全球智库信息集成服务系统

Summary

In the past half decade, a succession of uprisings against corruption has broken out worldwide. The frequency and significance of these events forces the question: What is going on? And does this international phenomenon hold lessons for others beset with systemic political corruption, not least in the United States? A look at countries as diverse in culture and political history as Brazil, Burkina Faso, Guatemala, Lebanon, Romania, South Africa, and South Korea suggests that it does.

Patterns

• Navigating between specific material concerns and all-encompassing ideologies, these recent anticorruption protests take up one of the roots of modern democratic development: obliging the powerful to submit to the law.
• Because the corruption they challenge is systemic, the protests have frequently encountered a tension between making concrete demands of those in power (say, cleaning up streets or reversing an amnesty law) and aiming at the kleptocratic system more broadly (such as demanding electoral reforms).
• This generation of protesters has been attracted by a horizontal model for action, and has balked at designating leaders. But the conceit of leaderlessness has its limits.
• Crucial allies have been found within the justice sector, where independence is prized. Defecting elites have also contributed to the fall of some regimes.
• In only one of the countries examined (Burkina Faso) has a structural change been won. Elsewhere, the results have been mixed, with some specific reforms gained, a more robust civil society, and some shifts in attitudes and behavior on the part of business and government officials alike.
• The sophisticated networks the anticorruption campaigns are challenging are highly flexible and resilient. Often bouncing back after sacrificing a few heads, they have been particularly skillful at playing to identity divides within the population.

Takeaways

Activists elsewhere who wish to challenge corrupt systems should consider the following:

Leadership is necessary to give direction to what might be spontaneous and multipolar protests. The leaders must be rigorously principled and able to cross political and identity boundaries.

Consistent decisionmaking mechanisms should be established to allow for transparent processes that can federate participants.

A detailed reform agenda that targets the kleptocratic network’s diverse capabilities will be crucial to exploiting whatever window of opportunity does open.

This agenda should be communicated to ordinary people in such a way as to capture their imaginations, so support doesn’t flag when some symbolic victory is achieved.

Long-range planning is required to effectively deal with the multiple likely countermoves the campaign will encounter.

Alliances are force multipliers. Independent individuals or institutions within a corrupt government invariably control some levers of power, or at least information. Because kleptocratic networks are transnational, alliances outside the country’s borders are also key.

Introduction

With a mammoth sky-blue and white Guatemalan flag looking down on the scene, thousands of citizens flocked to the central square of their capital, Guatemala City, in April 2015. A striking mix of people—indigenous villagers, their skin like worn leather, urban youth wearing glasses and goatees, retired office workers, beribboned young girls—braved the memory of massacres to voice a common demand. Amid demonstrable evidence that their president and vice president were entangled with organized crime in a vast corruption scheme, protesters required nothing less than their resignations. A few months later, halfway around the globe, slum-dwelling Shia youngsters joined with Beirut intellectuals to call for an end to the corruption that had heaped the streets of the Lebanese capital with decomposing offal.

The phenomenon of international protests holds lessons for those—including in Western democracies—who are disturbed enough by the capture of their political economies to challenge it.

It’s happening everywhere: in the past half decade, a succession of huge, often protracted uprisings against corruption have broken out worldwide in countries as diverse in culture and political history as Iceland and Brazil, Lebanon and Malaysia, South Africa and South Korea. In at least five cases, the protests have forced the impeachment or resignation of chiefs of state.¹

What is going on? And does this widespread international phenomenon hold lessons for others—not least in Western democracies—who are disturbed enough by the apparent capture of their political economies to wish to challenge it? 

A look at seven such recent protest campaigns, selected for their seriousness and the geographic, economic, and ideological diversity of the countries where they have occurred, suggests that it does. This study examines experiences from the Americas (Brazil and Guatemala), Africa (Burkina Faso and South Africa), Europe (Romania), the Middle East (Lebanon), and East Asia (South Korea). Each case has involved street demonstrations described as historic in size and spread, and often in duration. Many of them have delivered significant results—in Brazil, Burkina Faso, Guatemala, and South Korea, they helped unseat presidents and other top officials and subject them to criminal proceedings. Often they feature an objective alliance between crowds in the streets and tenacious legal professionals, as citizens have insisted on the fundamental principle that rulers be subject to the law. Yet across the board, in the face of sometimes dramatic outcomes, the networks that perpetrate the offending practices have proven resilient: even the most resounding “successes” have seemed almost pyrrhic to many protesters, who consider their efforts incomplete and ongoing.

