Ethics or the Right Thing?

Front matter

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Chapter 1. Kupang, the Giving City

Chapter 2. Corruption as Caring Responsibility Chapter 3. Between the Ethical and the Right Thing Chapter 4. Poetics and Poiesis

Chapter 5. Reading the Bidding Books

Conclusion vii

Acknowledgements

It is unimaginable to me now, that I ever thought that writing a book would mean starting with the first sentence and ending with the last. I have found that the process of writing a monograph is nothing like I once envisioned, which was something akin to a competitive skier making her way down an Alpine slope. Surely, she might expect some troublesome obstacles during her descent but, eventually and inevitably, a combination of natural ability and gravity would get her past the finish line in a speedy fashion. I have since learned that there is nothing inevitable—nor speedy—about the process. I also realized that natural ability, in fact, means hard work and practice. Most importantly, I now know that the force of gravity that finally gets you to writing that final sentence (which, incidentally, is likely nowhere near the final page of the book) actually consists of the influence, insights, support, and love given by many people along the way. I owe them all a tremendous debt of gratitude for the completion of this book.

Care and family form the central thread of the story in this book, but also in my own life. Many of the insights regarding the importance of a caring responsibility towards intimate others, as well as the fragility of family ties comes from being a part of a tight-knit extended family myself. For reasons of brevity, I cannot thank every one of you, so I will limit myself to my awe-inspiring aunties: Jannie, Francesca, Martha, Jacqueline, Patricia, and Suzanne. Being accustomed to having strong aunties made doing fieldwork in Kupang feel almost like a homecoming, for there I found myself absorbed into another loving network of aunties. Lele, Ince, and Tina: thank you for welcoming me into your homes and lives, and for teaching me how to not be an idiot.

Ethics or the Right Thing?

I would furthermore like to give Melan, Remon, Ongen, Om Adi, and Nabila an emphatic cium Savu for all the kindness you have shown me. I would like to give an especially heartfelt thank you to Opa Leo Nisnoni and Rudi Rohi, for their friendship, companionship, and engaging conversations.

The dissertation project on which this book builds formed one part of a much larger ambitious research program funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, In Search of Middle Indonesia. I will forever be grateful for the endless patience my two supportive advisors, Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken, showed me throughout my Ph.D trajectory. I am also thankful for all the scholars connected to the program for fostering a truly unique collaborative atmosphere: Basri Amin, Wenty Minza, Suzanne Naafs, Amalinda Savirani, Patricia Spyer, Ben White, Mario Rutten, Mohtar Mas’oed, Pratikno, Tamrin Amal Tomagola, Cornelis Lay, Pujo Semedi, Ratna Saptari, Bart Barendregt, Gerben Nootebom, Noorhaidi Hasan, Erwan Purwanto, Joe Errington, Chris Brown, and Jane Newberry.

At the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, where I completed my Ph.D and postdoc, I would like to express my thanks in particular to Anita Hardon, Tina Harris, Niko Besnier, Ward Berenschot, Michiel Baas, Annemarie Samuels, Lex Kuiper, Stine Grinne, Oliver Human, and Megan Raschig.

I also want to thank my colleagues at the University of Virginia, where I have been fortunate enough to have found several welcoming academic homes. In the Department of Anthropology, I am especially grateful to the mentorship provided by China Scherz, Adria LaViolette, Eve Danziger, Kath Weston, and Lise Dobrin. In the Global Studies Program, I thank Richard Handler, Phoebe Crisman, Tess Farmer, David Edmunds, Gabi Kruks-Wisner, Pete Furia, and Helena Zeweri for their support. I also want to thank my fellow members of the CLEAR-Lab, especially David Singerman, Dan Gingerich, Sandip Sunkhtankar, Mike Gilbert, and Deborah Hellman, for offering a stimulating interdisciplinary setting for thinking about corruption.

Some of the most invigorating contexts for the pursuit of scholarly curiosity are unexpected ones. The 2016 Wenner-Gren symposium on the anthropology of corruption is one such example. I want to thank Akhil Gupta, Sarah Muir, Aaron Ansell, Diana Bocarejo, Ilana Feldman, Kregg Hetherington, Julia Hornberger, Smoki Musaraj, David Nugent, John Osburg, Italo Pardo, Jane Schneider, Anu Sharma, Cris Shore, Alan Smart, and Dan Smith, for a truly rewarding and joyful few

Acknowledgements days in Sintra. I hope that you recognize parts of your own work and our thinking together in this book.

