Ukraine and the Geopolitics of Anti-Corruptionism

This talk was based on a book that Dr. Zaloznaya was currently writing about the political language and the channels of influence that anti-corruptionism (or efforts to combat corruption) generates on geopolitical arena. The book’s empirical analysis focuses on wartime Ukraine and its interactions with its international partners, such as the United States and the European Union, as well as its adversaries (primarily, Russia), as an ultimate “laboratory” for the geopolitics of anti-corruptionism.  Relying on in-depth interviews with anti-corruption experts in Ukraine and abroad, INGO reports, and media analyses, it explores how and why  fighting corruption has become the main focus of the Ukrainian civil society after the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. Next, the book (and the talk) traces the development of several channels of geo-political pressure via anti-corruptionism, including the transformation of Ukraine’s grass-roots anti-corruption groups into quasi-state actors with extensive domestic and international negotiating powers, inclusion of Western actors onto the boards of Ukrainian state-owned enterprises, and imposition of invasive transparency requirements on Ukraine’s major political and economic processes. Lastly, the book, and the talk, consider the ways whereby the Ukrainian government relies on anti-corruptionism to communicate with its constituents and with foreign governments, and how this symbolic politics of anti-corruptionism contributes to the emergence of Ukraine’s new national identity during the war.

 

Marina Zaloznaya joined the University of Iowa’s Sociology & Criminology faculty in 2012 and Iowa Political Science faculty in 2021, after she received a Master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. Since 2022, she has also served as the Director of the European Studies Group at the University of Iowa, and the Executive Director of the Corruption in the Global South Research Consortium.

 

Dr. Zaloznaya’s research explores public sector corruption, political behavior, and gender in non-democratic regimes from a range of methodological perspectives, including ethnography, survey methods, comparative-historical, and network analyses. Her first book, The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption (Cambridge University Press 2017) analyzed the impact of hybrid political systems in Ukraine and Belarus on petty corruption in local universities. In a more recent project, funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, Dr. Zaloznaya and her collaborators carried out a series of national representative surveys in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Georgia. Using these rich data, they analyzed individual-level causes, social network properties, and gendered patterns of public sector corruption. Results of these analyses have appeared in a range of top academic journals, including Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Social Forces, American Review of Sociology, Electoral Studies, Sociology of Development, Theoretical Criminology, and so on. Dr. Zaloznaya is also a co-author of a forthcoming agenda-setting edited volume on Sociology of Corruption (Cambridge University Press), and a research monograph, entitled Street-Level Corruption and Post-Communist Governance: Citizen-Bureaucrat Encounters in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Georgia.