Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the ways that anti-corruption activism, which aims to discipline the state and inculcate bureaucratic ethics in officials, itself works through informal relationships and connections to political, bureaucratic and media power. Drawing on ethnography of the lives and practices of anti-corruption activists I will consider the extent to which the organisation of anti-corruption activism prefigures the changes that activists want to see in the world, and how the conceptual boundaries between state, market and civil society that activists would police are actually penetrated and blurred by activist practice.

Paper long abstract:

Recently a surge of anti-corruption activism has caught the imagination of the Indian public, in particular the middle classes. After the efflorescence of public protest against corruption in mid 2011 excited comparisons have been made with the Arab Spring, the struggle for independence from Colonial rule, and mass movements against corruption such as that led by Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970's. Anti-corruption activism is a site through which ideas about the moral development of the nation and the ethics of active citizenship are debated and reproduced. Celebrating saintly politics on the one hand and system rationality on the other it brings together disparate actors interested in promoting moral, legal and technological schemes to change the relationship between citizen and state. But what is it like to make a life working within the activist scene? Behind the moral and technological rhetoric, and media hype, lies a social world of practices where individual activists have to negotiate the personal relationships and connections through which activist work is done. This presentation will explore the ways that activism, which aims to discipline the state and inculcate bureaucratic ethics in officials, itself works through informal relationships and connections to political, bureaucratic and media power. Drawing on ethnography of the lives and practices of anti-corruption activists I will consider the extent to which the organisation of anti-corruption activism prefigures the changes that activists want to see in the world, and how the conceptual boundaries between state, market and civil society that activists would police are actually penetrated and blurred by activist practice.