At a time when some in developed and developing countries alike argue the cultural specificity of democracy—its ineffectiveness or even inappropriateness in some contexts—the sheer variety of these examples demonstrates that the demand for accountable government, for government “by and for the people,” is both strong and widespread.²

But the question remains: what aspects of democracy matter to these activists? The act of voting? Personal liberties? Or the implied principles of equal justice under laws that are legitimately devised and enacted; the comparable weight, across the population, of votes cast; and, perhaps at the core, the premise that those entrusted with public office should exercise it in the interest of the people and not themselves?

By addressing these questions in sometimes technical detail, the recent protests implicitly affirm the value of the basic framework that modern democracy has established. Although the perception is strong in each case that the ills are systemwide, protesters are not denouncing the scaffolding that corrupt officials exploit or bend to their purposes, but rather the bending—the de facto capture of economic and political power, in violation of the structure’s more even-handed promises. Chiefs of state have made convenient scapegoats in several cases, but it is the mechanics of the (sometimes ungainly) constitutional contraption that most activists seek to adjust , so as to make it actually deliver on the shared well-being constitutional democracy holds up as an ideal.

Chiefs of state have made convenient scapegoats in several cases, but it is the mechanics of the constitutional contraption that most activists seek to adjust.

These protests invite consideration of the effort that is required, again and again, to secure the prized features of this form of government. A sense of history’s directionality permeates many belief systems, coloring assumptions about the arc of political development—presumably toward more liberty, inclusiveness, and equity, an inexorable march down a one-way street. That presumption has proved dangerously wrong. The circumstances giving rise to these anticorruption protests, and their outcomes to date, suggest instead that government in the public interest is vulnerable to constant and often insidious attack.

This wave of uprisings comes against a backdrop, stretched across about three decades, of abrupt upheaval in political systems followed by sometimes painful absorption of the changes and then rising countercurrents. Assessments of democracy’s viability have pitched and rolled in rhythm with these developments. From euphoria in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite governments, the end of several long-running civil wars and military dictatorships, and the demise of South African apartheid, the mood has shifted dramatically. As democracy experts Thomas Carothers and Richard Youngs wrote in a 2017 article (explaining the flaws in this new, more pessimistic view), “Democracy itself appears to be unraveling—helped along by resurgent authoritarianism, weakened liberal democratic values, rising populism, and contagious illiberalism.”³

The late-twentieth-century shake-ups also coincided with apparently separate cultural and technological transformations that may have helped new rulers buck the democratizing intent.

Many of the political revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s came suddenly, without the theoretical exploration and practical experimentation that marked the slow democratization of northern Europe and America. As Carothers points out elsewhere, the shoots of pluralism and liberty that sprang up across the postcommunist landscape and parts of the developing world germinated in an impoverished mulch of weak or stunted state institutions. State building often had to be launched from scratch, sustained by ill-monitored financial assistance from the West.⁴ Opportunities for capture were rife.

Coming when they did, the late-twentieth-century shake-ups also coincided with apparently separate cultural and technological transformations that may have helped new rulers buck the democratizing intent. A rising ideology glorified the personal accumulation of wealth. Legal and technological transformations facilitating the free (and invisible) transfer of capital made it easy as never before to spirit that wealth to safe harbor or transform it into real assets—buildings or sports teams or art. The result was an explosion in transnational organized crime and kleptocratic governance.⁵

In the two decades since the initial eruption of postauthoritarian chaos in Eurasia, when public goods were snatched up in a free-for-all, a measure of structure has come to characterize the capture of state-governed revenue streams. Networks have burgeoned that weave together the reconstituted public sector and the criminal world, while stitching in key segments of private industry. These sophisticated and purposeful structures are the face of severe corruption today. To shrug off corruption as “tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns,” as the U.S. Supreme Court did in a 2016 decision, is to dangerously underestimate its significance.⁶

Rather, in some five dozen countries worldwide, corruption must be understood as the operating system of complex networks that are bent on maximizing monetary returns to their members.⁷

These syndicates look quite different in different countries. Sometimes they are controlled from the top, by an unabashedly authoritarian leader. Sometimes they are multiple, or internally chaotic, disrupted by bitter rivalries (which may take the form of partisan politics). In some countries, largely subordinate presidents and legislatures do the bidding of one or more private sector oligarchs who hold the reins behind the scenes. Everywhere, there are pockets of courageous resistance to this prevailing incentive structure that selects for and promotes criminality.

The role of public officials in these networks is to harness their political office—twisting the functions of their agencies if possible, sabotaging them if necessary via budget cuts or rotation of qualified personnel—to serve the interests of the network at the expense of most ordinary citizens.

