Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global

Kim, Hun

doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12951

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…In the wake of the post-Washington Consensus, a rising global anti-corruption industry promoted neoliberal governmental reforms by locating corruption in the public sector, imagining it as endemic to the global south, proposing legalistic and technical reforms, and avoiding confronting elite alliances of power, ultimately preparing ground for Western-driven market expansion (Hindess, 2005; Bukovansky, 2006). An emerging body of work evaluates the social lives of corruption, including as a contested analytic (Goldstein and Drybread, 2018), a “infrastructure” of political-economic action (Kim, 2020) and a repertoire of profiteering practices intertwined with capitalist social relations (Tucker, 2020). Corruption is ordinary, compiling the quotidian practices of actors throughout the field of power called the state (Gupta, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marielle’s seeds: Contesting the emotional life of corruption talk in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Tucker

Melo

2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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In this paper, we argue the emotional life of corruption narratives underwrite the rise of the extreme Right in Brazil. Further, we argue that the talk of corruption is pervasive, polysemic, contested, racialized and emotional. It is deeply entwined with social struggles over the form, content and ends of political life. Drawing on this perspective, we analyze discourses of corruption in the wake of a seismic corruption scandal, Operation Lava Jato. We identify two competing narratives of corruption. The hegemonic form uses emotions to create political enemies, promote anti-Black punitivism and uphold social hierarchies. In contrast, a counternarrative of corruption rooted in Black feminist epistemology centers racialized spatial inequality as Brazil’s central challenge and offers pathways to reclaim political life from punitive neoliberalism. We contribute by specifying how the emotional life of corruption talk helps build support for Jair Bolsonaro’s cross-class project of revanchist populism. Ultimately, we argue that the Right has successfully mobilized corruption talk in the service of necropolitics.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marielle’s seeds: Contesting the emotional life of corruption talk in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Tucker

Melo

2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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“…The use of gifts and facilitation payments are common when dealing with frontline civil servants (World Bank, 2013). Giang and Pheng (2015) and Kim (2020) also demonstrate that the corruption system has evolved into an infrastructure and determines how the resources are allocated. The Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) 2013 shows that grand corruption by top officials (such as kickbacks on procurement contracts) has increased over time.…”

Section: The Vietnam Contextmentioning

confidence: 98%

Does corruption grease or sand the wheels of firm productivity? Evidence of a non-linear relationship from a firm-level analysis in Vietnam

Ha,

Nguyen Chau,

Pham

et al. 2023

JES

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PurposeThis analysis examines the relationship between corruption and firm productivity in Vietnam.Design/methodology/approachThe authors apply the system generalized method of moments estimation approach on a panel dataset constructed from comprehensive enterprise surveys covering all the sectors over the 2011–2020 period.FindingsThe results confirm a non-linear relationship between corruption and firm productivity. Where corruption is severe, leaving corruption alone tends to benefit firm productivity because efforts to control corruption are likely to cause greater delays. In less corrupt provinces, corruption appears to harm firm productivity while efforts to control corruption provide significant productivity gains. This U-shaped relationship is confirmed for small firms and those in the private sector sub-samples. Intriguingly, this study reveals that the U-shaped relationship does not apply to micro, medium, large firms, state-owned firms and foreign-invested firms because corruption is found to have no significant impact on productivity among these sub-samples. Changes in regulations after 2014 toward promoting a transparent business environment are shown to foster the positive impact of lowering corruption on firm productivity.Research limitations/implicationsThis study suggests that lowering corruption is beneficial for firm productivity at the micro level. However, where corruption is severe, monitoring corruption alone is likely to cause adverse effects on productivity due to increased bureaucratic delays. Institutional reforms might play an important role in leveraging the effects of lowering corruption on productivity in highly corrupt areas.Originality/valueThis paper sheds new light on the relationship between corruption and firm productivity in the broad existing literature and especially in the limited number of studies for Vietnam.

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“…As economic tides changed in the 2000s, reducing the need for self-building and increasing state capacity to pursue orderly, modern urban development, the locus of insurgency shifted to the periurban fringe and sharply diverged from the national state’s new ideology of economic development embodied in the consumerist trappings of sleek, orderly KĐTMs. Local practice was then reshaped by a new set of incentives brought by KĐTMs and their developers: the infrastructure of corruption that animates Vietnamese urban development (Kim, 2020) has made the enforcement of expropriation a priority for the local state regardless of the resistance it routinely incurs. These incentives align perfectly with the national state’s ideological image of urban and rural development: building an orderly city and phasing out subsistence agriculture.…”

Section: The Ambivalence Of the Developmentalist Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Ambivalent insurgencies: Citizenship, land politics and development in Hanoi and its periurban fringe

Brakke

2023

Urban Studies

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This article examines the Vietnamese state’s ambivalence towards insurgent assertions of urban citizenship in and around Hanoi. In the 1980s and 1990s, it tolerated the lawbreaking construction of self-built housing in the city centre and eventually extended self-builders land use rights for their extralegal claims. In the 2000s and 2010s, however, the state violently cracked down on periurban villagers using insurgent strategies to resist the expropriation of their agricultural land for master-planned real estate developments. I suggest that the insurgency of self-builders precipitated a regime of graduated land use rights wherein the informal, extralegal claims of self-builders have been more respected than the formal, legal claims of periurban villagers. I ultimately argue that the state’s ambivalent responses to insurgency result from its pursuit of a materially shifting ideology of developmentalism. I also find that the success of insurgency derives from how the interests of citizens, the local state and the national state align and realign with one another.

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Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global

Cited by 12 publications

References 41 publications

Marielle’s seeds: Contesting the emotional life of corruption talk in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Marielle’s seeds: Contesting the emotional life of corruption talk in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Does corruption grease or sand the wheels of firm productivity? Evidence of a non-linear relationship from a firm-level analysis in Vietnam

Ambivalent insurgencies: Citizenship, land politics and development in Hanoi and its periurban fringe

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