Another such context that showed me how to combine intellectual pursuits with joy is the one I will refer to as “Team Phenomenology,” which is the moniker given to the weekly Zoom gatherings for those with phenomenological inclinations, which was initiated by the phenomenal Jason Throop in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. I will borrow this term to refer to that ragtag group of anthropologists, who have come together in various formations in various workshops and panels, and AAA hotel bars, and who share an interest in phenomenological anthropology and similar pursuits. Besides Jason, I give my heartfelt thanks to Ellie Ochs, Sandro Duranti, Joel Robbins, Cheryl Mattingly, Bob Desjarlais, Linda Garro, Doug Hollan, Jarrett Zigon, Abby Mack, Aidan-Seale Feldman, Yael Assor, Devin Flaherty, Christopher Stephan, Thomas Schwartz-Wentzner, Rasmus Dyring, and Cre.

I also want to express my gratitude to another intellectually indispensable group of people, most of whom tend to remain invisible to an author: editors and peer reviewers. I will always remember and appreciate the time and effort Tom Boellstorff and Niko Besnier took to teach a very junior scholar how to improve article manuscripts. I hope to be able to emulate the academic generosity you extended to me. I also want to thank Vita Peacock for being a responsive and supportive editor throughout the process of developing this manuscript. Finally, and in spite of the many popular jokes about “reviewer two,” I want to thank all the anonymous reviewers who have offered constructive criticism and helpful reviews of my work. I have learned so much about writing, structuring, and arguing a point from your mostly uncompensated willingness to help a fellow scholar. I intend to be equally helpful to those on whose manuscripts I have the fortune of giving input.

I am also forever grateful to my longtime friends, who at this point feel like family. Kim and Rosalie, I cannot wait for our next trip. I am lucky to count you as my friends. Yenkit, Dylan, Waiman, Claudio, Mart, and Koen: I know I can count on your Groninger down-to-earthiness and ruthless mocking to keep me grounded always. Sanne, Marloes, my sounding board, Annemarie, Mila, Maria, Brigid, Josh, Antonia, Natalie, and Eric: thank you for your enduring friendship.

I want to express my gratitude to my closest family members, to whom I owe everything. I want to thank my dad, Michael, for passing on his stubborn defiance to me. I thank my mom, Chris, for showing me that life can always get better. I want to thank my parents-in-law, Sandy,

Ethics or the Right Thing?

David, and Janelle, for giving me a family on this side of the Atlantic. I want to thank Flora, Gino, Shainy, and AJ for reminding me that family takes unexpected shapes and forms. I thank Bianca and Naresh, for reminding me, and their daughters, what a loving home looks like. And to my nieces, the amazing Rani and Nisha: I am honored to be your fante. Being an aunt is a great responsibility. I promise to channel the very best of all the great aunties I have had in my life to love and encourage you.

Finally, to Jarrett Zigon, who is always already the ultimate love of my life. My /ekker ding. Thank you for embarking on an unconventional life path with me. Thank you for agreeing that family is where we—and a certain fluffy cat named Lucy—are. I never imagined life could be this good. Thank you for knowing that, in the end, love might really just be all we need.

xii

The trial begins on Wednesday, February 25, 2014. The small room in Kupang’s Corruption Court is packed.’ Standing trial is Daniel Adoe, who served as the mayor of Kupang between 2007 and 2012. Family members of the accused, most of whom have not been able to meet with him since his arrest and detainment months before, are eager to show their support and offer the comfort of their physical presence. Many journalists have also gathered to cover the city’s biggest corruption case to date. Photos from Pos Kupang, the local newspaper covering the trial closely, shows a frail, stooped, grey-haired man who bears little resemblance to the virile, black-haired, confidence-exuding victor of Kupang’s first-ever direct mayoral elections, one who ran on a pro-democracy and anti-corruption platform less than a decade earlier. Adoe’s claims of ill health impede the start of the trial several times and will continue to obstruct any smooth and swift court activities in the months to come. Indeed, a mere thirty minutes into the reading of the indictment, Adoe raises his hand to request a suspension of the proceedings due, again, to illness. The judge acquiesces and adjourns the session. Adoe shuffles

1. Pengadilan Tindak Pidana Korupsi, or TiPiKor for short. After the establishment a successful anti-corruption court in Jakarta (2004), the national legislature formed TiPiKor throughout Indonesia in 2011. Many of these regional corruption courts have been criticized by civil society organizations for perpetuating corruption (Butt 2012a).

Ethics or the Right Thing?

out of the courtroom, one arm supported by his daughter, the other by a court employee.’

