Dangerous collusion: corruption as a collective venture in contemporary China

Echoing changing social environments, corruption has grown in sophistication and complexity. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of collective corruption. Collective corruption, a distinctive form of social interaction among people dominated by individual calculations and unorganized interests, takes place when collaboration becomes a powerful, necessary weapon in pursuing private gains. The danger of collusion in corrupt ventures is that as corruption gets well planned and skillfully coordinated in its collective form, it may become less forthright and therefore more difficult to detect, or more overt and increasingly legitimized as an appropriate form of economic intercourse.The term corruption tends to carry with it an image of secrecy and furtiveness that entails the involvement of the least possible number of individuals. Corruption, on the whole, is a clandestine exchange due to its illegal nature. Corruption takes place, for example, when a financial officer embezzles public funds for personal use, a school principal arranges “back-door” admissions for his relatives or friends, or a government official accepts bribes from his subordinates in exchange for favourable treatment. These practices are either conducted by a single person who seeks to enrich him/herself in an individualized manner or occur between two parties where a patron (usually an official) grants his/her client (whoever is willing and able to pay for it) desired preferential treatment in exchange for goods or services.Corruption, in reality, is more complex than its heuristically useful definition. Echoing changing social environments, corruption grows in sophistication and complexity in terms of causes, forms and characteristics. This paper studies the phenomenon of “collective corruption”, a concept derived from the author’s research in China where recent corruption cases show an alarming tendency for party and government officials to collude with each other, as well as with people outside the government, on a massively corrupt scale. The following are just a few examples of this kind of “dangerous collusion”:

• •In Hebei province, a collective embezzlement case involved at least seven high-ranking government officials, including the province’s executive deputy governor, bureau chief of transportation, director of the taxation department, and the party secretary of a major city.¹
• •A startling bribery case concerning the Minjiang Engineering Bureau of Fujian Province implicated 70% of its bureau-level officials, including the two most senior ones—the bureau director and the party chief.²
• •More than twenty bureau and departmental chiefs were involved in a case of land leasing fraud. Each of them accepted bribes of at least hundreds of thousands RMB.³
• •When a major corruption case of the East China Aviation Management Bureau was disclosed, seven section directors and one deputy bureau chief were found involved.⁴
• •More than a dozen officials at the Public Security Bureau in Qinghai Province were found guilty of corruption, including the bureau chief, deputy chief, deputy director of the province’s legal affairs office, and deputy general manager of a company affiliated with the bureau.⁵

These cases, and many more like them, testify to the fact that corruption in many instances takes the form of a collective undertaking. Why do people act collectively rather than singly in what is supposedly a secret exchange? How do they come to transcend or bypass institutional and legal boundaries in their collusion? To what extent does the collectivization of corruption alter the forms and characteristics of corruption, if not its very nature? What impact does collective corruption have on the overall efforts to curb corruption? This article tries to provide answers to these questions. It treats collective corruption as a distinctive form of social interaction among people dominated by individual calculations and a pursuit of personal interests. It extends the analysis of collective behavior to corruption and argues that an aggregation of individual pursuits of self-interest can yield similar claims and behavior patterns. Collective corruption serves as a good case to study how unorganized interests generate collective behavior and how collaboration becomes a powerful weapon in seeking private gains.This article opens with a definition of collective corruption. It then discusses the socio-economic and psychological roots of collective corruption and offers interpretative remarks on how and why collective corruption rapidly spreads in China. In so doing, it portrays the characteristics of collective corruption as a distinctive form of collective behavior. The findings of this article illustrate how corruption is evolving as its actors, forms, and characteristics actively respond to social and economic changes, especially under the construct of a hybrid of state socialism and capitalism in today’s China.     

‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual,black musics,and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.     

Social Class: Perception and Reality

Middle class is a social construct and a moniker so central to the identity politics of the United States that it has become a persistent part of the rhetoric of both major political parties. This article seeks to understand how the way in which people categorize themselves in social class matches the observable characteristics that might be used to objectively classify them into such groups. This article examines survey data from a national poll and finds that a majority of the respondents consider themselves members of the middle class. While those in the lowest and highest income categories are less likely to categorize themselves as middle class (controlling for other factors), many in these groups also consider themselves middle class.     

