dependency” has long been a concern among development organizations, because it supposedly discourages the entrepreneurial spirit and thus hinders economic development. But what happens when beneficiaries refuse aid? In this article, I offer an ethnographic account of aid refusal in postconflict northern Uganda. There, members of savings and loan associations negotiate debts and investments through Acholi ethics ofripe, or “making life experiences together.” In doing so, they demonstrate that their refusals are not disavowals of development. Rather, they are refusals of development hierarchies and of the financialization of development, both of which risk obstructing Acholi ethics of interdependence. By analyzingripeand the ways that association members negotiate the ethics of receiving aid, this article offers a counterpoint to dominant, pathologizing discourses of African dependency, corruption, and development—discourses predicated on Western, neoliberal valuations of work and community. In short, this article calls into question the assumption that economic growth is always the sine qua non of development.

Surveillance of Global Corruption by Transparency International: Construction of a ‘Corrupt’ South and ‘Clean’ North Discourse

This study looks at how discourses of corruption in Bangladesh are discursively constructed within the official documents of Transparency International (TI), a non-profit organization that monitors corruption worldwide. It explores how an orientalist notion regarding Bangladesh is appropriated in neoliberal global discourse through TI’s corruption surveillance process. A postcolonial analysis of TI’s publications demonstrates a symbiotic relation between orientalism and neoliberalism. TI sets up a binary of ‘corrupt’ global South vs. ‘clean’ global North, reinforcing the uneven power relations between nation-states that can be seen as a neocolonial move for maintaining Western hegemony and enabling neoliberal ideology over non-Western territories. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#67-68; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2020 P 49-76

Deconstructing Corruption through Its Aporias

The dominant discourse of corruption (the idea that corruption is cancer, a social disease) has legitimized a particular and simplified overview of a rather intricate phenomenon. Thus, the strategies and instruments to deal with the disease have been a priority of several international organizations, creating a real anti-corruption industry with its own priorities, prognosis, and language. The instruments and policies created through this industry are proposed to several countries (basically developing ones) to face the malady they suffer. This dominant discourse has been crucial in creating a practical and political language that determines how corruption is conceived and treated through national and international policies. In this article, we seek to deconstruct the concept of corruption to identify several hidden dichotomies and contradictions, some of them already identified by different research projects which depart from the dominant discourse. Hence, five aporias are proposed to deconstruct the anti-corruption discourse. These aporias have been studied by different disciplines which have analyzed corruption. Each aporia shows critical contradictions endogenous to the dominant discourse urging to open its instruments and prognosis to further and thoughtful debate.

Do Goats Eat Yam in a Fire pool? Social Media Discourses of Corruption in Nigeria and South Africa: A Nation Building Perspective

Do Goats Eat Yam in a Fire pool? Social Media Discourses of Corruption in Nigeria and South Africa: A Nation Building Perspective

Corruption as a Social Problem: a Constructionist Approach

Introduction. The article provides an overview of the constructionist approach in sociology in the concerning the phenomenon of corruption as a social problem. The relevance of the work is determined by the need to examine the possibilities of sociology in the study of anti-corruption discourse and the construction of corruption in the public consciousness.Methodology and sources. The issue has grown in importance considering the need to study the perception of corruption in society and the processes of its construction. The methodological basis of the work is the analysis of primary sources (works by M. Spektor, J. Kitsuse, J. Best) and research publications, including the retrospective analysis of the theoretical prerequisites for the development of a constructionist approach in the sociology of social problems. This paper gives a detailed overview of the concept of social problems, which is important for the development of theoretical and empirical studies of various social problems from constructionist positions.Results and discussion. The paper presents the features of two directions within the framework of social constructivism: strict and contextual. The author identifies two main areas of corruption research in a constructionist discourse: the analysis of the construction of corruption as a social phenomenon and the analysis of the construction of deviance, which correspond to the phenomenological (strict) and contextual directions. This study defines the main theoretical aspects of the constructivist approach, its ideological prerequisites and traces the development of the main theoretical directions of constructivism within the interactionist approach in sociology. As a result of the analysis, the author highlights the limitations of the constructionist approach, which are significant for choosing a concept and conducting research and pays attention to the possibilities of developing an integrative approach.Conclusion. Social constructivism has heuristic potential in exploring the discourse of corruption as a social problem and the construction of its deviance, which is a promising area of research on the perception of corruption in modern Russian society.

Conflicting discourses — Social constructions of corruption in Finland

The Nordic countries are generally regarded as beacons of anti-corruption. This perception also applies to Finland, where corruption is said to be conspicuous by its absence. The article at hand, however, conveys a more nuanced picture of corruption in Finland. It delves into opinions submitted during the formulation of the Finnish anti-corruption strategy, identifying two conflicting corruption-related discourses. The analysis shows that corruption is a contested concept and that views on corruption prevalence and the need for anti-corruption measures vary greatly within the national context. The article illustrates the struggle between national corruption discourses, arguing that such discourses and their overall context should be analysed thoroughly if corruption efforts are to be grounded in their setting and successful. This is the case regardless of context and thus applicable also to countries perceived as “clean and honest”.

