The Multilevel Orders of Corruption - Insights from a Post-Soviet Context

This is a study on the multilevel orders of corruption. The project-administrating organisation is the Department of Sociology of Law, Lund University. The overall purpose of the project is to further contribute to the global and national efforts of understanding and counteracting corruption and its societal implications. The project challenges the conventional understanding that traditional economic-based attempts or legal centralistic approaches are sufficient to combatting corruption. Rather, it investigates corruption beyond the established paradigms (structural and interactional) and argues for the need to focus on society’s informal norms, micro-level power relations and non-monetary currencies as an additional lens to understand the emergence, explanation, persistence and ubiquitousness of corruption. The project’s specific aim is to explore and reconceptualise the multifarious meanings and morality of informal, non-legal transactions in the frame of the ‘multilevel orders of corruption’ perspective, focusing on the complex interdependencies and contradictions between micro-level social norms and practices, nation-state regulations and international anti-corruption agreements and indicators. These issues will be explored in the post-Soviet context, using the case of Uzbekistan. The project employs a mixed-methods approach and draws on the concept of multi-level governance and legal pluralism perspective as a theoretical starting point.