The Soviet and the Post-Soviet: Street Names and National Discourse in Almaty

Abstract

While discussing Kazakhstan's post-Soviet identity, scholars treat ‘Kazakhisation’ as a given, and the substance of the process of developing such an identity is usually ignored. This article gives an insight into this process by analysing the politics of street names in Almaty and its relation to collective memory in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It is argued that the so-called ‘Kazakhisation’ of the country has been shaped primarily by the Soviet legacy, and it is in no sense pursuing the elimination of the Soviet past, or moving essentially anti-Russian lines. In fact, the post-Soviet discourse of the Kazakh nation is not a rupture but a continuation of Soviet discourses.     

Relationships,significations, and orientations toward a collective acting of the Afro descendants and Africans in Argentina

In this work, we will analyze the collective actions of Afro descendants and Africans in Argentina regarding social movements (SMs). That is, we intend to understand the relationships, significations, and orientations toward collective action. Following Alberto Melucci's approach, we should not consider SMs as an ‘empiric unit’ but an ‘analytical category’, through which it may be possible to understand Afro-Argentine collective social action. The SMs are social constructions, and their work should be analyzed as a result, not as a starting point. We consider an SM as instituting, not as instituted, as a form of collective action oriented toward the construction of a new identity. Individuals construct their objectives, make choices, and take action according to the perception of their environments in relation to the social expectations. Therefore, we understand an SM as a network formed by a wide variety of groups and individuals scattered but interconnected, a network submerged in the daily life and from where the collective identity and the links for action are structured.     

‘We are this hybrid’: Members’ search for organizational identity in an institutionalized public–private partnership

There has been significant scholarly interest in organizational hybridity, the combination of multiple institutional logics in one entity. However, the extant research has mainly studied the implications for organizations and individuals, neglecting the challenges for organizational members as a collective. To mitigate, this article examines how members of a British institutionalized public–private partnership grapple with the question of what their organization may be, highlighting the confusion they are experiencing and their attempts to overcome it. Drawing on the concept of organizational identity (theorized as the outcome of collective sensemaking), the analysis identifies two mechanisms that recursively connect the organization and its members. Relational positioning draws on possible configurations of institutional logics and associated identity resources while discursive framing captures members’ hopes and expectations. The main contribution of this article is a better understanding of collective sensemaking in hybrid organizations in the light of institutional complexity.     

Disaffection and Revolts in Nigeria During the First World War, 1914–1918

In 2012, roughly 23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Religious responses to the disease have ranged from condemnation of people with HIV to the development of innovative AIDS-related services. This article utilises insights from the social movement literature about collective identity, framing, resources, and opportunity structures to interrogate religious mobilisation against HIV/AIDS. It demonstrates that mobilisation cannot be divorced from factors such as state–civil society relations, Africa's dependence on foreign aid, or the continent's poverty. Religious HIV/AIDS activities must be analysed in a conceptual space between a civil society/politics approach and a service-provider/anti-politics framework. That is, religious mobilisation may at times seek to engage the public realm to shape policies, while at other times it may shun politics in its provision of services. Case studies that illustrate these themes and demonstrate the multi-faceted interactions between religion and HIV/AIDS are included.     

An International Perspective on the African Famines

This article examines the practice of male circumcision among the migrant Yao people in Zimbabwe with the goal of showing circumcision's importance as a platform for social mobilisation against HIV and AIDS. The work looks at how the practice has health benefits and creates a new form of identity to fight AIDS. It therefore examines the role of the rite in the creation of a collective Yao identity that facilitates mobilisation against the pandemic within the community. This mobilisation is a complex and contentious process, which involves various levels of negotiation, reconstruction and reconfiguration of Yao identity and the circumcision practice (the surgical act and teachings about it), both within and outside the group. The article argues that the practice can be viewed as a form of an African social movement that is largely driven by a complex but self-conscious collective identity and is also induced by the global donor interest in the circumcision–AIDS debate.     

Collective memory and reputational politics of national heroes and villains

The politics of memory plays an important role in the ways certain figures are evaluated and remembered, as they can be rehabilitated or vilified, or both, as these processes are contested. We explore these issues using a transition society, Georgia, as a case study. Who are the heroes and villains in Georgian collective memory? What factors influence who is seen as a hero or a villain and why? How do these selections correlate with Georgian national identity? We attempt to answer these research questions using a newly generated data set of contemporary Georgian perspectives on recent history. Our survey results show that according to a representative sample of the Georgian population, the main heroes from the beginning of the twentieth century include Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Ilia Chavchavadze, and Patriarch Ilia II. Eduard Shevardnadze, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Vladimir Putin represent the main villains, and those that appear on both lists are Mikheil Saakashvili and Joseph Stalin. We highlight two clusters of attitudes that are indicative of how people think about Georgian national identity, mirroring civic and ethnic conceptions of nationalism. How Georgians understand national identity impacts not only who they choose as heroes or villains, but also whether they provide an answer at all.     

