Article by Dieter Zinnbauer: “There is a sense in the anti-corruption research community that we may have reached some plateau (or less politely, hit a wall). This article argues – at least partly – against this claim.
We may have reached a plateau with regard to some recurring (staid?) scholarly and policy debates that resurface with eerie regularity, tend to suck all oxygen out of the room, yet remain essentially unsettled and irresolvable. Questions aimed at arriving closure on what constitutes corruption, passing authoritative judgements on what works and what does not and rather grand pronouncements on whether progress has or has not been all fall into this category.
At the same time, there is exciting work often in unexpected places outside the inner ward of the anti-corruption castle, contributing new approaches and fresh-ish insights and there are promising leads for exciting research on the horizon. Such areas include the underappreciated idiosyncrasies of corruption in the form of inaction rather than action, the use of satellites and remote sensing techniques to better understand and measure corruption, the overlooked role of short-sellers in tackling complex forms of corporate corruption and the growing phenomena of integrity capture, the anti-corruption apparatus co-opted for sinister, corrupt purposes.
These are just four examples of the colourful opportunity tapestry for (anti)corruption research moving forward, not in form of a great unified project and overarching new idea but as little stabs of potentiality here and there and somewhere else surprisingly unbeknownst…(More)”