The Language of Anti-corruption

One of the most effective ways for powerful people to stop us thinking about an important issue is to ensure that the issue is made confusing and/or boring. That’s happened on climate change and, arguably, on Corruption. I’ve been looking a lot these past few days at the “discourse” of anti-corruption (sorry about the terminology but, this time, it’s an appropriate term to use). And I find it has only 2 tones – that of emotional outrage, on the one hand, and that of boring and confusing academia on the other. It’s why I found Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s report so refreshing in my last post. It may be more than 100 pages long and written a decade ago but it was clearly and vividly presented and made me eager to keep reading. 

I was also very taken with a short paper - Doing Anti-Corruption Democratically (2022) - by Heather Maquette which gave an overview of some of the material on the subject written in the past decade and introduced me, for example, to the work of Michael Johnston who has been critical of a lot of the work of what he calls the Anti-corruption industry. Johnston indeed is one the few prepared to call a spade a spade and identify power and its inequitable distribution as the “elephant in the room” in most of the industry’s discourse. He put it very clearly in a 2005 book  

“Affluent market democracies have corruption problems of their own that – along with the conceptions of reform they have fostered – do much to shape the difficulties facing what are better called “peripheral” rather than developing societies”.

“Syndromes of Corruption – wealth, power and democracy” Michael Johnson 2005 

Which brings us to the UK – and a rare resignation by a politician for his failure to curb the fraud and corruption which took place on his watch. Simon Jenkins has the story and youtube has the politician’s short resignation speech. And remember the UK Supreme Court had just found the government guilty of favouritism.  The British judicial system indeed took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” ed by D Whyte appeared followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).  

But let me return to the question of the “discourse of anti-corruption”. I started by suggesting it knew only two tones – the first of which we hear in mass media coverage which, in a sense, tells us what we already knew, namely that people will always take advantage of opportunities/loopholes/weaknesses to rip off the system. People shrug their shoulders and settle in to fatalism.

The second tone is more academic – and boring. And I want to explore why – and whether change is possible. A few years back I referred to one of the first books to deal fairly and squarely with the question – Mark Billig’s “Learn to write badly: how to succeed in the social sciences” 2013 of which this is the Intro – and this the first chapter. So – short reads!

But this morning I came across a great video which I would strongly recommend to my more scholastic readers – a lecture on Writing Effectively . That may sound a bit paradoxical - how can you lecture on writing? But the guy is chatting to students in a very interactive way, inviting their comments and using the blackboard to record the ideas which come out of the discussion. He’s challenging the students to think more deeply about what readers want to get from stuff they read – and to realise that the writing process is horizontal (thinking out aloud) whereas reading is vertical – from the text to the world the reader is trying to understand. The guy is very provocative = and amusing. Great viewing – enjoy! And the website actually gives notes and blackboard shots as aide-memoires. 

While we’re on the subject, I’ve just recently stumbled on a blogger whose writing really makes an impact and I’d like to offer as an example – despite the occasional swearword.   It’s https://indi.ca/ and scrolling down will give you the range of topics he covers. He’s actually a Sri Lankan – but born and brought up in the US and now back in Sri Lanka and making a living from his writing. This is his latest https://indi.ca/how-white-empire-is-a-thing/