Managing Corruption Risks

This article investigates the emerging engagement of private actors and specifically Western corporations in international anti-corruption, drawing on Foucauldian studies of governmentality. It explores this engagement as governing practices that have emanated quite independently from the inter-state system commonly understood to be at the core of the anti-corruption regime. It demonstrates how corporate anti-corruption ties in with a relatively new way of perceiving corruption. In this framing, anti-corruption comes out as risk management, which is latched on to notions of corporate social responsibility and business ethics. Moreover, the constitution of corruption risk relates to the rise of new actors and networks engaged in a wider business of anti-corruption, including commercial and hybrid actors that supply corporations with managerial instruments, benchmarks for best practice, rankings, and information and surveillance systems. This facilitates the enrollment of corporations into the anti-corruption cause while cultivating their competitiveness aspirations. The article offers a novel perspective on international anti-corruption and the position of business herein, and in a wider sense, it also contributes discussions about the role of private actors and their micro practices in global governance.