Corruption and Global Justice

Corruption and Global Justice begins with the observation that, although corruption has long been considered one of the world's most pressing social problems, it has so far not been the focus of many global justice theorists. With her new book, Gillian Brock aims to overcome this deficit. Brock shies away from clearly defining corruption, emphasizing that it is pervasive in both poor and rich countries, which she illustrates with a broad range of striking cases, including in health research and application, international financial flows, the sale of resources, and the construction and water sectors. The book explores not only various contexts where corruption is rife but also existing approaches and initiatives that seek to curb it, such as those by NGOs like the Water Integrity Network, multistakeholder initiatives like the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST), and international agreements like the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC). Through the compilation of a broad range of empirical material and extensive references to the literature on corruption, Brock provides a useful overview for the general reader who wishes to become familiar with a multifaceted problem that is rampant in our world. Most of the book's chapters pair empirical and normative diagnoses. Chapter 2, for example, contains a case study of corruption in the water sector as well as more abstract reflections on the importance of local agency, the empowerment of the poor, the inclusion of marginalized groups in political decision-making, and of fair and accountable state institutions. Chapter 3 contains brief abstract reflections on human rights as standards of justice and references international agreements that can be regarded as efforts to implement them, such as the Sustainable Development Goals. Chapter 4 outlines in very general terms some features of “good institutional design” (p. 76), including accountability and transparency, and points to the importance of “appropriate ethical and professional standards” (p. 77), “controlling conflicts of interests” (p. 78), and “independent monitoring and oversight” (p. 79), before mentioning some “social action coalitions” such as the Fifth Pillar campaign in India (pp. 81–3). Chapter 5 is entirely empirical, as it is dedicated to contemporary “corruption-curbing tools” such as the UNCAC, which Brock considers a milestone in the fight against corruption and therefore outlines in detail. This chapter also includes a more brief discussion of multistakeholder initiatives like CoST and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Chapter 6 outlines the scale of abusive international tax avoidance and presents criteria for responsibilities to contain these practices. Chapter 7 is mostly normative as it develops a general account of shared responsibilities for curbing corruption and building accountable and resilient institutions. According to Brock, these responsibilities are multilayered and apply to a variety of agents, including states, governments, companies, NGOs, social movements, and civil society more broadly. She regards states as the “primary agents of justice” (p. 142) who are to keep their commitments, especially through frameworks like the UNCAC. But given that our world is still rife with corruption, non-state actors must also join the fight. According to Brock, what each agent may be expected to do more concretely depends on their contribution to and benefits from corrupt practices, as well as on their capacity to curb them (pp. 117–8 and 146–8). Brock holds that, next to group agents, even individuals who do not directly benefit from or contribute to corruption share responsibility to curb corruption (section 7.7)—a responsibility that can be concretized with regard to their social roles and “standing or positioning […] within relevant institutions, organizations, or practices” (p. 159). Chapter 8 briefly addresses common challenges to an account like her's, which have to do with the question of the cultural appropriateness of transnational efforts against corruption, and closes the book by sketching some “future directions” for research. Brock's account of shared responsibilities to curb corruption takes its cues from the philosophical literature on collective agency and responsibility, particularly from Iris Young's late work on responsibility for justice, although it does not register the rich contemporary debate around both Young's account and responsibility for structural injustice more generally. While the latter debate shows that it is, in principle, useful to apply Young's account to macrosocial problems such as corruption, it would be helpful if all those who are said to be responsible for curbing corruption were equipped with a more precise understanding of the practices they ought to change and for what reasons. In the remainder of this review, I will outline why I think that Brock's book is too vague on these points. In the first introductory chapter, Brock mentions a broad definition of corruption as “use [of] public office or professional roles, typically for some personal or political gain, in ways contrary to the purpose of that office or role, thereby abusing their entrusted power” (p. 27). Such a definition seems to be a good starting point for a reflection on the precise conceptual boundaries and their normative significance. Brock, however, does not want to use this definition as a conceptual benchmark and relegates further discussion of conceptual issues to the book's appendix. There, she argues that even the abovementioned broad definition of corruption is not inclusive enough. She holds that some relevant cases of corruption are not covered by an understanding of corruption as a misuse of public office or professional roles for personal gain and that these cases call for an even broader account. The