Adoe was charged, along with thirteen others, with the embezzlement of IDR 1.4 billion ($100,000) in state funds that were supposed to be used for the procurement of books by the Department of Education, Youth, and Sports. According to the testimony of an auditor from the Financial Supervisory and Development Board,’ far more money was put aside for the procurement of those books than their actual cost, the difference going into the pockets of those involved. The others charged include various city-level government officials, members of the procurement committee tasked with evaluating competing bids, and the contractor who eventually won the contract. Adoe was facing the most severe indictments since the prosecution accused him of having abused his official position by, first, appointing all members of the procurement committee while lacking the official authority to do so, and, second, by influencing the committee in their determination of the winning contractor. The prosecution asked for a prison sentence of one year and three months as well as a fine of IDR 50 million ($3,575).

‘The final verdict by the panel of judges on July 10, 2014 turns out to be more severe than that. In addition to the fine, they also sentence him to prison for two-and-a-half years. The judges conclude that Adoe not only abused his position but did so at the expense of the state and thus deserved a longer prison sentence than what was requested by the prosecution.* After deliberating with his defense team for a few days, Adoe declines to appeal the verdict and accepts the sentence.

This account of Daniel Adoe’s fall from grace after rising to power on a wave of anti-corruption promises is an all too familiar one in Indonesia. Indonesia joined the so-called third wave of democratization (Huntington 1991) rather belatedly when President Suharto stepped down

2. In my description of the trial and its charges and verdict, I draw on the many articles published in the local newspaper, Pos Kupang (2013) and gathered on the website: “Alleged Corruption Around the Procurement of Books.”

3. ‘The board is known locally as the BPKP (Badan Pengawasan Keuangan dan Pembangunan).

4. Adoe was charged with violating Article 3 of Law No. 20/2001 regarding the abuse of one’s authority, opportunity, or position for the purpose of profiting on behalf of oneself, another, or a corporation in a way that harmed the state or the country’s economy.

from power in 1998 after more than three decades of authoritarian rule. This political transformation occurred, in part, because of mass student protests that demanded sweeping reforms, democratization, and an end to corruption (Biinte and Ufen 2009; Lee 2016; H. Schulte Nordholt and Hoogenboom 2006). To be more precise, they demanded an end to the unholy trinity of korupsi, kolusi, and nepotisme—better known by its popular acronym KKN. Suharto’s resignation ushered in a period of political reforms in promotion of democratization, or reformasi, under the ideological banner of “good governance,” a move prompted and supported by the wider international development and financial community.

In this process of reformation, combatting corruption took center stage. Structural measures to change the institutional framework in which corruption had become so entrenched were implemented (Robison 2006). These included a devolution of economic and political power from Jakarta to the provinces, a process that unfolded so rapidly that the World Bank labeled it Indonesias dig bang and turned the nation from “one of the most centralized systems in the world into one of the most decentralized” (Hofman and Kaiser 2004). In 1999, the Indonesian government also introduced parliamentary elections, liberalized press laws, and allowed political parties and trade unions to operate freely. In 2002, it established the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), auditing bodies, and anti-corruption courts. This otherwise impressive march toward democratization, however, has been accompanied by some undemocratic disappointments. Post-Suharto Indonesia has also seen a continuation of military influence, a consolidation of local oligarchies, a revival of ethnic and regional sentiments, and an inability to ensure the rule of law (Biinte 2009). The hoped-for transition to the liberal, democratic principles suggested by the idea of good governance seemed thwarted by a continuation of bad practices.

Indonesia’s predicament resonates with broader concerns about the state of democracy across the globe and the ways in which corruption threatens it. Over the last three decades, questions of ethics have informed international debates around governance, perhaps most obviously indicated by the good of the good governance approach. These questions have mostly been aimed at countries of the Global South and posed by international financial and development institutions attempting to help shape postcolonial state governments (Hough 2013; B. C. Smith 2007). In contrast, a concern with ethics did not figure prominently in earlier modernization efforts or structural adjustment policies during the Cold War era—Suharto’s unparalleled corruption and cronyism could

Ethics or the Right Thing?

go unchecked as long as Indonesia continued to experience economic growth and remained a staunch political ally of the United States.

