Global capitalism has never been more advanced and aggressive than now. A key feature of this intensively global capitalist world is the staggering level, variety and institutionalisation of fraud and other economic crimes, across economic sectors. Wherever you look, the extensive societal restructuring of the last 30 years, that is ‘neoliberalism’, has produced structures and conditions that are fraud enabling. Corporate power and profit-making are closely tied to theft, deception and lawbreaking, in oil, mining, manufacturing, retailing, accounting, banking, education and health (Dukes, Braithwaite, and Moloney 2015; Whyte and Wiegratz 2016; Wiegratz 2016; Sanchez 2016; Carrier 2018). While the 2000s were characterised by industrial-scale fraud in the finance sector that contributed to the 2007/08 crisis and its aftermath, the 2010s saw increasing fraud in banking, but also revelations about regular ‘irregularities’ in the automobile and other core sectors of the global economy. Media reports about the latest corporate ‘scandals’ and dodgy deals involving prominent politicians, global celebrities or influential organisations were later followed by news about the launching of official investigations, arrests of managers, prosecutions, and fines for some of the planet’s best-known firms. Then came corporate promises to clean up and change culture, revelations of repeat offences by the same firms sometime later, and then global summits of experts and business and political leaders to discuss the fight against economic crimes, and make new declarations and promises to deal with them once and for all.
The timeline of the ‘age of fraud’ (Wiegratz 2015), begins with ‘grand corruption’ of public officials becoming routine by the late 2000s. Large-scale ‘wrongdoing’ by corporate professionals and managers then became ‘normal’ a few years later, while tax fraud by the powerful is now institutionalised. Fraud scandals that had media attention and captured the public imagination in recent years include: Barclays, Deutsche Bank, the Panama Papers, Volkswagen’s ‘Dieselgate’ emissions scandal, and many others – including those involving presidents Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma. Terms such as crony/rentier capitalism, criminal capital, dark money, deep state, state capture, and regulatory capture entered the political lexicon. Thus, mature neoliberalism brought about the exposure and evidence of the criminality at the top of the contemporary social hierarchy. As noted by Karl Marx long ago, deception and crime, circumvention of rules and creative trickery sit at the heart of modern capitalism and its global market project. More specifically, markets in everyday sectors are regularly underpinned by fraud and other criminal activities, with profits of ‘legitimate’ firms (re)produced by criminality (Whyte 2016). The state is often, directly or indirectly, an enabler and beneficiary of fraud, and a significant section of the powerful, supported by a legion of professionals, reproduce and advance their positions through fraudulent activity (Whyte and Wiegratz 2016). In sum, we have arrived at a point where it is public knowledge that the capitalist corporation can not only exploit, intimidate and otherwise mistreat its workers, damage the environment and other public goods, but can also be a serial lawbreaker and fraudster (Tombs and Whyte 2015).
So it is high time for a deeper analysis of fraud, its causes, characteristics, and societal repercussions, negatively affecting as it does lives at all ages, from the retired in the form of pension fraud to students and ‘essay factory’ fraud; and also given that the production, trade, finance, social services and entertainment sectors are affected by routine fraud. Corporate analysts note that businesses are reporting record levels of fraud, cyber, and security incidents (Kroll 2018). Fakes and frauds are at the centre of private and public conversations, including topics such as anxieties about being defrauded, fraud-related damages, or the perceived boundaries of legal/illegal, legitimate/illegitimate, and criminal/non-criminal activity (Beek, Kilian, and Krings 2019). Finally, corporate crimes are a major contributor to the existential threat of climate change and are now seen as crimes against humanity (Glikson 2019). That said, what exactly makes the neoliberal period of fraud in historical-comparative terms distinct, quantitatively and/or qualitatively, is still up for debate (Whyte and Wiegratz 2016; Wiegratz 2016; Carrier 2018; Bittle et al. 2018; Beek, Kilian, and Krings 2019); as are how the shifting character of neoliberalism in its different phases over the last three decades (Boffo, Saad-Filho, Fine 2018; Fine 2019) and the different aspects of neoliberal social engineering (Harrison 2010) have affected the scale, character and dynamics of fraud in particular regions, countries, sectors and professions.