The seven countries discussed represent a subset of places where corruption has played a role in recent political developments. More than a dozen others could be added.

It is this type of governance that today’s anticorruption protests are contesting. At significant cost in effort and material resources, sometimes at physical risk, people are demanding public-spiritedness from their governing officials. They are insisting on the substance of democracy, not just the outward forms that many of their countries gained in the 1980s and 1990s. As one Brazilian protester put it, “This is like a second revolution.”⁸

The seven countries discussed here represent only a subset of places where corruption has played a significant role in recent political developments. To their number (and the others mentioned above) could be added more than a dozen others —including China, France, Iraq, Israel, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Moldova, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovakia, the United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam—where some manifestation of the issue has upset elections, upended political establishments, or sent thousands into the streets. With this issue roiling so much of the world, and spoilers competing to capture the energy of popular indignation, frustrated citizens and civil society activists are struggling for effective ways to mobilize. They may find some useful teachings from the array of anticorruption protests taking place around them.⁹

The Triggers

It was after ten at night on January 31, 2017. A televised press conference, droning and technical, by the bespectacled Romanian finance minister to lay out his month-old government’s economic policy, was interrupted twenty-two minutes in. Abruptly, the cameras cut to an identical podium, also flanked by Romanian and European Union (EU) flags, and the then justice minister, Florin Iordache. He announced an emergency edict: to reduce prison overcrowding, nonviolent financial crimes in which less than about $46,000 was at stake were decriminalized.¹⁰ It was the dead of winter, the middle of the night. Yet within hours, Bucharest was heaving with indignant protesters.

In Burkina Faso, similarly, it was an attempted legal revision that sparked mass protests in 2014 that ended the twenty-seven-year presidency of Blaise Compaoré. On October 21, the cabinet sent a bill to the national assembly mandating a referendum on a proposed constitutional amendment to increase the number of terms a president could serve from two to three. The new provisions would have allowed Compaoré to run (yet again) in 2015 elections and beyond.¹¹

Something more in-your-face set off the summer 2015 uprising in Lebanon. “You couldn’t walk in the streets; the smell was everywhere,” recalls Rima Majed, a political sociologist at the American University of Beirut, adding: “There’s something insulting about trash.”¹² Garbage collection, one of the lucrative public services the Lebanese government had privatized along sectarian lines, had ceased, with Beirut’s dumps overflowing and no plans for a sustainable alternative.¹³ Nizar Ghanem, one of seven activists who launched the You Stink movement that stamped its name on the crisis, can still smell the insult. “It was disgusting. You’re going to rob the country, then you’re going to throw garbage in our face?”¹⁴

Flouting the Rule of Law

But even in Lebanon, where the grievance that set protesters off was as concrete as they come, intangibles lay just beneath that repellent surface. New legislation regulating elections had languished, and the country had been without a president for months. In a move many deemed unconstitutional, parliament voted a three-year extension of its own mandate in November 2014.¹⁵

The recent anticorruption protests are qualitatively different from labor strikes over an unfavorable turn in contract negotiations, or revolutionary eruptions against repressive dictatorships. Going beyond immediate material grievances, they take up the objective that lies at the root of modern democratic development: making the powerful submit to the law. 

Going beyond material grievances, recent protests take up the objective that lies at the root of modern democratic development: making the powerful submit to the law.

In Brazil in 2015–2016, as well as in Guatemala and South Korea, shock at the scale and sophistication of corrupt practices that were exposed, and at the webs of high-ranking public figures involved, sent people into the streets—where they stayed for months on end. The information was either unsealed by investigative bodies or, in South Korea’s case, exposed by the media. “It became like a landslide, the information that started pouring out,” says Kim Sun-chul, professor of Korean studies at Emory University.¹⁶ Koo Se-woong, editor-in-chief of the online publication Korea Exposé, remembers how stunned he was by the television news reports that “exposed the president as a liar. No one expected to see hard evidence that contravenes the chief of state.”¹⁷

Often, the apparent arrogance with which implicated officials flout the law adds to the outrage. “The level of corruption was so absurd, so visible,” notes Salvador Biguria, a Guatemalan businessman. He was referring to the investigation by an international commission, called the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala, or CICIG), that in the spring of 2015 exposed millions of dollars in customs fraud and kickbacks, perpetrated by a network that included the vice president and the president.¹⁸ “They felt so untouchable they started doing things that were truly outrageous.”¹⁹ For Cosmin Pojoranu, of the activist association Funky Citizens, the Romanian government’s late-night attempted corruption amnesty “showed defiance to the citizens, who had demonstrated several times that very month to tell them, ‘Don’t do it.’ We were appalled by the degree of defiance.”²⁰

