The (de)construction of corruption in one hundred years of American foreign affairs discourse

Over the past few years, several events have prompted increased attention from international affairs experts to the dangers that corruption posits to the liberal international order. These include the Russian efforts to influence elections in Europe and the United States, the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, and China’s opportunistic assertiveness in the Global South. Beyond the traditional focus on corruption as a domestic issue, governments are increasingly considering anti-corruption efforts as part of their international agendas and national security risk assessments, as reflected in the recent United States Strategy on Countering Corruption and the new European Union’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA). While these developments consolidate the inclusion of anti-corruption narratives in international fora, it was not long ago that the topic of corruption was considered taboo in international policy and political circles. The most common description of the pivotal period in which corruption finally burst into acceptable discourse points to the end of the Cold War and the resulting shift in American priorities, the founding of the NGO Transparency International, and the economic and technical approach to anti-corruption adopted by the World Bank during the 1990s. Yet, most accounts concerning this historical evolution of corruption as a legitimate topic of international policy debate and academic inquiry remain anecdotal, satisfied in describing its epistemological development in terms of stages rather than processes and brushing over significant discursive details. To provide a fuller picture of the international ‘rehabilitation’ of anti-corruption, we look into its historical evolution as a topic of interest within international affairs circles, exploring the ways in which it has been framed and the events and phenomena with which it has been associated. To accomplish this, we conduct a systematic review and bibliometric analysis of 5,717 articles printed in the magazine Foreign Affairs (published by the US think tank Council on Foreign Relations) from 1922 to 2022. First, frequent single- and multiple-word corruption-related keywords found in academic publications are identified from a previously collected dataset. A language model known as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is then employed to discover significant topics hidden in the corpus of collected articles, increasing the statistical weight of corruption-related keywords to guide the process. With the BERT model facilitating the selection and clustering of relevant articles for review, we proceed by examining and revealing the basic underlying themes. Then, we extract named entities and apply qualitative coding to discover framing patterns along key dimensions, including national/transnational, normative/positive, and political/technical perspectives. Finally, a bibliometric analysis is carried out to unveil any remaining patterns and trends hidden in the data. The result is an evidence-based description of the construction of corruption within one of the most important fora for the dissemination of ideas and knowledge regarding