The current preoccupation with the quality of governance carries an explicit ethical charge that characterizes post-Cold War liberalism more generally (Hetherington 2018; Guilhot 2005; Moyn 2010). This movement towards what former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, has termed “ethical globalization” (2003) is particularly clear in the context of military and humanitarian interventions, where the moral-political ideology exemplified by human rights and good governance has become the dominant mode of political imagining (Asad 2003; W. Brown 2001; Zigon 2013a). One consequence of this surge of global ethics (Sampson 2005) is that anti-corruption efforts have come to be seen as crucial for ensuring that newly democratized countries transition to a desired state of liberal democracy.

The supposed equivalence of anti-corruption, democracy, and the governmental good has proven to be, however, a tenuous one. Not only have anti-corruption efforts failed to deliver on their promise of curbing corruption around the world (Kaufmann 2009; Sampson 2009), the assumed equivalence of democracy and good governance does not even hold in the supposed heartlands of liberal democracy. Indeed, Western democracies are thought to be “in crisis,” “under threat,” “in decline,” or even “dying” (Levitsky and Zieblatt 2018; Przeworski 2019; Van Beek 2019). Their legal remedies for things like emoluments, collusion, and nepotism increasingly lag behind popular condemnations of such practices. In many democratic nations, the threat of authoritarianism seems evermore real. For these reasons, it is necessary to reassess the relationship between corruption, democracy, and the idea of good governance.

In taking on such a reassessment, this book is not a dismissal of the importance of problematizing corruption or trying to work towards a kind of good in governance. Indeed, given that dissatisfaction with corruption figures so prominently in people’s complaints about their governments all over the world (Muir and Gupta 2018), attending to the specifics of corruption offers valuable insights into existing visions of what counts as just, fair, and truly good in schemes of governance. The book is, therefore, an ethnographically grounded investigation into what the good in governance can look like outside of the dominant, contemporary configurations of ethical globalization that have become so hard to unsee and unthink.| turn to the effects of anti-corruption efforts in the nascent democracy of Indonesia to show how the good governance model itself enables a continuation of existing, as well as the emergence of novel forms, of corruption. Spurred by these unanticipated and contradictory effects I ask: what if anti-corruption efforts actually make governance worse? If we look beyond hegemonic understandings of corruption and conceptions of the governmental good, what shapes can good governance take and how does corruption figure within it?

I attend to these questions from the vantage points of civil servants— who are often considered to be the main culprits of everyday, petty corruption—in the Indonesian city of Kupang, the capital of the eastern Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara (Nusa Tenggara Timur, or NTT for short). At the time of my research in the late 2000s, Kupang was majority Christian with close to 300,000 inhabitants (BPS 2008: 35). While I was conducting my fieldwork in 2008, the international anti-corruption agency Transparency International awarded it the dubious title of being Indonesia’s most corrupt city. By attending to the social construction of corruption in the situated context of Kupang’s civil service, I argue that corruption is not antithetical to good governance or outside of processes of democratization, but rather, it is intimately implicated with them.

Corruption as Political Failure?

I first came to know Daniel Adoe in 2007 during his first year in office, when he graciously allowed me to conduct my ethnographic research on the effects of post-reformasi administrative changes within all city-level government offices. His unexpected victory seemed to signal a decisive break with the clientelism and favoritism that had characterized his predecessor's twenty-one years in office. Adoe had managed, against all odds, not only to defeat the favored candidate, who had the full support of the then mayor and the biggest political party behind him, but to do so with a supporting coalition of political parties that mostly consisted of Muslim parties. In a Christian majority city within a country with the world’s largest Muslim population, this was no small feat.

A popular concern with corruption played an important part in Adoe’s victory. People in Kupang were tired of the korupsi, kolusi, and nepotisme (KKN) they associated with the former mayor and his favored candidate, dismissively characterizing them as “corruption buddies” or “collusion buddies” (Tidey 2018). They preferred to cast their vote for a candidate who ran on an explicit anti-corruption platform and offered the promise of progress and to keep the city’s workings “clean.” Adoe’s election

Ethics or the Right Thing?

caused concern for those cronies who remained in city government and who now wondered how the unexpected change would affect their career advancement. For others, including poor market vendors, minibus drivers, and women doing laundry in the Dendeng River, Adoe’s election held the promise of progress—or at least something better.