Protecting Anticorruption and Justice Sector Institutions

Arguably, the origins of modern democracy can be traced to a determination to subject rulers to the law, not—at least initially—to an effort to allow the people to choose their rulers through suffrage. The most radical act of the English Civil War, for example, was to put Charles I on trial. The dramatic event took place in 1649. Recognizing the profound significance of the move, he refused outright to enter a plea. He preferred to face certain death rather than defend himself in a court of law and in doing so implicitly accept its jurisdiction over him. Likewise, sixty years before Charles’s trial, the Dutch Republic came into being through a bloody struggle to force Philip II to abide by the terms of the governing contracts he had signed with the nobles and burghers of his northern provinces—the precursors of modern constitutions.²¹

A fresh wave of protests was set off when the Guatemalan president fired the head of an investigatory commission with a tweet.

Echoing this preoccupation with ensuring the law applies to the powerful as well as the weak, citizens have risen up in recent years to defend anticorruption bodies that seek to enforce their jurisdiction over public officials. Romania’s amnesty edict, coming as it did amid concerted attacks on the National Anticorruption Directorate (Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie, or DNA), was seen as a bid to reduce the body’s remit.²² “After the DNA put some big people in jail, beginning around 2012, people feared the government would mess with the laws to reduce its independence and benefit themselves. That’s exactly what happened in 2017,” notes Pojoranu.²³ A few months later, legislation to overhaul the rules for appointing and overseeing judges and prosecutors came before the Romanian parliament, bringing crowds back into the streets.²⁴

In the view of political sociologist Daniel Sandu, some of the most crucial reforms the European Union required of Romania in order to join focused not on electoral processes but on the judicial branch. In the wake of the changes, “a conflict between political leaders and the judiciary which would have been normally seen as a battle between interest groups became a battle between right and wrong. The population, especially the most sophisticated and hopeful for change, jumped in to support the judiciary,” and its scrutiny of suspected corruption.²⁵

Other countries have had their own versions of Romania’s controversial late-night broadcast seeking to shield officials from the full force of the law. On August 27, 2017, the official government Twitter account of the current Guatemalan president, Jimmy Morales, announced the expulsion of the CICIG commissioner.²⁶ That tweet set off a fresh wave of protests . In South Africa, respected former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene may not have played an overt anticorruption role, but many saw him as standing in the way of “[then president Jacob] Zuma and his cronies getting their hands on the treasury,” in the words of David Lewis, executive director of the nongovernmental organization Corruption Watch. When Nene was fired in the night of December 9, 2015—“a shock,” says Lewis—“that was the dramatic act that triggered the protests.”²⁷

It Gets Personal

Even for today’s protesters, moved as they have been by grievances of a conceptual nature, it does make a difference when the effects of corruption take a vivid, even personal form—the way stinking refuse blocking your street is personal. For Nina-Kathrin Wienkoop, a Burkina Faso researcher at Leuphana University in Germany, “the genius” of one of the groups spearheading the protests there “was its ability to link corruption to people’s everyday lives.” She contrasts its style with “the old leftist abstractions of capitalism and neoliberalism.” Pictures of the huge houses belonging to top officials and their notorious mothers-in-law, for example, were placed alongside scenes of the poverty most voters experienced, in images on posters or spread via social media.²⁸

Today’s anticorruption uprisings are not primarily about state violence or heavy-handed repression. Governments and demonstrators alike seem to have gained sophistication since the momentous events of the 1990s.

In South Korea, what drove home the corruption of former president Park Geun-hye’s coterie most bitingly was the apparent ability of her controversial personal confidante, Choi Soon-sil, to use her ties to the president to secure her daughter’s admission into a prestigious university. “That made me really disgruntled about Korea,” college student Kang Hae-ju exclaims. “Everyone’s really smart around me, and that seemed really unfair.”²⁹ Lee Sook-jong, director of the East Asia Institute in Seoul, explains that Koreans, who normally respect hierarchies, are viscerally egalitarian about two things: “The draft and higher education,”³⁰ which is a “make-it-or-break-it rite of passage” in the judgment of Korea Exposé’s Koo.³¹

Several participants—in Lebanon, for example—noted an initial government bid to quell the demonstrations by force. But today’s anticorruption uprisings are not primarily about state violence or heavy-handed repression. Governments and demonstrators alike seem to have gained sophistication since the momentous events of the 1990s. As officials have adopted many of the procedures of representative government—and learned to game them in the service of personal enrichment—alert citizens are reacting to the subtler tactics. Describing Romania, correspondent Andrew MacDowall sums up the evolution this way. Romanians, he says, “view their democracy as largely stillborn. These protests were aimed at completing the work begun in 1989.”³²

The Protesters

“The revolution,” Black Panther Huey Newton is said to have said, “has always been in the hands of the young.” It is perhaps no surprise that youth have been in the vanguard of today’s anticorruption protests.