This special issue is set against the background of this recent phase of the long history of the relationship between capitalism and economic crime (Pearce 1976; Bittle et al. 2018). It is dedicated to the analysis of fraud in the economy.1 It aims to shed light on some of the major political-economic characteristics of the fraud phenomena analysed, and thereby on what fraud has to do with, and can tell us about, relevant aspects of state–business relations, regulation and regulatory agencies, capitalist transformation and the corporation. It investigates fraud as a phenomenon of neoliberal reform and unpacks fraud as a societal and particularly a power phenomenon under capitalism. It responds to the imperative to advance the analysis of the link between capitalism and crime in Africa, and to locate capitalism more centrally in the analysis of economic crimes, as more African countries move from being societies with capitalism to capitalist societies (Parisot 2019).
Neoliberal reforms, economic fraud and Africa: continuities and changes
The global mainstream public debate, including in mainstream politics, throughout much of the last two decades was dominated by analytical insights of the kind that suggest fraud is a problem of greed and selfishness, that is, of culture and psychology (Hutton 2010; Sachs 2011). Class, power, profit, accumulation, market imperatives and the role of the capitalist corporation in (re)producing the criminal political economy were usually marginalised, or absent. However, throughout its history capitalism has had a criminogenic character, systematically producing political economies and cultures that advance criminal economic activities, with corporate crime causally linked to corporate power (Whyte 2009; Barak 2017). However, the state of this debate is changing because of the regularity with which cases of corporate crimes and their damaging consequences are reported and the urgent need to understand and tackle the link between corporate power and illegality, and the resulting social harms, especially in the context of the climate catastrophe.
Turning to economic fraud in Africa, and the analysis of it, a good illustration of the global, multi-sectoral coalition of actors that can characterise a given fraud case these days is this news report:
An ex-Credit Suisse Group AG banker became the first person to plead guilty in what U.S. prosecutors called a $2 billion fraud and money-laundering scam tied to loans to Mozambique that were used to pay bribes and kickbacks. […] The case centers on deals that allowed Mozambique to borrow $2 billion for maritime projects and coastline protection in 2013. The bonds sold to finance the loans were marketed to international investors to aid the economy and thwart sea piracy, but prosecutors say at least $200 million were plundered in the form of bribes and kickbacks. (swissinfo.ch 2019)
To recall, the neoliberal reforms across the continent were, according to promoters and their discourses, about creating a better, productive, innovative, progressive economy in which efficient, open, free markets allowed formal, legal commerce and entrepreneurship to make money in return for genuine goods and services offered. This was contrasted with a narrative of a pre-reform era characterised by wasteful and fraudulent state enterprises and cooperatives, black markets, and criminal economies. Major donors and later governments declared the state to be the cause of the underdevelopment and economic transformation problems on the continent, and free, unrestrained capitalist enterprise and capitalist spirit the solution to it. The aim of their reforms was titled the advancement of ‘private-sector development’, or the ‘private-sector-led economy’. Importantly, there was no historically informed caution of the sort that would raise red flags early on about the economic crime and trickery that comes with a full-blown capitalist society being engineered here. Instead, from the 1990s onwards, dominant neoliberal policies, programmes, discourses and ideologies propped up the power of the capitalist corporation, especially capital's ‘social credibility' (Snider 2000) or ‘moral capital' (Tombs 2016), and gave it ‘special freedoms’ (Hall 2012) to operate as it saw fit. That process is ongoing. Over the years, arguments against it were countered with variations of TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’) and ‘just-do-it’ arguments and discourses in Africa and other regions under reconstruction, such as Eastern Europe. Importantly, the reforms did not lead to economies that contained crime, with fraud limited to a very few sectors, as evidence from key reform countries such as Uganda, Kenya and South Africa suggests. In Uganda, for example, there was a string of revelations about fraud problems throughout the years in the import/export, logistics, construction, finance, agro-produce and agro-inputs sectors, in taxation, and regarding quack ‘foreign investors’ (Wiegratz 2010, 2016).