Nevertheless, by the time I started my fieldwork during Adoe’s first year in office, traces of disappointment had started to cloud the initial excitement in Kupang. The disappointment was palpable among the civil servants with whom I spent much of my time. Some of their apprehension stemmed from the mayor’s perceived incompetence. But while being critical of Adoe’s political effectiveness, they were also engaging in self-reflection. As we have seen in, for example, Nigeria and India, (Gupta 1995; D. J. Smith 2007: 7-9), corruption narratives and complaints in Kupang were closely tied to the ways in which people tried to make sense of the state, city, and themselves. And in these processes of sense-making, civil servants found the city of Kupang, the province of East Nusa Tenggara, and Indonesia as a whole wanting, especially when compared to an idealized West, like the United States or the Netherlands, which they imagined to be “already developed” and “free from KKN.” Perhaps most difficult for them was what they concluded about themselves: the persistence of corruption in an age of anti-corruption, lower-level civil servants, department heads, and politicians would all claim, meant that people in Kupang were simply “still stupid” (masih bodoh) and “not yet ready” (belum siap) for a new, democratic state system.

‘These self-accusations reflected a general feeling of humiliation the Kupangese felt towards their own city and society. The province of East Nusa Tenggara is among Indonesia’s poorest. In 2011, it ranked thirtyfirst (out of thirty-four) on the country’s Human Development Index with almost a quarter of the population living below the national poverty line (WFP Indonesia 2013). People in East Nusa Tenggara joke that the acronym by which their province is known, NTT, actually stands for Nanti Tuhan Tolong (God will help later), Nasib Tak Tentu (unfixed/ uncertain fate), or Nusa Tetap Tertinggal (the island left behind). When Transparency International named Kupang Indonesia’s most corrupt city in 2008 (Melayu Online 2009; Tempo 2009), it confirmed the self- Orientalizing critique Kupangese already possessed—that they were, indeed, “still stupid” and “not yet ready” for democracy, a conclusion that prompted further reflections about the state of democracy in Indonesia in general. It was not just the people that were ill-prepared for democracy,

Kupangese would tell me. Kupang, NTT, and even Indonesia as a whole were simply “not yet developed” and “still transitioning.”

This view of Indonesia’s democratization process and the suspicion that corruption was to blame for the failure of the country’s development also captured a more general scholarly disappointment about the trajectory of the post-reformasi Indonesian state (Aspinall et al. 2020, Biinte and Ufen 2009; H. Schulte Nordholt and Hoogenboom 2006). In spite of far-reaching reforms to stimulate democratization, critics claim that instead of having achieved the preferred end-stage of meaningful or liberal democracy, Indonesia is stuck in a protracted transition. Its democracy is thus categorized as predatory, of low quality, and illiberal.* Of particular scholarly concern is the lingering influence of hierarchical power dynamics on contemporary Indonesian politics, variously described as clientelism, patrimonialism, or neo-patrimonialism, or the continuing presence of asymmetrical power relations. While there is some disagreement as to the extent to which this signals a continuation of more traditional power arrangements or suggests a particular modern reconfiguration of power and politics (e.g., Barker and Van Klinken 2009), the general consensus is that it interferes with achieving good governance. This is unsurprising, for hierarchical and asymmetrical power arrangements directly contradict liberal intellectual and political ideals, which consider individualism, freedom, and egalitarianism to be central to conceptions of meaningful personhood, justice, and the social good (Haynes and Hickel 2016; Piliavsky 2014). From this perspective, the possibility that hierarchy and patronage might be central to certain understandings of the good is absurd. The dissatisfaction and the related self-accusations people in Kupang voiced in the aftermath of reformasi thus fits well within the larger development narrative, in which corruption, and specifically the presumed inherent exploitative character of asymmetrical power relations, figures as the main obstacle to successful democratization.

5. ‘This description of Indonesia is seen in the work of Aspinall and Mietzner (2019); Bünte and Ufen (2009: 6-7); Diprose, McRae, and Hadiz (2019); Hadiz (2008); Malley (2000); Mietzner (2009); Robison (2002); and Törnquist (2008).

6. For examples of how these relations are used to view Indonesia’s protracted transition to flourishing liberal democratic conditions see Aspinall and Berenschot (2019); Choi (2009); Hadiz and Robison (2013); Schulte-Nordholt (2004); and Webber (2006).

Ethics or the Right Thing?