A New Generation

In Burkina Faso, a troupe of performing artists would roar into slum neighborhoods at the head of a motorcycle caravan; they’d unpack a makeshift stage for a free concert or movie and, between sets, engage their audience in a debate on democratic citizenship. In Lebanon, seven young men, including artists, communications consultants, and journalists, hit on the “You Stink” slogan. That core largely directed the unfolding movement. In Guatemala, “It was university students,” says Claudia Escobar, a former judge who helped the emerging protest leadership strategize. “My generation grew up in the civil war and a lot of fear—‘Don’t talk; don’t get involved; don’t denounce.’ This was a new generation doing something for the first time.”³³

Despite the fresh faces found on the front lines of most demonstrations, experience—even collective or historical experience—has mattered in their outcomes.

Indeed, a prickly generational divide has marked some of today’s protests.³⁴ The group that helped ignite Burkina Faso’s 2014 uprising with its road shows, Citizen Broom (Balai Citoyen), was born of its leaders’ defection from older, largely labor-based protest groups, “which seemed tired out,” comments Idrissa Barry, one of the founders. Other freshly formed associations quickly joined the actions. “Relations weren’t particularly cordial,” Barry admits, especially at first. “We were new. We stole the limelight from our elders. They saw us as inexperienced jokesters.”³⁵

In Romania, the age divide is even more significant. Though, unusually, cities outside the capital joined the 2017 protest,³⁶ some observers depict nothing less than two separate countries, a “dynamic Romania” pitted against a “neo-feudal Romania,” with the poor, rural, older population “dependent on the goodwill of the public authorities” and therefore largely opposed to anticorruption demands.³⁷

The Value of Experience

Yet, despite the fresh faces found on the front lines of most demonstrations, experience—even collective or historical experience—has mattered in their outcomes.

“These were expert organizers,” says Emory’s Kim Sun-chul, who argues in his 2016 book, Democratization and Social Movements in South Korea, that public protest has largely propelled South Korea’s democratization process over the course of decades.³⁸ “Street protest,” he wrote in another publication, as they were taking place, “became the new normal as the democratic space expanded.”³⁹ Through this long practice, he elaborated in an interview, “social movement organizations have developed a tight network,” which was able this time to overcome earlier infighting. “Everyone knows each other. The leading activists have all worked in other organizations. It has grown customary to visit each other, participate in each other’s actions.” He describes a well-honed decisionmaking process, with some meetings held classroom-style with moderators in front of the rows of desks helping elicit a consensus. Such trust-based organization was crucial not just in bringing people into the streets but also in handling the gargantuan crowds.⁴⁰

Although this South Korean model is somewhat exceptional, Burkina Faso, too, is known for its history of protests—much in the French tradition. “In primary school, from the age of eleven or twelve, we said ‘we will oppose this system, whatever the cost,’” says Citizen Broom’s Barry. “We were always going to debates and student protests.”⁴¹ As Sten Hagberg, an anthropologist specializing in Burkina Faso at Uppsala University, writes, the military’s involvement in Burkinabe politics “coexists with a long tradition of protest and resistance.”⁴²

Moreover, analysts ascribe some of the movement’s unexpected success in toppling Compaoré to its alliance with the established political opposition, which supplied organizational structure and material support, largely behind the scenes. Zéphirin Diabré, who had been finance minister in the mid-1990s but left to teach at Harvard University and work in international development and consulting, returned to Burkina Faso and founded a new opposition party, the Union for Progress and Change (UPC), in 2010. “The UPC played a coordinating role,” says Eloise Bertrand, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warwick researching political parties and opposition dynamics in Burkina Faso.⁴³ Nina-Kathrin Wienkoop also highlights the close collaboration between Citizen Broom and several opposition parties, judging it “not so critical for mobilization,” since many younger Burkinabes had grown suspicious of organized politics, “but very important for media coverage and the movement’s strategy and tactics.” The performing artists and their social-media-savvy friends met regularly with opposition party members, and may have had access to inside information on upcoming National Assembly votes as well as some logis