Multilevel Orders of Corruption in Central Asia

Corruption has become a buzzword in both academic and policy debates over the last three decades.

The initial view that “corruption greases the wheels of economic growth” in the newly independent states of Africa and Asia has lost its validity in the light of the current ever-growing global coalition against corruption, spearheaded by Transparency International and the World Bank.

Despite the unrelenting global anti-corruption efforts, one thing seems clear: There is no such thing as a remedy to this “cancer”.

In the light of the obvious failure of global anti-corruption initiatives, there has been a growing call to rethink the existing approaches, arguing for the necessity to understand better what corruption is, why it occurs, and what we can do to stop it.

MOCCA is a research and staff exchange programme intended to contribute to the global and national efforts of understanding and counteracting corruption by conducting research on the multilevel orders of corruption in five countries in post-Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan).

This will enable the MOCCA team to: 1) gather original empirical data (based on research solidly grounded in fieldwork) on the interplay between international law norms, national laws, and local legal cultures and informal norms in Central Asia and their implications for understanding corruption and its societal effects; 2) engage with and situate our research in relevant theoretical debates and thereby advance scholarly debates on (anti-) corruption by developing new conceptual, methodological and comparative approaches to study and understand it; and 3) provide strategic intelligence for EU-based political and economic actors interested or already working in the region, and to inform international organisations and decision-makers in the EU and Central Asia on ways to combat corruption and improve the business and investment climate, the rule of law and governance in the region.