Introduction - Noticing Corruption

Look up the following news items

1. UAE told UK: crack down on Muslim Brotherhood or lose arms deals

2. Nigeria’s former oil minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke, lost
$20 billion on her watch.

3. How industry transforms our ‘scientific’ understanding of risk

4. How Interpol got into bed with FIFA

Now write down 3 sentences about what is common and 3 to show what is distinct in these cases.

Congratulations, you've already mastered 60% of what experts seem to know about corruption. The rest is simply more words, which will help you identify jargon in the literature. Otherwise, everything else we will ever learn about corruption is from actually looking at cases, just like the ones above, to get insights into that funny feeling we get when we hear the word corruption.

Corruption stings us with the accusation that we betray humanity. It recalls the obsolete English, ‘corrump,’ to decompose or rot, from the Latin ‘corrumpere,’ to adultrate, violate, falsify, bribe. It is the stink of decay in the putrid sense of oozhal in Tamil, the attrition of basic human decency.

Yet each case of corruption,  like a snowflake, shows resemblance and difference in features against others. That is both a good and bad thing. To study corruption means looking at each instance separately, like a detective, investigative reporter, or physician. But in doing so, just like these experts, one gains knowledge by having a broad range of cases to look at. What is troublesome about this is that one has the temptation to lump cases too quickly into common themes and solutions, but far more useful understanding of structure and formation of corruption appears with a gestalt of instances, like a snowstorm, to maintain the metaphor I began with.

Development is used as a context in this course, although corruption is often  justified in its name. Nevertheless, we will see why developing societies are not somehow less or more prone towards corruption, a view that not only perpetuates what Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed the ideology of ‘not-yet-there-but-on-the-way towards Europe' but also misses the point about the deep structure of corruption itself as well as its opposite, democracy.

In this blog, we will want to engage with the proposition that corruption in virtually all societies is a process of making things bad for democratizing impulses and freedom. That implies learning about freedom and the concept of the people or demos. But it also means having to adopt a somewhat dark but philosophically valid position of Machiavelli, that political failure is inevitable, especially in societies that attempt not to consolidate well-crafted and supported regimes that survive on their skill and callousness if necessary, but also on luck, which can sometimes be cruel for political transformation.

But there is also another way of viewing corruption that must not be lost in these normative readings. To cite Arlene Saxonhouse:

“To be human … requires the examined life. Examining, though, means corrupting what society offers as given and engaging others in this process, just as Socrates the corrupter of the young does… Corruption is the corrective to the unattainable political ideal of eternity. Both Thucydides through Pericles and Plato through Socrates look for perfection in the city, and both acknowledge the inaccessibility of that perfection. Corruption inevitably occurs[i].”

[i] Saxonhouse, Arlene W. "To Corrupt: The ambiguity of the language of corruption in ancient Athens." In Barcham, Manuhuia, Barry Hindess, and Peter Larmour, eds. Corruption: Expanding the Focus. ANU E Press, 2012. p.45,47 (emphasis added)