Organizer: Jonathan Padwe, Yale University
Chair: Jason Cons, Cornell University
Discussant: Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale University
Corruption--understood narrowly as the appropriation of public goods for private use--has in recent years been assigned significant explanatory power by those seeking to understand the failure of programs of reform, improvement, modernization and democratization. Indeed, in South and Southeast Asia, corruption has become a shorthand explanation for the breakdown of development. Yet, our experiences working in India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Indonesia demonstrate that corruption manifests itself in myriad ways. Local and community understandings of corruption often diverge from those presented in the narratives of policy-makers, planners and reformers. Further, “corruption” does not exist in-and-of itself, but rather is constituted through other processes of rule, law, spatial regulation, development, and conflict negotiation. Papers in this panel thus move away from normative understandings of corruption, and instead explore the ways corruption emerges as a social and political construct, one that is frequently reworked in situ. We consider alternative conceptual frameworks for thinking contemporary forms of corruption. In our work, corruption emerges as mutually constituted with space and sovereignty, as an improvisational strategy, as an ecological process, and as a constitutive part of state reconstruction in post-conflict situations. These papers take a broadly cross-disciplinary and cross-regional approach. They combine theoretical insights from historical and development sociology, cultural anthropology and political science; however, they are all grounded in ethnographic inquiry and are similarly engaged in an effort to see corruption as a dynamic, contextual, and fluid concept, rather than as a static explanation of the failure of development.
Reading news sources, participating in scholarly seminars, and just engaging in daily conversation assures one that there is a general consensus in postcolonial India that local governments have surrendered to corruption, criminalization and bureaucratic dysfunction. But while “the game” does indeed seem to be the norm, this does not require that governance, politics and authority in such a place are doomed to “failure”; nor does it mean that every subject or institution is equally likely—or inevitably—to become “corrupt”. While not denying the reality of illegal and non-normative practices, this discussion refrains from focusing on whether (and how much) corruption is present or absent. Rather, it delineates how so-called corrupt activities in Northern India play out on the ground and are configured and categorized in culturally meaningful ways. In Uttar Pradesh, certain exchanges between police and citizens—including large and small-scale bribes, as well as non-monetary forms of deal-making—are often understood by people less as manifestations of corruption, and more as moments of particularly clever improvisation vis-à-vis generally thwarted agency; as skillful social networking and good fortune; as lubrication rather than friction or hindrance; and as day-to-day survival. People also speak in terms of a continuum of “more corrupt” and “less corrupt” persons and actions. Considering such understandings propels us to expand our horizons for theorizing the concept of corruption itself, which is urgently necessary if we are to explain many peoples’ everyday practices in ways that do not degenerate into unproductive cynicism, or deem an entire society as inherently, or intractably, corrupt.
Corruption in Cambodia has often been understood as an effect of the grafting of colonialist and later Western develop mentalist, norms of accountability to "traditional" political patronage networks. The Cambodian term for corruption, puk roluy, or "rot", captures the sense of decomposition that inheres in the Western concept: the breakdown of order, the rot and decay that plague the organism of the state. In Cambodia today, where "development" provides an important conceptual framework for legitimating political action, and where development aid provides significant material support for the national government, and comprises a large share of GDP, corruption may be understood as the antithesis of development. If “development” represents orgasmic growth and productivity, “corruption” represents death and decay. Yet while both Western and national observers interpret this life (of development and growth) and death (of corruption) normatively, valuing the former and condemning the latter, by adopting the investigative stance of ecology one can understand death and rot not only as the end of life, but also as the process through which energy and matter are transferred from one organism to another. This paper investigates the ways through which the inputs of development assistance in Cambodia, both material and ideological, are diverted, adapted and reconfigured by local actors. The study is based on discussions with Cambodian villagers, small-time political appointees, and development workers, and examines their experiences with and attitudes towards the corrupt practices they encounter when obtaining various sorts of permissions, finding jobs, and participating in a distribution of food aid.
This paper aims to move away from the policy and development world's (normative) understanding of the negative role of corruption in state-building and development, towards an analytical understanding of its potentially positive role in state reconstruction in post-conflict societies. The paper provides an anatomy of the uses, roles and outcomes of the 'corruption', or state capture, of post-conflict aid and reconstruction funds in Eastern Indonesia in regions socially and economically devastated by violent communal conflict between 1999 and 2002. In so doing, the paper explores how the state capture of post-conflict aid and reconstruction funds enabled the rebuilding of the local state. This was done through the restoration of a state-societal clienteles bargain, long established under the New Order regime, which was threatened during the conflict period. The paper links the work of Brass, Chandra and Wade on the routine nature of corruption in democratic Asian political societies, with the idea of corruption as a positive force in rebuilding regions damaged by conflict. Through examining state capture of domestic and international aid funds, and contrasting the intended and unintended consequences of state capture of aid on state reconstruction, the paper poses a reassessment of the dominant donor paradigm, whereby 'corruption' is understood as a solely negative force in state building and development.
On the surface, projects of place making-characterized by the precise measurement of boundaries and the maintenance of sovereign space-and political corruption appear to be separate and even antithetical. Yet at the India-Bangladesh border, these processes of state formation are bound together in often surprising ways. This paper explores links between space and corruption in enclaves-literally sovereign pieces of India inside of Bangladesh and vice versa-along the India-Bangladesh border. I ask how competing conceptions of sovereignty and rule, practices of policing space and “transgressing” it, configurations of criminality and governance structure daily life. The enclaves are often conceived as “corrupt” and “sensitive” spaces by those who patrol their boundaries. This conception leads to frequent transformations in strategies for regulating movement through the enclaves and controlling and rigidly defining its borders. Yet these regulations are complicit in producing new configurations of sovereignty and clienteles within the enclaves themselves. I explore these complications through a debate over the movement of cattle into and out of a Bangladeshi enclave situated in India. While attempts to regulate this movement did little to reduce smuggling of cattle through the enclave, it produced unintended and lasting reconfigurations of power and patronage within it. By exploring this issue ethnographically and spatially, I problematize notions such as ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘petty corruption,’ arguing that patterns of defining and exploiting space are best understood together as processes of spatial corruption.
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