Much of the pro-business-speak of state and donor officials in such neoliberal examplar countries privileges and protects the interests of big capital. Denial or neglect of the systematic criminal character and tendencies of capitalist enterprise and economy is widespread, as is a refusal to discuss substantially the relationship between neoliberal reforms and widespread fraud, as well as the implication of various reform engineers including donors and imperialist countries in the co-production of the fraud-enabling economy (e.g. Wiegratz 2016; Hanlon 2017; Hoffmann and Hendricks 2018).
There are changes too. First, corporate irregularities seem less of a taboo topic in official discourse than in the 2000s. Some corporate practices have received considerable official attention; for instance, illicit financial flows including tax evasion of transnational corporations (TNCs) (GFI 2019a). This is part of the long aftermath of the report of the African Union/United Nations Economic Commission for Africa which estimated that illicit flows from Africa could be around US$50 billion a year (UNECA 2015). Other data about the scale of the problem have become publicly available: by the mid 2010s, capital flight was estimated at US$68 billion a year, mainly due to ‘multinational companies deliberately misreporting the value of their imports or exports to reduce tax’ (Global Justice 2017, 2), while about US$29 billion a year was reportedly ‘stolen from Africa in illegal logging, fishing and the trade in wildlife/plants’ (Ibid.). Another study estimated that Egypt loses tax revenue of about US$1.6 billion a year due to trade misinvoicing (GFI 2019b). UNCTAD research on trade misinvoicing revealed staggering figures too and many of these cases involved trade with countries in the global North (UNCTAD 2016). The figures were contested and led to debates about data categorisation and interpretation (Forstater 2017); UNCTAD had to react to the controversies (UNCTAD 2016, 1–4). The exact size of illicit financial outflows remains unknown also due to the scale, complexity and opacity in the system, and the relatively low level of research that explores the topic (Shaxson 2011). Further, there are official concerns – including in countries like the USA – regarding financial crimes such as money laundering and how it may fund terrorist activities and insurgencies.
Thus, faced with widespread economic crimes, a number of states in Africa and elsewhere have recently started to acknowledge more formally that there is an issue with economic irregularities that needs tackling. They have undertaken explicit countermeasures in the name of detecting and reducing fraudulent activities in their economies. After two decades of light-touch regulation of the economy during the rise and height of neoliberalism, these initiatives are advanced in the name of fostering product quality, consumer confidence, competitiveness, exports, and ultimately economic growth, and include attempts to restrict a range of economic, financial and environmental crimes. These regulatory initiatives to ‘clean up’ the economy are sometimes complemented by the activities of consumer protection organisations demanding regulation of problematic business practices; and these organisations occasionally form anti-fraud coalitions with business associations and donor agencies such as USAID (see Mykhalchenko and Wiegratz, in this issue). The World Bank releases reports about ‘ill-gotten money and the economy’ (World Bank 2011a) and anti-competitive practices in African economies in the context of the prevalent misuse of market power by monopolies or oligopolies. For example, the World Bank reports that in the telecommunications sector, sub-Saharan African countries by 2015 had ‘the highest final prices for mobile broadband services in the world’ (World Bank 2016, xiii). It notes an increase in the number of competition authorities and competition laws and states that are beefing up enforcement capacity (World Bank 2016). The UK Department for International Development (DFID) currently funds an ongoing large-scale research programme that investigates ‘private sector corruption’ in various African countries (Khan, Andreoni, and Roy 2016).
