Corruption, Law and Contested Illegality

Pervasive and persistent corruption originates in the South and East – it is the condition of the ‘evil and primitive Other’. The Northern anti-corruption project in and for the South evinces serious ignorance of the situation they claim to be remedying. Salvation for the incapable and unwilling resides in healthy dosages and speedy administration of the anti-corruption ‘gold standard’ - good governance, the rule of law, transparency and accountability – by the North and the(ir) cheerleaders of the social behavioural change communication brigade. Legality is contested by historical resistance and material claims; alternative moral economies of reciprocity, redistribution and solidarity; the interwoven relationship between formal and informal citizenship; accelerated interpenetration of formal/informal/illegal to the point of near indistinguishability; and multiple conceptions and interpretations of law in the same geographic space. Corruption in the South is possibly more varied and complex than in the North with many scholars are pushing against the limited purchase and dismal results of orthodoxy in situations poorly understand and or strategically ignored. This paper unpacks the double standards, normative posturing, and imposed dualism of mainstream anti-corruption studies by bringing it into dialogue with a handful of subjects from other social sciences. It argues that mainstream anti-corruption studies can no longer ignore nor dismiss the plural and contested understandings of legality, legal systems and illegality as relayed by other disciplines. The paper summons the urgent need to critically integrate orthodoxy’s binaries, dualities and disembodied norms. However, whether mainstream anti-corruption scholarship is capable and willing to change is the question.