TAFAHUC15U How to understand ’Corruption’: policy making and the socio-cultural aspects of economic practices

Since the 1990’s corruption has become a key notion in development politics. Policy making actors seem to have an implicit agreement about what corruption is about and how to eradicate it. As Anti-corruption politics have become a condition for receiving development aid, almost every African country now has an anti-corruption commission or at least a clearly formulated policy on the subject. During the last decades, the academic study of corruption has developed from being essentially an object of political science and economics to occupying an important place within anthropology and related disciplines. Whereas those first disciplines focus mainly on quantitative data, models of governance and state building, the latter highlights the importance of understanding local meanings of practices labelled ’corruption’.

The course aims at providing students with an overview of the multiple approaches to the topic and an understanding of the conceptual contribution of each discipline. The focus will be on both the development within each discipline and trends within current research. Through the course we will discuss how different academic fields contribute to our understanding of “corruption”, but also how the academic study of corruption often opens up new understandings of social, economic and political structures in Africa that may be relevant for both academic perspectives and for actors in the field.

The course will combine readings from anthropology, political science and development studies as well as (to a lesser extend) economics. The readings will be both theoretical and empirically oriented literature (with case studies from West and East/Southern Africa).