The People Are Missing: Cramped Space,Social Relations,and the Mediators of Politics

This article investigates the place of social relations in Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of ‘cramped space’, a figure integral to their ‘minor politics’. Against social and political theories that seek the source of political practice in a collective identity, the theory of cramped space contends that politics arises among those who lack and refuse coherent identity, in their encounter with the impasses, limits, or impossibilities of individual and collective subjectivity. Cramped space, as Deleuze puts it, is a condition where ‘the people are missing’. This is not, however, a condition of asocial isolation, but one full of social relations; the loss of identity is a condition comprised only of social relations. The ramifications of this thesis are here explored through Marx’s critique of citizenship, the socio-historical conjuncture of cramped space in relation to the ‘communization’ problematic, and the Palestinian mediator of sumud.     

Common Foreign and Security Policy Alignment in the Southern Caucasus: Convergence, ‘Pick and Choose’ or Indifference?

This article examines the issue of Common Foreign and Security Policy alignment—a procedure by which governments from the European Union's neighbourhood may support previously adopted Common Foreign and Security Policy documents. It provides a comparative theory test of Common Foreign and Security Policy alignment in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In doing so it seeks to elucidate why they engage in alignment as well as how cross-country and cross-issue variance can be theorised. After reviewing the explanatory potential of power-based and sociological institutionalist theory, domestic variables are assessed. The essay shows that, contrary to frequently expressed assumptions, convergence is even possible in less institutionalised high politics fields. But it emphasises that it is largely conditioned by domestic institutional configurations, the preferences of individual or collective actors and overall state gains.     

Defining Corruption Where the State is Weak: The Case of Papua New Guinea

Corruption is often defined as the abuse of public office for private gain. This article suggests that this is inadequate for understanding corruption in weak states and presents two broader definitions of the concept. It discusses findings from qualitative and quantitative research conducted in Papua New Guinea in light of these definitions. Respondents – particularly the poor and marginalised – saw corruption as tied to the actions of public officials as well as non-state actors. It is argued that applying broader definitions of corruption could help researchers and policy makers better understand citizens’ concerns about corruption, particularly where the state is weak.     

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN VOLUNTARY ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMMES: A FUZZY SET QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Voluntary Environmental Programmes (VEPs) have become increasingly popular in addressing environmental risks. While VEPs have attracted much scholarly attention, little is known about how they achieve their outcomes. This article seeks to better understand whether and how the roles of governments in VEPs affect their outcomes in terms of (1) attracting participants, and (2) their contribution to a desired collective end. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this article addresses a series of 31 VEPs in the building sectors of Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Of particular interest is a better understanding of what configurations of five specific governmental roles in VEPs are sufficient to attract participants and contribute to a desired collective end. Three ideal type roles for governments in VEPs, that are positively related to the two outcomes under scrutiny, are uncovered, and the article concludes with lessons on how governments may be best involved in VEPs.     

The neoliberal discourse on corruption as a means of consent building: reflections from post-crisis Turkey

This article draws attention to the ideological role that the neoliberal discourse on corruption has fulfilled in the promotion of the second generation reforms in Southern countries since the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. This discourse is ahistoric insofar as it fails to recognise corruption as a problem of modernity; biased insofar as it associates corruption with Southern countries' historical and cultural specificities only; contradictory in terms of its counter-productive anti-corruption strategies; and politicised as it has redefined ‘corruption’ as ‘rent-seeking’. In the absence of alternative radical conceptualisations, this essentially competition-induced neoliberal orthodoxy on corruption has been easily articulated within morality-based popular concerns in domestic politics and hence acquired a hegemonic capability. The article substantiates these arguments by examining the trajectory of the neoliberal anti-corruption agenda in Turkey with a particular focus on the developments of the post-2001 financial crisis period.     