What is being said, researched and analysed
Fraud has never been a field of research on its own, but studying it can provide insights into various topics as it sits between many analytical categories including imperialism, state, markets, class, ethnicity, gender, and regulation. Further, a significant share of the data and analysis in the African context is published not by academic scholars, but by national or international bodies, activist groups, think tanks, corporate analysts and investigative journalists. Second, the phenomena of economic and especially corporate fraud and anti-fraud measures have remained understudied. There are several reasons for that, one being the almost exclusive focus in the 1990s to 2000s of the international donor and aid community, which funds a significant share of the research, on matters of political corruption, as part of the concern with the state and matters of ‘governance’ (Szeftel 1998). This has left private-sector fraud off the radar. For donors, the troublemaker was the corrupt state, not the corporation; the latter was framed as the ‘victim’ of rapacious state officials (Bracking 2014), despite counter-evidence (Otusanya 2011). Third, African studies has, in relative terms, rather a lot to say regarding state criminality, including corruption (e.g., Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999; de Sardan and Blundo 2006; Hoffmann and Hendricks 2018), and also about smugglers, tricksters, violent gangs and the like, but little, especially from criminological perspective, regarding corporate criminality. Relatively few criminologists study African corporate crime cases (Ezeonu 2018; MacManus 2018); much of the existing research on corporate crime is on South Africa, and legal studies dominate here. A number of debates are concerned with how crime affects matters of state building, political (dis)order, violence, political institutions, stability and (economic) development in Africa (World Bank 2011b); this is arguably also due to the impact of reports of the UN and other agencies in (post-)conflict and ‘state failure’ contexts, and the UN’s concern with crimes related to trafficking, drugs, natural resources and piracy (Ellis and Shaw 2015). That said, there are a number of relevant themes and debates in African studies, and branches of economics and development studies, concerning for example trade in drugs, weapons and human beings, smuggling, financial and environmental crime, and cyber-crime. However, African Studies does not sufficiently engage with and mobilise the relevant global, critical criminology literature to run analysis of economic crimes as phenomena of global and local capitalism (Snider 2000; Tombs and Whyte 2010; Tombs 2013).
The existing literature on (economic) crime in Africa makes a number of major points. First, the study of economic crime tells us something about the character of integration of African countries into a criminal global economy, including transnational connections of places and actors in Africa to structures such as off-shore havens. Second, there is a close relationship between the state and the criminal economy and legal economy, and between legal and illegal economic activity. There is a symbiotic, co-dependent, co-constitutional, collusive relation between state and criminal non-state actors such as corporations. There is a crime–politics nexus where politics, business and crime intersect. There is a role for power brokers, gatekeepers and facilitators. Third, there is recently a more intense merging of licit and illicit activity; an increased blurring of the distinctiveness between politics, organised crime and legitimate business; an increased integration of criminal markets into legal economy (e.g. Ellis and Shaw 2015; Sharman 2017; Carrier and Klantschnig 2018). Fourth, the state facilitates crimes. Various state actors, including operatives from the military, police, security and intelligence services are enabling criminal activity and profiting from crimes (e.g. McCormick 2015). Fifth, new shifts and trends regarding economic crimes in Africa include: the impact of globalisation and related market expansions and changes; the increased complexity, fragmentation and opacity of the corporate world; the impact of the neoliberalisation of the domestic political economy and introduction of multi-party democracy which affects struggles for rent; the increasing role of elites in crime (Ellis and Shaw 2015; Bracking 2014, 2016; Shaw 2017). Research gaps still exist in areas such as the political economy of health and safety crimes of corporations, and the role of banks and accounting firms in facilitating fraud. Underexplored also are the legal and other privileges (Tombs and Whyte 2015) that corporations enjoy in African countries, and how they contribute to the special status of the criminal par excellence in capitalist society, the corporation and the respective ‘structure of impunity’ (Bernat and Whyte 2017).
