On an applicability of the concept of border in studying corruption

Bartosz Czepil

University of Opole, Institute of Political Science
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4907-795X

Abstract

Since the 90s of XXth century we have observed a significant increase of the interest in the issue of corruption, what was reflected in the scientific investigation over the phenomenon. The last decade of the XX century was also the period when the problem of borders and borderlands has been rediscovered as the central to the processes accompanying human kind at the end of the millennium. It must be noticed that both the higher interest in corruption and the interest in borders are determined by the same conditions of the 90s. A globalization, the another wave of democratization and collapse of the Soviet Union have created new, structural opportunities for corruption and redefinition of political borders, the latter being for a long time frozen within the Cold War order. Despite a similarity of the determinants inspiring to more systematic analysis of corruption and borders, both of these phenomena are usually recognized as a separate researched fields. However, there are some ‘meeting points’ where research on these phenomena are intertwined, clearly embedding corruption in the context of borders. It seems that what these research have in common is the domination of a such framework of thinking about corruption and borders where the nexus between corruption and borders is located, both in institutional and theoretical terms, on a state border. The thesis proposed in this article states that the above presented perspective in the analysis of the nexus between corruption and borders does not cover multidimensional relations between these phenomena, because the diversity of forms of corruption and the variety of ways in which borders are understood within the field of border studies, provide much wider perspective for analyzing relations between these polymorphic categories. The author presents two different approaches to studying these relations and proposes some research questions corresponding with each of these approaches. In the first approach a phenomenon of corruption is constituted by boundaries being constructed in public discourse – they can be changed, negotiated and contested by different actors of given political system. Thereby, corruption is a product of bordering process. According to the second approach a corruption is a phenomenon causing construction of borders, because it can lead to the emergence of the dirty togetherness, with its invisible boundaries of inclusion (corrupt insiders) and exclusion (non-corrupt outsiders). In this case the socially constructed and preserved boundaries are products of corruption.

Keywords:

corruption, borders, borderland, bordering