Towards a critical geography of corruption and power in late capitalism

Abstract

Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption narratives become politicized and yoked to symbolic, material, and territorial regimes of power. We suggest that recent theories of urban informality provide a revealing lens into the ethico-politics and territorial struggles of contemporary capitalism across the North and South.

Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global

“…Here the implication is that dealing with corruption is more a form of political discipline than a systemic program. 1 Following Doshi and Ranganathan (2018), corruption cannot be positively or universally defined but instead is a 'normative discourse about the abuse of entrusted power' through which the workings of capitalism and the state become discursively politicized. More importantly, they grapple with a series of questions about corruption 1…”

Enhancing corporate standing, shifting blame: An examination of Canada's Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act

“…Canadian and foreign companies operating within Canada must report transfers to the Canadian government under the Act. However, as per Doshi and Ranganathan (2019) and Bratsis’(2014) positions above, Canadian state officials promoting the ESTMA were most concerned with monitoring transfers to foreign governments by Canadian companies as a means of deterring corruption. In principle, such reporting would enable citizens in foreign countries to hold their governments to account for transfers such as taxes and royalties paid by Canadian extractive companies to governments which did not accrue to broader public accounts (ibid).…”

“…Herein, critical race theory draws attention to how an investment in white supremacy entails justifying the overall impoverishment of Indigenous and racialized peoples through racist tropes. Scholars such as Doshi and Ranganathan (2019) and Bratsis (2014) discuss the roots of corruption discourse in modernization theory and orientalist and racist depictions of Global South governance. The EITI discourse of corporate ‘home’ state (Global North) and operational ‘host’ state (typically Global South), which characterized the initiative at its inception, set up an uneven application between extractive sites in the South and sites of corporate headquarters in the North, as Bracking (2009) delineates.…”

Global retail capital and urban futures: Feminist postcolonial perspectives

“…With growing middle classes, affordable land, competitive international investment tax rates, and other incentives, dramatic retail development now occurs in global south urban spaces (Moriarti et al, 2015; Sotunde, 2014). The activities of major multinational, national, and city‐level entities to address corruption and improve transparency, regularize taxation, and neoliberalize trade each also support these moves (Doshi & Ranganathan, 2018; Grunberg, 1998; Livingston et al, 2018; Martin & Beck, 2018). Indeed, global south cities are seeing the most growth in GRC investment, with African cities offering huge investment potential (kmgp.com/Africa, 2016).…”

“…Postcolonial work “provincializes” Europe and North America in theory‐making (Sheppard et al, 2013; following Chakrabarty, 2000). That is, it disrupts Anglo Euroamerican norms of modernity, rationality, and universality that infuse (even critical) arguments about, say, “planetary urbanization,” “global cities,” and the “urban age” (Doshi & Ranganathan, 2018; Roy, 2011b). It attends to global south realities, frames of thinking, and methodologies (e.g., Doshi, 2013; Ghertner, 2014; Roy, 2011a; Sequera & Janoschka, 2015), largely deemed “off the map…structurally irrelevant to the commanding heights of the global economy” (Roy, 2011b, p. 10).…”