What is in this issue
The articles in this special issue extend some of the debates in Africa and beyond about present-day economic fraud, particularly regarding: the political character of fraud, and of anti-fraud measures, the relationship between neoliberal reform and fraud, the relationship between power, class and fraud, and the social making or co-production of fraud by a wide range of social actors who are enabling fraud. Further, the collection adds to the scholarship on crimes of the powerful, fraud and inequality, business regulation, the (il)legitimacy and ideological and moral underpinnings of fraud, and the political economy of data, definition, policy, and intervention. The analyses show the fruitfulness of focusing on corporate crime: gathering data especially on the powerful, following the broader set of actors, interests and ideas that allow corporate crime and evidencing its class character.
In their analysis of cartels in southern and East Africa in the post-liberalisation period, Thando Vilakazi and Simon Roberts provide insights into the collusive conduct of TNCs and the ways they exert power to influence policies and shape markets. They reveal that liberal notions of a disciplining role of competition, complemented by deterring competition laws, are misguided as they fail to address entrenched market power. The image of open, competitive markets that is being portrayed by various actors, including cartel firms themselves, turns out to be a façade that helps protect and cover up ongoing market cornering and rigging. Business associations including sector-specific associations can act as facilitators of fraud (i.e. the deliberate misrepresentation/misinformation in relation to market-related parameters): by advancing information exchange and communication; helping to cover up collusive conduct; lobbying government for cartel-friendly policies and regulations; advancing supportive discourses, such as ones of private-sector-led development and private–public partnerships. Further, large firms have powerful backers among the political/state elite and fraud is thus an outcome of an elite alliance that has a transnational character. Companies manipulate various societal realms, including the political, economic and legal, which helps to reinforce their power, sustain or advance the cartel and ensure the reaping of its benefits. They are engaged in multiple activities including control over infrastructure, logistics and inputs industries, shaping regulations; they position themselves as partners and advisers of government and donors and get involved in large development initiatives. State agencies in charge of competition and/or consumer protection have a hard time challenging cartels (i.e. enforcing competition rules), even once their existence has been detected and evidenced. Detection hardly leads to severe punishments, let alone trimming of the powers of large companies, also because of the power of the elite interests that back the cartel. Cartel activities have become increasingly sophisticated (including at avoiding detection) and regionalised and globalised, and are thus harder for national agencies to regulate. Finally, Vilakazi and Roberts argue that cartels (and related fraud) affect the industrial development dynamics on the continent, and influence the political economy of competition and market power as well as rent capture and division, and thus the rivalry between these powerful, well-connected (i.e. politically backed and protected) incumbents and the smaller, local challenger companies.
In the second article, Milford Bateman focuses on accounting ‘control fraud’ in the global microcredit industry, causing social harm in many countries across the world, including in South Africa, the special focus of the article. The analysis shows the dynamics that can unfold when Wall Street targets Soweto. Business sectors and models that donors, governments, non-governmental organisations, and, of course, companies actively market as developmental, socially beneficial and pro-poor have turned out to be routinely fraudulent and harmful, negatively affecting millions of the poor and their communities. And yet, despite sufficient and publicly known evidence of substantial fraud and harm in the global industry from the early 2000s, these businesses continue to be financially and ideologically boosted by a powerful alliance of actors to undertake this sort of business with the subaltern classes. Key actors in the international aid sector are thus entangled with corporate criminality and gangster capitalism, at the expense of the poor. They and their neoliberal state partners are enablers, backers and defenders of criminal capital. High-profile frauds get deliberately overlooked or downplayed by officialdom. Fraud, or ‘programmed deception’ in Bateman’s words, is a key mechanism for the private profiteering and enrichment of CEOs, senior managers and key shareholders. The corporation becomes the organisational vehicle of the rich and powerful to defraud and make super-profits from business with the very poorest and most vulnerable sections of population and the state, and cover it up for as long as possible. Finally, fraud is a driver of stark inequalities, also across racial lines; it enabled a number of white and male individuals to rise up the rankings of the super-rich.
