Exposed impunity: leaks, scandals, and dominant class solidarity

Abstract In light of the proliferation of data leaks about state and corporate secrets, from security to finance, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently celebrated “ten years of exposing the financial secrets of some of the world's most powerful people.” In view of this decade of scandals, one paradoxical situation must be questioned more broadly. On the one hand, the capacity of the “powerful” to keep their “dirty” secrets is challenged and so is their ability to impose one legitimate and performative justificatory discourse in case of digital exposure. On the other hand, this expository new normal results in neither their enhanced accountability nor a systemic critique of the social order. Although the illegalisms of the powerful have been increasingly made public, this has not led to any general framing in terms of policing and security and even less so in terms of broader normative transformation. How to understand, scandal after scandal, the persistence of what we call a state of exposed impunity? We argue that the answer to this enigma lies in the analysis of a specific form of dominant class solidarity that becomes manifest and visible during the uncertainty and indeterminacy of an emerging scandalization process. This article aims to resolve this enigma in light of the Panama Papers, whose publication was welcomed by Edward Snowden as the biggest leak in the history of data journalism and, more generally, as “the Wikileaks of the mega-rich.”