Discourse of corruption in the Russian society

Objective: to study the socio-cultural and legal nature of the corruption phenomenon in a discursive and communicative context.Methods: the methodological basis of the article is the synthesis of the discursive and communicative theory of J. Habermas and W. Krawietz’s integrative theory of legal reality, focusing on the interdisciplinary study of corruption as an interdisciplinary category, taking into account not only objective, but also subjective components. This determined the choice of research methods (comparative, hermeneutic, and discursive methods).Results: corruption as a phenomenon and the interdisciplinary category reflecting it is determined by social, cultural and psychological factors of the legal reality development. Acting as a complex legal archetype, it defines the value attitudes of consciousness and behavior of the legal communication participants, orienting them to carry out actions aimed at satisfying individual (less often group and social) interests, even if they contradict the law. Corrupt behavior is perceived by a large part of the Russian society as a model of hierarchical interaction of the legal communication subjects, the purpose of which, according to the addressee, is to increase the effectiveness of the addressee’s activities. In addition, corruption is becoming an informal means of “liberation” from the legal requirements, rigid and unfair, according to some representatives of the society. In these conditions, the success of the institutional fight against corruption can be achieved only if this fight involves not only improvement of anti-corruption legislation, but also countering shadow norms, creating a system of anti-incentives for corrupt behavior, including ideologically, through the formation of value attitudes of citizens to reject corrupt practices as unpatriotic and harmful to the rule of law and the legal culture of the society as a whole.Scientific novelty: for the first time in Russian jurisprudence, a study of the category of corruption in the communicative and discursive aspect was conducted.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific and pedagogical activities when considering the issues of the essence and content of the Russian legal reality, in the anti-corruption activities of state and municipal bodies, as well as in anti-corruption education.

Embodied Urbanisms: Corruption and the Ecologies of Eating and Excreting in India's Real Estate Economies

This article studies metabolic systems of food, body, and waste within the urban development politics of the city of Gurgaon (now Gurugram) in India’s National Capital Region. I link rapid urban transformation within the region, the labor required to produce it, and the speculative real estate economy that governs it to the phenomenology of body politics in the region. In particular, I examine corruption as both a political-economic and a physical, caste-based narrative to argue that corruption connects embodiment and urban development ecologies to each other. This allows corruption discourses in Gurgaon to form a critique of real estate economies; changing urban environments are felt and critiqued through body politics and experienced at once as a peril and a pleasure. This work is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in the construction industry in NCR involving members across the production chain of real estate, including landowners, investment bankers, developers, engineers, architects, foremen, and laborers.

It is Christ or Corruption in Papua New Guinea: Bring in the Witness!

ABSTRACTEndemic corruption and fervent Christianity dominate Papua New Guinea (PNG) public discourse. We draw on ethnographic material—including the emplacement of a King James V Bible in Parliament—to contextualise corruption discourse and Christian measures against corruption within evolving Papua New Guinean ideas about witnessing. Both corruption discourse and Christianity invoke a specific kind of observer: a disembodied, reliable witness capable of discerning people's intentions. Established ethnographic and linguistic data from PNG meanwhile document witnesses as imagined to be embodied, interested, lacking a privileged relationship to truth, and thus susceptible to coercion. Recasting the PNG corruption issue in terms of witnessing foregrounds a perceived cultural conflict between inclusion and duty; it also reveals how and why the Christian God was invoked—using debt and obligation rhetoric—to end corruption at the national scale.

Discourses of Corruption in Africa: Between the Colonial Past and the Decolonizing Present

:To civilize and rescue certain populations from self-destruction was a cardinal aim of colonization, which reflected the supposition that colonized people were evolutionarily, culturally, intellectually, and morally deficient and therefore incapable of attaining advanced levels of sociopolitical organization. This article explores how contemporary discourses of corruption in Africa echo these discredited narratives, which I critically analyze using a combination of postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches to discourse as an ideational structure. I conclude with two broad arguments: first, that the focus of these narratives on the perceived moral deficiencies of so-called African leaders misrepresents complex historical, social, and structural conditions; second, that, by constantly questioning Africans' capacity to govern themselves, these narratives sabotage efforts toward decolonization while providing subtextual justifications for continued neocolonial relations between the West and Africa.

A Crisis of Competence: Information, Corruption, and Knowledge about the Decline of the Qing State

This article elaborates on the claim of this special issue that “bureaucratic actions” are “knowledge practices” that have “the power to both make and break social and material worlds” to question the standard assumption that the Qing state became increasingly corrupt over the course of the long nineteenth century. It examines the evolution of the Qing information regime in one field—prison administration—to elucidate the relationship between information about the Qing state and knowledge of it. By reviewing how processes of enhanced reporting led to greater regulation and scrutiny, the first portion of this article argues that reporting processes that have seemed (both to Qing actors and historians) to be straightforward requests for information led over time to subtle but profound shifts in the epistemological and administrative foundations of the Qing state. It then demonstrates how Qing actors themselves engaged in discourses of corruption that eventually evolved into revolutionary critique and, finally, historiographical commonplace. The article concludes with the suggestion that although an abundance of information about the rise of corruption throughout the Qing administration appears from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, neither historians nor Qing actors themselves have distinguished between the growth of information alone and the growth of corruption itself.