CISSR SPOTLIGHT

Professor Marco Garrido Holds the CISSR-Sponsored “Sociology of Corruption Symposium” September 2021 

CISSR 2020-21 Fellow and Associate Professor of Sociology, Marco Garrido, organized a two-day symposium in which early and mid-career scholars working in and around the sociology of corruption shared their research and presented papers covering different locations around the globe. Members of this group, operating independently and in collaboration, have previously convened for a series of panels on corruption in major sociology conferences, a workshop on corruption at the University of Notre Dame in 2019, a yearlong reading group on the topic, and met again at the University of Chicago for the CISSR-sponsored symposium on September 24th and 25th. For many, this was a great opportunity to meet with colleagues in person since before COVID-19 restrictions were put in place. While many disciplines within the social sciences have vast literatures on the global issue of corruption, only a few sociology scholars have published articles with corruption as the main subject despite sociology’s ideal intellectual equipment already in place to understand how corruption embeds itself in social structures around the world. These internationally focused presentations provide a jumping board for theorizing further about corruption and builds on previous meetings discussing this topic. 

Professor Garrido and his collaborators share more details on the importance of their project for understanding the sociology and structure of corruption: “Corruption is one of the most consequential issues of our time. In recent decades, frustration about corruption has inspired grassroots protests, justified exorbitant spending on “good governance” reforms, and enabled the rise of populist leaders in Brazil, the Philippines, India, Hungary, Turkey, the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile, social-scientific scholarship on corruption has been dominated by two contrasting perspectives: one “universalizing” approach, prevalent in economics and political science, which seeks to essentialize, quantify, and compare corruption directly across social settings, and a “particularizing,” constructivist perspective, common among anthropologists, that reduces corruption to its ultra-localized meanings, rendering generalizations largely impossible.” 

Among featured speakers was previous CISSR 2020-21 Dissertation Fellow, Sneha Annavarapu, an Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology at the National University Singapore, presented a part of her ongoing book project on the issue of safe commuting in contemporary India. Other scholars include Rahardhika Utama, a Northwestern University PhD student, who researches the ways geopolitics shapes development in Southeast Asia. Leslie MacColman, a postdoctoral fellow from Ohio State University, also spoke about her studies in Latin America and presented on “Material Interests, Moral Claims, and Political Contests: Corruption in the Metro Police in Buenos Aires” which looks at how police reform initiatives can actually erode their legitimacy in the public. 

Professor Garrido co-leads this group with Professor Marina Zaloznaya from the University of Iowa and Professor Nicholas Wilson from Stony Brook University. They now aim to create an edited manuscript about the sociology of corruption. Professors Garrido, Zaloznaya, and Wilson share their nexts steps: “From these foundational events, we have developed a distinctly sociological approach to corruption as socially embedded. The proposed volume synthesizes and advances this sociological perspective on corruption. It brings together sociologists doing historical, ethnographic, and quantitative research on corruption around a core, collectively forged set of ideas.” 

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Professor Rochelle Terman writes on International Human Rights and Norm Fragmentation

Assistant Professor of Political Science and CISSR Book Fellow, Rochelle Terman and co-author, Zoltán Búzás, an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame, recently published their article “A House Divided: Norm Fragmentation in the International Human Rights Regime” in the journal International Studies Quarterly. Utilizing data from the first two cycles of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), where states “peer review” each other’s human rights practices, the authors found distinct configurations of normative positions among four interstate clusters. By studying the reviews of each country and looking at each country as a relational to another’s human right views, Professor Terman and Prof. Búzás found four normative groups or the publiclyrepresented view of a country as follows: 1. Civil Libertarians 2. Developmentalists 3.Institutionalists 4. Egalitarians. Professor Terman argues that despite there being the usual conflict between countries on opposing ends of the “civil-political-socioeconomic rights spectrum” there also exists international fragmentation around which groups value or recognize global governance. Through their study, they also found that countries broadly value women’s rights: “In fact, women's rights arethe single most popular substantive issue in the UPR, particularly among countries in the Global South, followed closely by children's rights.” The paper proposes further research using UPR data to measure changes in states’ view of human rights, and to ask more questions about why some rights are more popular than others, and the normative framework can help inform these research questions.

Professor Paul Cheney writes on István Hont, Capitalism, and the Early Modern period 

Professor of History and CISSR 2019-20 Faculty Fellow, Paul Cheney, published an article in Modern Intellectual History titled “István Hont, the Cosmopolitan Theory of Commercial Globalization, and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism.” In the article, Professor Cheney asks: what are the economic theories and histories at work in István Hont and how can they be used to better understand economic thought and the capitalist world economy of the early modern period? Professor Cheney traces the history and development of the “World systems theory” and the various tracks economists and historians follow when analyzing early modern ideas of capitalism and international trade. Critically, Professor Cheney argues that Hont’s analysis of the world system and competition as “jealousy” between nations, and the never-ending crises which result from our cosmopolitan theory of commercial globalization, serve to encourage further examination of these early modern economic theories as predictive of our current economic system and current global capitalist system.

Jonathan Schoots Considers the influence of S.E. K. Mqhayion South African Sociological Thought

In an article published in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, CISSR 20-21 Dissertation Fellow and current Postdoctoral Fellow at Stellenbosch University, Jonathan Schoots, explores the writings of amaXhosa intellectual S.E. K. Mqhayi. The article titled “S.E.K. Mqhayi and African social analysis: African sociological thought in colonial South Africa” considers Mqhayi’s use of the sociological imagination by combining historical and sociological analysis. In centering Africans as his audience, Mqhayi endeavored to reorient the colonial South African sociological situation through employing knowledge-making for African audiences in contrast to the colonial projects which is about Africans and comes from outside the country. Mqhayi’s early twentieth century writing also remains critical in the efforts to decolonize academics from Eurocentric views, and in the process, recenters the local community’s knowledge-making.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…

As part of a workshop hosted by the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado addressing the ten-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, CISSR 2019-20 Dissertation Fellow and Dartmouth University Postdoctoral Fellow Hiroko Kumaki discusses her thought piece “Technopolitics of Health and Well-being in Fukushima.” Through ethnographic accounts, Dr. Kumaki examines the paradox where a “reasonable” amount of radiation exposure inevitable for nuclear workers and the public while any amount of exposure could be harmful and shares the different ways the public has responded to the accident. From scientific explanations of the cumulative effects of nuclear radiation, to international inquiries into the impact of the disaster on places across the globe, Kumaki was able to reflect on the public response since then and inspire future conversations. 

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