Grand corruption - corruption investigative framework (CIF) - methodology to generate an approach for grand corruption research - case study centring on an Australian-led megaproject being built in ...Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea - application of CIF - empirical layers that centre on transnational state-corporate power - ambiguity of civil society - structural inequalities - theoretical consequences of the findings - underpinning methodology., Grand corruption - corruption investigative framework (CIF) - methodology to generate an approach for grand corruption research - case study centring on an Australian-led megaproject being built in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea - application of CIF - empirical layers that centre on transnational state-corporate power - ambiguity of civil society - structural inequalities - theoretical consequences of the findings - underpinning methodology.
Government agencies are embracing the rhetoric of public value, but what does the empirical evidence tell us about drivers of its creation? One critical source of insight are the practitioners who ...turn public investment into public value through complex forms of labour. This article identifies how public value is interpreted and created by forensics scientists in the Criminal Justice System using Q Methodological interviews. The results indicate that two very similar types of forensic scientist exist The study finds that while the decisions of scientists are grounded in their expertise, their public value motivations are to ‘add value’ to the public through their science. They serve the citizen through their science. They do not serve the consumer, client or victim directly. The findings also indicate that there is a need to recognise hidden forms of value-added activity that take place upstream in public-value chains, ensuring that there are systems in place to maximise their impact downstream.
Points for practitioners
Forensic scientists are motivated to serve the public, not the consumer or customer.
In order to build capacity within Criminal Justice Systems, agency leaders need to build a relationship based on mutual professional respect rather than a supplier–consumer relationship.
If administrative reform is to be guided by academic research, practitioners should use the language of public value rather than the language of new public management.
Public value is often created through inter-institutional value chains that can conceal the contribution of upstream value-added activity to desirable public outcomes. It is critical that the value-added process is traced on an inter-institutional basis, and maximised through effective forms of inter-institutional collaboration.
Land-grabbing is an international issue closely associated with conflict and violence, as communities confront, through prolonged struggles, powerful elite networks involved in the illicit ...transformation of space. Resistance to land confiscations can be a life-and-death struggle especially for poor rural and urban communities whose livelihoods are tied to the targeted land. Because these struggles are often marked by corruption, state violence, and the persecution of already marginalized populations, they have become an area of emerging interest for state crime and state-corporate crime scholars. However, there is only introductory data mapping how communities resist land-grabs engineered through illegitimate state-corporate activity. Against this backdrop the following paper analyses a case of community resistance to land-grabs in Bangladesh using a contentious politics framework and the concept of land-laundering. The structure and activity of this resistance has been mapped through interviews with stakeholders involved in this struggle, complemented by documentary research.
For most of the 1990s, the island of Bougainville was the subject of a counterinsurgency campaign administered by the Papua New Guinea state. The denial of humanitarian aid, extra-judicial killings ...and forced displacement were just some of the egregious tactics employed. Papua New Guinea's main international benefactor, Australia, publicly remained aloof from the hostilities. However, in reality, the Australian state was covertly sponsoring Papua New Guinea's counterinsurgency operations. Drawing on interviews with senior Australian and Papua New Guinea state officials, this paper will offer the first scholarly account of Australia's proxy war. Employing a theoretical framework influenced by classical Marxism and Foucault, particular attention will be paid to the relationships, calculations and strategies that informed Australia's criminogenic response.
This paper brings together Žižek's Bartleby politics with the praxis of organic
intellectuals emerging out of the “Bougainville crisis”, in order to generate a
new vantage point for theorizing ...anti-colonial resistance to state violence.
Bartleby politics, it is argued, conceptualizes how socio-symbolic orders
naturalize their existence, and the strategies required to disrupt this
completeness of power, so we can begin again. Applying this approach, it is
argued during colonization metropolitan powers shatter the permanency of
indigenous socio-symbolic orders, by situating them within a wider (contrived)
teleological historical sequence. However, the metropolitan power's capacity to
manage this risky enterprise—where the possibility of possibility emerges—is
shaped by anti-colonial resistance. This resistance can shift a teleological
moment to a contingent moment, where multiple vectors of history are opened up
by the colonized “subjects,” that go beyond the set sequence offered by the
colonial power. One of the most radical forms of violence colonized “subjects”
can inflict on the colonial powers during this open historical moment, it is
argued, is refusal. Refusal, that is to negotiate the terms and conditions of
incorporation into Empire, and instead unilaterally setting a different
historical course. The violence refusal inflicts on Empire, and the greater
violence Empire inflicts back, will be examined through the case study of the
Bougainville war.
Investigates state involvement in war crimes surrounding activists on the island of Bougainville, who struggled to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine.
Following the commission of state crimes, state officials are in the privileged position of being able to mobilize significant resources to conceal their activities. Laying siege to the ...fortifications which facilitate denial is a difficult, often dangerous process that can, in general, only be mounted by movements of resistance. Consequently, generating conceptual tools which researchers can use to strategically manoeuvre within contexts defined by denial, struggle and resistance is a pressing methodological challenge for state crime studies. To that end, the first part of this article will present an analytical framework which helps sensitize researchers to the shifting social forces that condition denial and resistance. In the second part of this article the analytical framework will be applied to an empirical case study in order to demonstrate the practical research outcomes which these shifting social forces can engender. It will be concluded that state crime researchers must work with the rhythm of struggle, using research methodologies which permit strategic action.
The role which corporate and financial secrecy vehicles play in enabling transnational corruption has justifiably received growing scholarly and policy interest. Less attention, however, has been ...given to the enabling role played by political secrecy vehicles. Political secrecy vehicles denote arrangements that allow individuals to clandestinely exercise public authority, which is concealed by a formal bureaucratic façade. This article develops analytical categories for deconstructing political secrecy structures and pinpointing the threat they pose to anti-corruption enforcement. These structures and threats are then empirically explored through an investigative case study. The case study plots how shadow political space in Uzbekistan and the simulacra of impartial public administration, was utilised by a kleptocratic syndicate to conceal an international bribery scheme, and then weaponised by the conspirators to successfully frustrate enforcement efforts in Europe. Drawing on key lessons from the case study, proposals are made for how the threats posed by political secrecy structures can be jurisprudentially and practically counteracted.
Marx, on several occasions, registered his plan to devote a volume of Capital to the state. At the time of his death, however, this volume remained unwritten. Subsequently, students of Marx have ...proven hesitant to theorize the distinct organizational schema of modern state power, and the way it mediates and enriches those tendencies identified by Marx in Capital’s first three volumes. Instead, the capitalist state is often distinguished by pointing to its disaggregation from the economic structure of society. The following paper will return to Marx’s proposed volume on the state, using a number of recently published scholarly tracts to consider its potential analytical orientation. Particular attention will be paid to Foucault’s late work on governmentality which, it will be argued, offers a useful starting point for conceptualizing modern state power, and the historically distinct ways it forms part of capitalism’s interior.
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