2. Corruption and Its Discontents

The chapter provides a roadmap through the complex landscape of the global governance of corruption and an introduction to the implicit and explicit hypotheses on the factors and agents responsible for the global anti-corruption eruption in the 1990s. The first part of the chapter presents an outline of the major global anti-corruption initiatives and introduces the main actors in five different groups. The second part of the chapter starts to problematize corruption as a global issue by introducing the six factors that have contributed to the rise of corruption as a global policy problem: the end of the Cold War, the good governance agenda of the World Bank, the coalition building of TI the quantification of corruption through the publication of international perception-based indices, the instrumental use of the issue of corruption as a smoke-screen for policies of liberalization and finally, the role of the United States in raising corrupt payments on the global agenda. The third part of the chapter then proceeds to examine four major ways of conceptualizing global anti-corruption work: anti-corruption as an issue for global governance, as an international regime or regimes, as a movement and as an industry.