appendix, however, only offers hair-splitting considerations that fail to make the case for or even frame a convincing alternative. It is unclear why Brock is so committed to broadening the concept of corruption to the point where it risks becoming indistinguishable from various other defects in political and professional agency. The quality of the presentation suffers from a lack of precision even in otherwise well-written parts, such as Chapter 6, which vividly describes a dense web of agents, including professional accountants, bankers, and tax professionals, who are all involved in abusive international tax avoidance on a vast scale. What the chapter fails to do, however, is to offer tools for clearly distinguishing corruption in this sector from other interactional wrongs (such as fraud) and structural injustices that may be facilitated by it but which should, in principle, be separable from corruption. (The chapter also ignores the philosophical literature on tax injustice.) Brock seems to think that a definition of corruption must be able to accommodate all kinds of examples of what is or may be called “corrupt” in general public discourse. But this cannot be a benchmark because lay people's intuitions about what constitutes corruption are too broad, imprecise, and inconsistent to clearly demarcate a realm of practices. Although this may have always been the case to some extent, public discourse has become even more unreliable in this regard through the inflationary use of the term by authoritarians and populists who have radically different motives from those who want to save their democracies from within by freeing them, at least, from the graver forms of corruption. Brock's overarching aims surely align with the latter. However not all wrongs or injustices are corruption, and the aim of improving democracy would be better served by supplying a more precise idea of corruption. The other philosophical work I would want to see from such an account is a more systematic categorization of forms of corruption, including an explanation of whether some forms are more severe or problematic, and why. Brock's major examples are undoubtedly problematic, as they include bribery of political and administrative officials, state capture, cronyism, and the infamously close relationship of business and government (“the revolving door”). However, corruption in the sense of a misuse of public office is indeed very widespread in our world, and some varieties of corruption in this sense do not seem to endanger the integrity of public institutions as much as others. As lay people's intuitions about which forms of corruption are more severe will differ, an account of global responsibilities for curbing corruption should ideally attempt to offer normative criteria for judging which forms of corruption are most problematic and which should be prioritized in the case of a conflict. I have not encountered any systematic attempt to draw such moral distinctions in Brock's book. It is one thing to systematize the severity of different forms of corruption, and another to justify why different agents bear a responsibility to curb corruption in jurisdictions other than their own. Given the omnipresence of corruption, some might voice opposition to the idea of such a transnational responsibility and say that “people should put their own houses in order first.” In more general terms, an account of corruption and global justice should explore the reasons (moral or other) for addressing corruption at home or abroad and explain why some agents have an obligation from justice to do so, as opposed to, for example, a humanitarian obligation. Such differentiations are standard in contemporary theorizing about social and global justice but are scarce in Brock's book. Contrary to the book's title, Brock says comparatively little about the more specific question of what different agents should do about corruption as a matter of global (as opposed to, say, social, local, or interactional) justice. Compare this to the now decades-old philosophical literature on corruption in the context of what is known as the “resource curse,” which has taken such distinctions seriously from the outset while focusing on a smaller but nevertheless grave form of corruption that still fuels deadly civil wars. One might defend Brock by pointing to the fact that she grounds the responsibilities to curb corruption in human rights (see Chapter 3), from which it can be inferred that state governments have a justice-based responsibility to curb corruption in their territory. But further normative argument is required to show that other agents have justice-based transnational responsibility to help curb (some forms of) corruption in these states by, for example, empowering local civil society actors, as Brock suggests. Turning to Iris Young's ideas on transnational grounds for responsibilities and applying these to curbing corruption seems to be a good start. But it appears that we are in need of additional normative criteria that more specifically apply to the morally significant ways in which people are socially, economically, and politically connected to corruption in other countries, in order to concretize the objects and precise normative grounds of the responsibilities of differently positioned agents. Despite the lack of conceptual detail in these regards, Brock's book is still worth engaging with, because it offers a wide range of empirical and moral considerations on an important and underexplored topic in international normative political theory. Brock's wide-ranging study demonstrates indeed that global justice theory should pay more attention to corruption. However, the book also unwittingly shows why conceptual work can neither be dismissed as a philosophical afterthought nor separated from more substantive normative considerations about the nature and perils of corruption.