Analysing Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy in South Africa, Sarah Bracking asks whether it has been useful as a vehicle to advance economic justice, redistribution, empowerment and historical restitution for black South Africans. The policy is commonly linked to elite enrichment, corruption, state capture, and the shadow state. But Bracking counters this portrayal and paints a nuanced picture of how BEE participants themselves understand the achievements and failures of the programme. Bracking argues that the policy, on its own terms, is effective for some, in a context of continued racialised markets and discrimination. She finds that BEE fraud, and related political corruption, exists and is underpinned by a range of ideologies, ideas and moral frames. In people’s accounts of fraud and corruption, there is an ideological mix of justifications that borrow from both neoliberalism and ideologies of resistance and the Left and are employed by actors to differentiate fraud and non-fraud within BEE. From neoliberalism there are tropes of competitiveness, individualism, entrepreneurship and economic marketisation, while from ideologies of resistance and the Left there are justifications related to decolonisation, historical and race restitution, radical transformation and BEE itself. These moral repertoires overlap and variously condemn or justify fraudulent practices, forming the embedded meanings that define these moral identifiers in the first instance. Neoliberalism is thus not the whole story, as historical national and local forces and dynamics (including those of class formation) shape the specifics of the fraud phenomenon. Bracking concludes that ‘the meaning of fraud or corruption is understood as inevitably embedded in narratives of class, state- and nation-building and socially situated within related concepts of empowerment, economic justice, and restitution for colonialism’ (p. 417). Invoking the concept of a ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005), she notes that some fraud is seen as ‘acceptable in the class and race struggle to correct the past and build prosperity in the future’ (p. 436).
In their analysis of ‘fake drugs’ (including fraudulently mislabelled drugs) in Nigeria, Gernot Klantschnig and Chieh Huang point out that pharmaceutical fraud cannot be attributed to lack of consumer awareness or the entry of organised crime in these markets, as many of the ahistorical and apolitical establishment accounts would have it. Instead, the colonial roots of unregulated and illegal trade and the current political-economic context produced by liberal restructuring have to be taken into account. The authors attribute the rise of fakes to a range of global and local changes related to neoliberalism: reduced public spending and the devaluation of currencies that came with structural adjustment programmes, resulting in crises in local healthcare systems and pharmaceutical manufacturing, the privatisation of healthcare and the commodification of health along with the liberalisation of related markets. They note that drugs provision is now run by highly global networks, and that Nigerians are more exposed to global pharmaceutical markets and their dominant firms. It is this context that helps us to understand the conditions that favoured fake drugs and made regulation difficult. ‘Fake drugs’ is thus a phenomenon of contemporary private, under-regulated markets, and more generally a marketised society. Further, drugs in high demand are particularly targeted by fraudsters; importers of falsified drugs cooperate with those in legal business; customers (including state hospitals) rely on the quasi-illegal wholesale market for purchase of drugs due to the lack of legal alternatives. Meanwhile, the restructured local manufacturing industry now operates at low capacity, and often with lower standards. Finally, Klantschnig and Huang note a decline of ‘fake drugs’ in the country due to an increase in government regulation and stronger enforced self-regulation among drug sellers to maintain reputation and sales. This takes place against a context of contestations between different national/international health and law enforcement agencies; political-economic rivalry between wholesalers, pharmacists’ associations and regulatory agencies; and pharmaceutical firms' funding of some of the regulator’s initiatives.
