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- Anti-Corruption Discourse Bad – Disempowering to Developing Countries
--Anti-Corruption Discourse BadAnti-Corruption Discourse Bad – Masks Bias to Western Morals and Values“CORRUPTION” IS A LOADED TERM – MUST BREAK DOWN THE SPECIFIC BEHAVIORS OF CONCERN Madalene O’Donnell, NYU Center on International Cooperation, 2006, Post-conflict Corruption: A Rule of Law Agenda?, Draft Chapter for International Peace Academy, Civil War and the Rule of Law, [http://www.worldbank.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/wbi/governance/pdf/corruption_conflict_and_rule_of_law.pdf], p. 4-5 “Corruption” is a loaded term. For governments and outsiders, it implies a degree of judgment or even crusading zeal they find inflammatory or unhelpful. But anti-corruption advocates are “loathe to separate the element of moral disapproval from the word itself.”12 Euphemisms in international discourse, such as lack of transparency or poor governance, may make people more comfortable but cast a technical glaze over issues that, within their respective societies, do have a normative dimension. An important drawback of the term corruption is that it encompasses many behaviors with distinct causes and solutions. It is essential to unpack corruption and, in particular, to distinguish between administrative corruption (i.e., corruption among low- and mid-level bureaucrats) and grand corruption (i.e., corruption among political and economic elites). Administrative corruption may be addressed through institutional reforms designed to improve accountability and transparency, in conjunction with state and societal actors. Grand corruption, however, requires a focus on the incentives of political elites and key economic interests seeking to influence them or “capture” the state.13 CORRUPTION CONTEXT GROUNDED IN LIBERAL AND REPUBLICAN ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT “THE PUBLIC” Mlada Bukovansky, Professor of Government, Smith College, 2002, ‘Corruption is bad: normative dimensions of the anti-corruption movement’, Australian National University Working Paper, 2002/5, p. 32-3 The accountability of public officials, and their capacity to pursue the public good, is the ‘measure’ by which we assess whether or not a society or government is corrupt. Level of development and investment flows are not measures of corruption, even though they may be measures of its consequences. In the latter case, however, the normative (and hence intersubjective) elements built into the definition of the independent variable (level of corruption) will require examination, because if left unexamined they may impart significant bias (for example, about the value and impersonal nature of modernization) drawn from the perspective and cultural orientation of the observer. Corrupt transactions are illegitimate because they take place in a domain – that of public politics—which sets limits on what can be bought with money or other favors. The general implication is that, at some level, public power should not be for sale, and that public power should not be used in the service of private gain. The reason for this is at core a moral reason: the public good, and more specifically, the public trust, are fundamental societal values. The discourse that sustains these distinctions is a liberal one, albeit informed by a rich historical discourse of republicanism. Republican discourse further suggests that the definition of corruption I gave at the outset of this essay (use of public office for private gain) does not fully communicate the sense in which corruption can be thought of as a danger to the polity. Isolated incidents of bribery are one thing, but deep-seated corruption connotes a structural condition, a sickness of the polity which at worst can mean its destruction as a cohesive whole, or a ‘loss of identity and definition.’ Thus, the anti-corruption discourse bears the weight of a history of concerns about the health and vitality of the polity. Without engaging in a lengthy analysis of republican discourse, the juxtaposition of corruption, as an indicator of a sick political community, to the key concepts of liberty and civic virtue as indicators of a health polity bears mentioning in this context. A corrupt polity in this sense is one in which private interests have dominated public decision making, where factions and strife rule, and where loss of liberty – defined as the capacity to participate freely in public life – ensues. Anti-Corruption Discourse Bad – Disempowering to Developing CountriesANTI-CORRUPTION DISCOURSE CONSTRUCTS THE STATE IN A DISEMPOWERING AND FRAGMENTARY MANNER John Gledhill, Anthropology Professor, University of Manchester, 2004, Between Morality and the Law: corruption, anthropology, and comparative society, ed. I. Pardo, p. 156 My approach to the question of corruption will involve a considerable amount of further unpacking of concepts and theories in the course of the argument. But it will be helpful to state at the outset that my focus is on the power relations that shape both practices themselves and the ambiguous moral discourses that characterize the responses of situated social actors to those practices. I argue that corruption must not be analyzed in a moralizing framework but must be seen as a mode of exercising power within complex social and political settings that must be analyzed carefully and in their historical and cultural specificity. Corruption persists and may well enjoy a bright future because of the way its practices spin webs of complicity at different social levels (and increasingly, beyond the boundaries of nation states. But the way that actors are drawn into complicity is not simply a question of powerlessness since complicity may be refused), even if resignation to the need to participate in corrupt or illegal acts enhances feelings of powerlessness. In Latin America, the most fatal complicity lies in the upper strata of society (and the relationships between national and international elites). This is both the strength and the weakness of the powerful. As Gupta (1995, p. 394) puts it: “the discourse of corruption helps to ‘construct’ the state.” The Latin American state, like any other, is a “translocal institution that is made visible in local practices” (oibid, p. 375) and must therefore be imagined or constructed by social actors. An imaginery of “the state’ as a centre of power with corruption at its heart (or behind its formal, dignified façade) can, as I will show, produce a variety of effects that are disempowering and fragmenting. But Gupta is also right to argue that: “at the same time [the discourse of corruption] can potentially empower citizens by marking those activities that infringe on their fights’ (ibid.).
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