The religious factor in the reification of “neo-ethnic” identities in Kyrgyzstan

This paper studies how religions, Islam in particular, play a part in the attempted reifications of “neo-ethnic” identities in Kyrgyzstan, a Turkic-speaking republic with a nomadic tradition and a Muslim majority (Hanafî Sunni Islam). In a context characterized by brutal transformations (decline in living standards, widening social inequalities, etc.) and by an increasingly failing central state whose autocratic rule appears ineffective, Islam intervenes as a paradoxical resource that is subjected to contrary uses. The traditional social link between collective identity and Islam is in fact reinvested ideologically within the framework of the new state construction. As a result a key question is what function the re-emergence of religion on the Kyrgyz political scene fulfils, especially considering broad disenchantment with politics. Islam is first re-emphasized as a national element by the authorities and, in the process, it becomes the subject of a drive towards territorialization that aims at erasing any transnational and/or pan-Islamist dimension from this universalist religion. Yet Islam and ethnicity are reinvested again in a new mode, the mode of subjectivization of religious belief, which gives rise, outside state control, to overlapping and often contradicting Islamic identities.     

Weep for the One Who Descends? African Democracies,Politics of Stomach Infrastructure,and Homology of Corruption

This article discusses contemporary African democratic practices vis-à-vis politics of stomach infrastructure that debilitates sustainable infrastructural development in the region. In this article, clarifications are articulated within four interlinked phenomena: the enthusiasm for democracy, its collapse, and the resurgence of hybrid-democratic order that metamorphosed into politics of stomach infrastructure that facilitates corruption in African postcolonial state. It unravels the existing democratic prototype against ideal democratic order. The article considered the prevailing democratic inclination moseyed through citizens and political elite’s armistice that presage democratic peril. The article argued that unscrupulous political collaboration and democratic debauchery that exist between the political elites and the electorates craft an opportunity for institutionalized corruption in the region. Finally, the article found homogenous paradigms of corruption in the selected African states, including South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria.     

The institutionalization of identity: Micro adaptation, macro effects, and collective consequences

Constructivist approaches to the emergence and stability of collective identities are now widely accepted. But few of the assumptions of constructivist theory regarding repertoires of identities and their mutability in response to changing circumstances have been examined or even articulated. The article shows how different conditions of a fluid and changing environment affect the stabilization or institutionalization of an identity as dominant within a polity. We used the Agent-Based Identity-Repertoire (ABIR) model as a simulation tool and confined our attention to relatively simple identity situations. Strong evidence was found for the emergence of identity institutionalization, the existence of a “crystallization” threshold, the effectiveness of divide-and-rule strategies for the maintenance of an identity as dominant, the efficacy of a network of organic intellectuals, and hegemonic levels of institutionalization. Thresholds leading to hegemony were not observed. Preliminary results from experiments examining more complex identity situations have been corroborative. Ian S. Lustick is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author ofUnsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank/Gaza. His current research involves development and expansion of agent-based modeling techniques for the study of identity politics, learning, globalization, and terrorism. Dan Miodownik is a doctoral candidate in the University of Pennsylvania Department of Political Science. His dissertation integrates statistical, historical, and agent-based modeling techniques to explore the relationship between changing communications technologies and competition among identity projects in Europe.     

Europeanization, Whitehall Culture and the Treasury as Institutional Veto Player: A Constructivist Approach to Economic and Monetary Union

This article examines Europeanization in Whitehall, using EMU as a case study. It argues that how the EMU policy community has developed within Whitehall, and its outcomes, cannot be captured using a narrow, rationalist game-theoretic frame-work. Although strategic behaviour is important, as Dyson and Featherstone (1999) argue, the primary question is how Whitehall players have defined British interests, formed a collective identity and given a specific meaning to the EMU game. The article applies a cultural approach to Whitehall, focusing on the macro structures of belief within which EMU policy is made.     

Politicization of identity in a European borderland: Istria,Croatia, and authenticity, 1990–2003

In most studies of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, identity politics focuses on nationalism. Unfortunately, very few examine regional identities and how they too are politicized in similar ways for similar reasons. Istria provides a good example of how identity is politicized and how and why individuals adapt it to both internal and external influences. While in the past local and regional identities were politicized in response to colonization, more recently national divisions became more prominent. However, in the very recent past, Istrian identity again became politicized as many natives drew lines between themselves and what they saw as an external national influence emanating from Zagreb. In the 1990s, a renewed Croatian national movement competed with an Istrian regional movement. Istrian regionalists, seeking to justify taking and maintaining regional power and hoping to more quickly bring Croatia into the European Union, used this new political tactic against the nationalizing Croatian government. While both the nationalists and the regionalists claimed the other side's ideology was foreign to Istria, in actuality both have historical roots in the region. Though the competition was not as virulent as in past episodes of nationalist tension between Italians and Croats, it does fit a pattern of continuity in the region.