Unpacking (anti)corruption in the Global South

Abstract

That corruption is a multidimensional governance problem that affects every part of the globe is a well-established fact which has given rise to multiple international anti-corruption norms and best practices over several decades leading up to the present. However, increasingly scholars across diverse disciplinary concerns have also raised the argument that incidences of corruption, acceptance and non-acceptance of corrupt norms and practices, and even definitions of corruption vary across countries. Furthermore, as Gephart (2014) noted, there are strong critiques from the scholarly community of international and transnational anti-corruption discourses which impose a universalistic conception of corruption produced in the Global North on countries of the Global South. While there is a general consensus among various anti-corruption stakeholders that corruption is a constant feature of political economies of the countries of the Global South deterring their growth and development (Kieh 2023), there is a strong colonialist gaze that marks this characterisation (Hellman 2019). When considering these factors together, it can be argued that we need a greater understanding of national, regional and local imaginaries of corruption with emphasis on the sociocultural dimensions alongside the economic, political, environmental, technological and legal ones. The proposed panel on ‘Unpacking (anti)corruption in the Global South’ sets out to address the issues outlined in the previous paragraph, thereby aiming to facilitate conversations between researchers, policymakers and practitioners on perceptions, imaginaries, narratives and definitions of corruption arising from Global South country contexts focusing on the work of local political actors including (but not limited to) governments, local courts and ombudsmans, civil society organisations, transparency activists, business and financial entities. A further aim of our panel is to interrogate global top-down measures like international anti-corruption norms and their efficacy in contexts which are vastly different from those in which they were created. This is motivated by the fact that most anti-corruption initiatives in developing countries fail, often because of the lack of context-specific approaches, an implied Western bias (ethnocentrism) and an oversimplification of strategies that lead interventions off track.

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