In many ways, the contemporary preoccupation with corruption as an impediment to good governance is not unique to Indonesia and fits within a more general post-Cold War liberalism (Guilhot 2005). However, we would be wise to remember that long before the current neoliberal interest in good governance, corruption functioned as the symptom of a vestigial pathology of the body politic, a condition that weakened processes of political liberalization (Hetherington 2018). Most notably, perhaps, it was used to explain the failure of those states that gained independence after World War II to achieve the end stages of capitalism and development as set out in modernization theory (Pierce 2016: 17). This explanation fit seamlessly with the long-held belief that corruption was endemic to the non-Western Other (2016: 10-12). In this sense, good governance and its emphasis on anti-corruption is but the latest re-enactment of a steadfast fantasy of progress that fuels the logic of liberalism (Edelman 2004; Zigon 2013a). Such fantasies of progress are projected not just temporally but also geographically onto non-Western elsewheres, with little questioning of the ethical assumptions that ground good governance, or how these assumptions compare with other ethical foundations of governance outside of liberalism. ‘These fantasies of progress, with their not-so-hidden ethical assumptions, have been central to establishing and maintaining global political-economic power dynamics and inequalities (e.g., Brown 2001; Guilhot 2005; Moyn 2010; Zigon 2017).

Perhaps paradoxically, Kupangese frequently use the familiar liberal language of development and democracy to articulate their complaints. Although this suggests that they hope to fulfill the fantasy of progress described above, the lived experience of this dissatisfaction and disappointment is much more complex. As Sarah Muir and Akhil Gupta (2018) have suggested, corruption might be best understood as a category of transgression. The transgressive character of corruption comes from its elision of definitions and evoking of questions about justice, equity, and appropriate relationships between power and economic resources. Viewed as such, the existent disappointment and dissatisfaction in Kupang capture how a program meant to improve governance in fact negatively impacts expectations of what counts as just, equitable, and good in connection to the distribution of resources. Complaints about corruption in Kupang, then, not only signal a failure of political transition, but more importantly a transgression of care; a dereliction of the caring responsibility of the state to ensure possibilities for its people to forge worthwhile lives. Good governance, in short, makes life worse.

The Rise of Good Governance

A particular vision of the good began to take shape in international policy circles during the years before Suharto’s resignation and then influenced the particular administrative form of Indonesia during the reformasi years. The Indonesian concern with corruption dovetailed with a renewed interest that international development institutions displayed toward corruption in the 1990s, in which anti-corruption efforts came to be closely tied to good governance (Guilhot 2005). For decades, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had little concern for corruption, favoring instead a strict economic approach to development.’ In Indonesia this meant that Suharto’s extravagant corruption could go uncontested, as long as Indonesia continued its economic development and remained an ally of Western powers in the Cold War.

However, with the end of the Cold War and the so-called victory of liberal democracy, and the recognition that modernization efforts and structural adjustment programs had failed to deliver stable markets and democratization, the focus of development shifted from the narrowly economic to the role of corruption and governance (Hough 2013, 12-30; B. C. Smith 2007: 1-16). The most dramatic denouncement of corruption happened when James Wolfensohn, then president of the World Bank, referred to the “cancer of corruption” in his address during the bank’s annual meeting on October 1, 1996. His speech and the subsequent launch of the Corruption Action Plan Working Group effectively solidified the importance of anti-corruption efforts for international development and financial institutions, where it had been steadily growing for a number of years. For example, the non-governmental organization Transparency International—known for its annual publications of the Corruption Perceptions Index and Bribe Payers Index—had been pushing for the necessity of attending to corruption since its foundation in 1993. Furthermore, the United Nations, IMF, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had also started to prioritize the importance of tackling corruption (Bukovansky 2006). By the late 1990s and early 2000s, most multilateral and nongovernmental

7. Although we should recall that political scientists deployed patrimonialism and neo-patrimonialism to explain the failure of African and Asian states to modernize in the 1970s and 1980s (see Joseph 1987a; Crouch 1979).

Ethics or the Right Thing?

organizations had incorporated anti-corruption as a central part of their rhetoric and reform programs.

The definitions of corruption that prominent international institutions generally employ tend to be markedly concise and characterize corruption in a Weberian vein—a transgression of the boundaries between the public and private realms.* For example, the World Bank describes corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain’; the IMF defines it as “the abuse of public power for private benefit”; Transparency International stresses “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’; and the OECD calls it “the active or passive misuse of the powers of public officials (appointed or elected) for private financial or other benefits” (Hough 2013: 2).

It is worth noting that despite the sheen of universality and timelessness exuded by such definitions, the understanding of corruption solely in terms of transgressing public-private boundaries is relatively new. As Bruce Buchan and Lisa Hill (2014) argue in their comprehensive overview of the changing usages and meanings of corruption throughout Western political thought, it was not until the late eighteenth-century that understandings of political corruption came to be restricted to the abuse of public office for private gain.’ Until that point, the rather narrow view of corruption as a matter of public office was accompanied by a more expansive definition of the “degenerative’—a general social,