Corruption is considered a problem that is often blamed for the developmental problems of modern societies. In post-socialist European states in particular, intensive monitoring, media campaigns, and massive institutional imports have been deployed in recent decades to get the problem under control—with mixed results.
Our research cluster at the University of Regensburg is tackling this issue in an innovative way. We start from the assumption that although corruption is a universal phenomenon, each historical context has its own boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate actions. International anti-corruption campaigns that fail to recognize this risk falling flat if they do not adequately address the local context and seek to engage with local discourses. In a region such as (South)Eastern Europe, which has always seen itself as a pawn of foreign powers and their interests, it is unlikely that it will identify with the changes demanded by the European Union and initiate a profound, authentic social transformation. For this to happen, we first need to “autochtonize” the terminology we use to understand and describe corruption.
Where people have learned to distrust the state throughout their history, they also internalize the importance of alternative forms of security provided by family or friends. An anti-corruption policy that portrays favoritism toward close associates as inherently immoral fails to recognize the value that these relationships have for people and thus misses the starting point for change. This cannot lie in the expectation that family and friendship will suddenly become “private matters” that have nothing to do with the distribution of public resources. It would be more important for a society to incorporate personal networks into the formal regulatory framework in such a way that local notions of justice are satisfied, but limits are also set and transparency is ensured in the event of violations. Otherwise, formal rules and reality threaten to drift miles apart.
We translate our approach into research by practicing interdisciplinary cooperation between the disciplines of history, linguistics, and business administration. All three disciplines are characterized by their openness to qualitative approaches, i.e., to the precise examination of local/regional/national conditions and specific actors. History examines the diachronic aspects, business administration the contemporary aspects, and linguistics investigates the corruption-related sign system and how it changes over time.
Our research cluster has been in existence since 2020 and is centered around DFG-funded doctoral projects from all three disciplines; we are now in the second phase of DFG funding. The first phase (2020-2023) focused on corruption in Yugoslavia and its successor states (especially Serbia and Croatia) in the 20th and 21st centuries, while the second phase (2024-2027) focuses on the connection between religion and corruption in Russia and Serbia. This means that in this phase we are expanding our scope and looking at an old and important source of morality, namely the Orthodox Church, which is dominant in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Our previous focus on autochthonous notions of corruption will thus be maintained and even intensified.
The research cluster also includes projects that were developed outside the DFG context and are funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (2021-2023) and the Bavarian Academic Center for Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (2021-2024), among others.
As the domain name “informalityregensburg.com” suggests, we work not only with the concept of corruption, but also with the term informality. Unlike corruption, informality is a value-neutral term that refers to an objectively definable phenomenon, namely actions that are not formally regulated or that contradict formal regulations. Corruption, on the other hand, is a value judgment that we use to label these actions as negative or even scandalous. Both concepts are context-sensitive, meaning that every historical context has its own transitions between formality and informality, as well as between integrity and corruption. How these transitions change is the focus of our research.
Regensburg Corruption Cluster 