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The global fight against corruption has reached an impasse. The issue no longer mobilizes people; instead, helplessness and cynicism are spreading as opposing camps bombard each other with accusations of corruption and authoritarian governments persecute their opponents for alleged corruption. How did we get into this situation? Back in the 2010s, when political consultants still believed in the possibility of ever-improving governance, sociologist Alena Ledeneva warned that corruption could only be successfully curbed if local understandings of corruption and notions of justice were taken into account. However, this hardly happened. Instead, the growing “anti-corruption industry” saw itself more as a door opener for large companies that wanted to find conditions that were as clear as possible when entering the market. Not least because of this focus, a gap opened up in many societies between anti-corruption and ideas of the common good. Locally, anti-corruption was now often seen as a covert strategy of Western dominance, and accusations of corruption were degraded to rhetorical ammunition in political trench warfare.

Against this backdrop, the second funding phase sees itself as a repair — an attempt to understand local, culturally deeply rooted notions of corruption and feed them into corruption research. These basic resources include religion, whose “corruption mindset” has received little attention in research to date. This is particularly true of Orthodox Christianity, the strongest religious community in Eastern Europe, which – according to well-known corruption indices – allegedly has a greater problem with corruption than Catholic and, in particular, Protestant Western Europe. However, Orthodoxy also has its own anti-corruption ideas, which are anchored in sacred texts and tradition, and we want to shed light on their content and relationship to other competing norms.

The second funding phase consists of three subprojects, each with a doctoral position for three years:

– Historical subproject: Likhoimstvo. Law and Morality in the Russian Empire, 1762-1825.

– Linguistic subproject: Does the Church speak its own language? Secular and religious corruption lexis in Russian (2000-2023)

– Business administration subproject: The Church as an Organization and Actor. Informality and Corruption in Serbia and the Role of the Serbian Orthodox Church (1991-2023)

In the historical subproject, we examine the extent to which the secular conceptions of corruption in the Tsarist Empire were fed by religious sources. In the linguistic subproject, we compare ecclesiastical and secular Russian corruption lexicon, thus contrasting linguistically mediated worldviews. Finally, the subproject in management science deals with resource flows in and around the Serbian Orthodox Church, the corresponding regulations, realities, and interpretations.