Nobody says they are for corruption.
Civil liberty groups decry it, politicians rail against it, and journalists pledge to unmask it. This year, young people from Mexico to Madagascar to Nepal have protested corruption, demanding that their leaders stop the practice that François Valérian, chair of Transparency International, called “a key cause of declining democracy, instability and human rights violations.”
But what, exactly, is corruption? And what can a society do about it?
It’s a beguilingly complicated question. As scholars Marco Garrido, Marina Zaloznaya, and Nicholas Hoover Wilson write in their upcoming book, “A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption,” the way that corruption is defined, and countered, says a lot about a society.
One response, they write, is a doubling down on common cultural values and norms – a recommitment to standards of behavior that “affirm a shared vision of social order.” But there’s another response, they found, especially when traditionally liberal responses don’t seem to work – one that entails a move toward conspiracy theories, an “us versus them” polarization, and even autocracy.
The Monitor has been exploring this topic, with stories about everything from political behavior in Washington to the demands of Generation Z protesters around the world to efforts to track climate finance funds. In this week’s magazine, Linda Feldmann writes about President Donald Trump’s increasing wealth in office, while also noting that his predecessor’s relatives came under legal and congressional scrutiny “for allegedly leveraging the [Biden] family name for financial gain.”
Meanwhile, contributors Yuliana Ramazzini and Nelson Rauda Zablah explore a growing autocracy movement in Central America, which some analysts see as connected to increasing frustration about corruption.
These stories – and the concept of corruption overall – are worth contemplation, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. We hope you will read them, pause, and ponder. Labeling others as “corrupt” without thinking deeply about the meaning, or brushing off behavior that unfairly benefits the few, can have consequences that ripple across nations.
As Dr. Wilson explained to me, even before Mr. Trump, the legal understanding of corruption in the United States had “taken us from the possibility of enforcing corruption laws against public officials – when they appear to have a conflict of interest – to considering ‘corruption’ only when a cartoonish level of explicit bribery can be proven.”
That, he says, “takes us away from the common-sense idea that ‘corruption’ represents a kind of moral violation that is embedded in a time, place, political system, and economy.”