In our fifth article, Christiaan De Beukelaer and Martin Fredriksson analyse the highly skewed political economy of intellectual property rights (IPR), with particular reference to the case of media piracy in Ghana. They note that cultural ‘piracy’ is deemed purely detrimental, destructive, illegal and anti-developmental in much of mainstream discourse and policy, and is discouraged, suppressed, clamped down on and punished regularly by governments in a number of African countries. According to the neoliberal orthodoxy, copyright promotes while piracy undermines ‘development’, despite evidence of a more nuanced and messy industry, where legal and illegal, formal and informal practices are difficult to untangle. Clampdowns on piracy are part of ongoing attempts to further privatise and commodify culture, and to impose and enforce a stricter copyright regime in Africa, thereby normalising copyright and intellectual property (IP) and the corresponding capitalist international regulatory regime. Further, the authors show that to date, African countries have had very limited impact on the development of international copyright legislation. The legalistic IP framework, the concept and legal context of copyright – and the resulting local social tensions – are a remnant of colonial rule in most African countries, formulated without African input, negotiation or consideration. The current regulatory and legislative framework regarding IPR is being imposed through the international trade regime, i.e. a global governance structure dictated by the global North. These power structures shape the practice of local implementation of international IPR regimes. De Beukelaer and Fredriksson further argue that following the formation of the World Trade Organization and its Trade-Related Aspects of International Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, copyright is now predominantly regarded as a trade rather than as a human and cultural rights issue. TRIPS redefined IPR as a financial matter, aiming to protect global corporate interests and ignore or exclude traditional knowledge and forms of ownership applied by indigenous groups on the continent. The authors call for a transformed political economy of intellectual property rights that strikes a different balance, one that rewards IP holders but also acknowledges and serves public interests, i.e. ensures wide access to culture.
There are three related Briefings in this issue. First, Milford Bateman, Maren Duvendack and Nicholas Loubere scrutinise the academic validity of one of the most influential research articles that is used by the likes of DFID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the promotion of financial technology (fin-tech) in the global South, including Africa. A central claim of that article (by Suri and Jack 2016) is that the world’s flagship fin-tech, Kenya’s money transfer platform M-Pesa, has been instrumental in facilitating poverty reduction. Bateman and his co-authors show how Suri and Jack’s analysis and claims are extremely problematic, noting parallels here to another dubious impact evaluation study that was used to promote another problematic tool to ‘help the poor’: microcredit. They finally argue that fin-tech is designed to benefit a narrow global digital-financial elite, at the expense of the poor.
In the second Briefing, Nataliya Mykhalchenko and Jörg Wiegratz explore the drivers and characteristics of anti-fraud measures (AFMs) of both state and non-state actors in four countries in the southern African region: Malawi, Botswana, South Africa and Zambia. Their data suggest that these measures are predominantly driven by corporations and state bodies, based extensively on technology and awareness-building campaigns, and the creation of a sense of threat and urgency through the language used in articulation of these initiatives. International regulatory private firms feature strongly in AFMs. The authors point to the political character as well as to the commercial interests that underpin some of the measures.
In the last Briefing, Adam Aboobaker explores the term ‘white monopoly capital’, which has featured prominently in South Africa’s recent popular economic discourse. Situating this rhetorical turn within discussion over the broader monopoly capital tradition, Aboobaker argues that the term has a weak conceptual basis and that there is a need to move beyond it, because it relies on the unsupported idea that a concentrated market structure is driving stagnation and inequality in the country and fuels conspiratorial language which ‘is harmful to South Africa’s political discourse’ (p. 515).
Following the Briefings, Jan Beek’s book review contributes to our discussion on neoliberal versus non-neoliberal drivers of contemporary fraud.
As shown here, fraud is a social phenomenon uniting various classes as well as state, political and professional organisations. One line of future enquiry could explore further the link between economic fraud and public-sector dynamics and investigate how the state becomes internally restructured and incapacitated, with the aim of facilitating corporate fraud. To ‘follow the state’, to explore the political economy of the relationship between economic fraud and political corruption, might add to our debate about the special relationship between capital and state under neoliberalism. Finally, the pro-corporate-criminality effect of some of the ideologies and/or operations of sections of the international aid/development sector requires further research too.