Corruption and Informal Practices in the Middle East and North Africa

Ina Kubbe, Aiysha Varraich, Ina Kubbe, Aiysha Varraich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367422264
• eBook ISBN: 9781000760613
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates the pervasive problem of corruption across the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on the specifics of the local context, the book explores how corruption in the region is actuated through informal practices that coexist and work in parallel to formal institutions.

When informal practices become vehicles for corruption, they can have negative ripple effects across many aspects of society, but on the other hand, informal practices could also have the potential to be leveraged to reinforce formal institutions to help fight corruption. Drawing on a range of cases including Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia or Israel the book first explores the mechanisms and dynamics of corruption and informal practices in the region, before looking at the successes and failures of anti-corruption initiatives. The final section focuses on gender perspectives on corruption, which are often overlooked in corruption literature, and the role of women in the Middle East.

With insights drawn from a range of disciplines, this book will be of interest to researchers and students across political science, philosophy, socio-legal studies, public administration, and Middle Eastern studies, as well as to policy makers and practitioners working in the region.

Part I
Conceptualising the mechanisms and dynamics of corruption and informal practices in the MENA region

1 Dispersing the fog A philosophical analysis of institutional corruption applied to the MENA region

Gizem Kaya and Georgy Kopshteyn

DOI: 10.4324/9780367822859-3

Introduction¹

Corruption exists in all parts of the world, but it is of increasing concern in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Despite some efforts, these countries have not seen any remarkable progress in the fight against corruption and impunity. One of the biggest challenges for the anti-corruption regime in the MENA region can be found in the persistence of forms of corruption that are rarely recognised as such because they are assessed against a culturally relativistic benchmark. The social practice of wasta, for example, is usually not viewed as a legal infringement but is part of formal legal procedures. Thus, conventional approaches to fighting corruption such as attempts of its criminalisation are insufficient. This can be seen in Jordan, for example, where many legal and administrative reforms were introduced as a result of protests demanding an end to corruption (Doughan 2017: 2). To account for effective anti-corruption measures, however, it will be necessary to disperse the fog around the many faces of corruption and generate a shared understanding of the phenomenon. This means that in the long-term perspective, we need a philosophically grounded conceptualisation of corruption that is both normatively guiding and culturally sensitive. It recognizes the notion of corruption as a social cultural phenomenon that needs to be viewed against institutional arrangements. For that purpose, the present chapter seeks to provide a functional analysis of corruption. To construct a conceptual framework that ensures internal coherence, we demarcate our work as follows: (1) Our reference point will be the phenomenon of institutional corruption, whereas (2) our working definition of corruption will conceive of corruption in the most abstract manner, that is, as a violation of role-specific norms that is motivated by the role-occupier’s pursuit of private motives. Thus, analysing the nature and function of norms, especially those that apply to agents in office, will be crucial to our framework. This includes both, formal, institutional and informal, social norms (see Kubbe and Engelbert 2017: 2).

The chapter is organised as follows: We begin with a short empirical overview of corruption in the MENA region. To offer a comprehensive approach, corruption will then be viewed on two levels; we divide our functional analysis into an external and internal analysis. On the external level, we will begin with an investigation of features within a norm-order that typically instantiate corruption. We will argue that corruption is externally conditioned by an authority’s inability to enforce (re-)establish the norms of conduct that ought to be action-guiding in office. More precisely, the failure to realize the norms in question prompts a decay of reasonable expectations of the compliance in office. To complement the external dimension, we will then examine the features within a corrupt agent which catalyse corrupt conduct. This internal dimension of our conceptual framework will refer to Rawls’ moral psychology and emphasize the motivational deficits of corrupt acts. It will be argued that these deficits are located in the false relation between an agent’s private morality and the public morality of the norm-order. It causes citizens to treat each other as mere means to an end. This has detrimental effects to the social cohesion of a society since the lack of a common ground increasingly causes social disintegration. The shift in the expectation-structure continues until the corrupt behaviour appears to be accepted as a normal part of social life from within the norm-order. Taken together, the external and internal driving forces of corruption create a vicious cycle that renders many anti-corruption-initiatives ineffective. Respectively, we will argue that there is a positive correlation between an authority’s inability to secure expectations and an agent’s improper considerations that will result in corruption. Moreover, the more improper considerations are spread across the society, the harder it gets for an authority to secure expectations. We will finally conclude that for anti-corruption-measures to be successful in the MENA region this vicious cycle must be overcome. From this we derive general recommendations for the MENA region.

Corruption in the MENA region: what is the state of the art?

Corruption remains a common cause for concern in the MENA region as it continues to undermine law and order, affecting inefficient and distrusted institutions that fail to provide a fair delivery of services for their citizens. Rampant corruption impedes economic and social development and is especially toxic for a region that already struggles with political and economic instability. Yet, despite small steps towards increasing criminal liability, corruption remains a widespread occurrence. In its latest Middle East and North Africa report, the Global Corruption Barometer finds that, in 2016, nearly 1 in 3 people had to pay a bribe to access basic services that they needed (Pring 2016: 5). Of the 10,797 people surveyed, 61 per cent even perceived corruption to have increased recently (Pring 2016: 6). Accordingly, 90 percent of these countries have scored below 50 on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean) on Amnesty International’s Corruption Perception Index 2016, whereas Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Syria were among the ten most corrupt countries in the world (Transparency International 2017). The latest report of 2018 (Transparency International 2019), on which countries of the MENA region score (39) below the global average country score of 43,² confirms that no progress has been made within two years. Syria scores 13 only, followed by Yemen (14) and Libya (17). Both Syria and Yemen are also in the bottom five of the entire index in the last few years. Whereas Yemen decreased by 5 points over the last four years (from 19 in 2014 to 14 in 2018), Syria decreased by 13 points during the last 8 years (from 26 in 2012 to 13 in 2018). This mainly reflects the direct link between war and violent conflicts, human rights violations and corruption. The instability of the governments on the one hand and the citizenry’s lack of political rights on the other hand enable corruption to flourish.

Qatar (62) and the United Arab Emirates (70) have been leading the region throughout the last years (see Transparency International 2017, 2018, 2019) by improving the management of public finances and public procurement while facilitating the access to infrastructure and public services. That said, they still lack democratic institutions and respect for political rights which leaves anti-corruption-efforts up to the political will of the ruling class (Transparency International 2019). Although Qatar has shown efforts to clean up many levels of bureaucracy, the higher level of government still remains opaque (Transparency International 2019).

The Gulf States have all dropped on the index as the concentration of political and economic power remained in the hands of the ruling families, restricting public freedoms and oppressing civil society. State budgets and public expenditure remained highly non-transparent, especially fueled by the military engagement of these states (Tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptualising the mechanisms and dynamics of corruption and informal practices in the MENA region
• Part II Successes and failures of anti-corruption initiatives
• Part III The way forward – empowering women as a tool to reduce corruption
• Index