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The critical
The critical business of business of
corruption corruption
Ed Brown
Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, and 275
Jonathan Cloke
Department of Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to set out an agenda for promoting collaboration between
researchers in critical geography and critical management studies.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is divided into two main sections. In the first, a
detailed discussion of the nature of critical perspectives in the two traditions is advanced which
focuses upon the nature of the two disciplines, the contested meaning of “critical” approaches and our
relationship with the wider political world. The opportunities for collaboration are explored in more
specific detail through consideration of the ongoing attempts to develop a new perspective on the
current international pre-occupation with corruption and anti-corruption initiatives, which is both
critical and multi-disciplinary.
Findings – In trawling through the political economy of the development of an idea, corruption, the
paper demonstrates, not just the part that a critical geographical narrative has to play in informing
policy, but also the vital links that geography has to develop with the critical appraisal of business,
business management and economics. The paper calls for the combining of insights from both
traditions to better assess what is signified by corruption, how the concept is used in the business
world and how to convince policymakers that, in this area at least, there is no such thing as a
consequence-free policy.
Originality/value – This paper’s originality lies in: its bringing together of two distinct research
traditions in geography and management studies; and the novel approach it espouses in relation to
refining our understanding of the meaning of corruption and its place in broader debates about
economic policy and broad patterns of development.
Keywords Critical geography, Critical management, Corporate governance, Corruption,
Public sector organizations
Paper type Viewpoint

Introduction
There are two major intentions behind the submitting of this paper to critical
perspectives on international business. As two critical geographers, the first is to sketch
out some points of connection between the critical geography and critical management
studies traditions in the hope of opening a fruitful dialogue. The second is to suggest
avenues of research where there may be opportunities for collaboration. In this article
we focus (in particular) on recent attempts to develop a new multi-disciplinary, critical
perspective on the current international preoccupations with the broad spectrum of critical perspectives on international
activities, processes and actions labelled as corruption and corresponding business
Vol. 2 No. 4, 2006
“anti-corruption” activities. pp. 275-298
The first section of the paper looks at common areas of concern in the development q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1742-2043
of critical perspectives within both the geography and management/business studies DOI 10.1108/17422040610706622
CPOIB traditions, with emphases upon issues such as the availability of funding for critical
2,4 research, forms of engagement with government and effects on policy (including a brief
engagement with the thorny question of “relevance” in research). In the second section,
the authors use their own engagement with the topic of corruption as an example of
one area in which a critical voice from geography and management/business studies
might have an important impact. The ensuing two sections expand upon this by firstly
276 looking at the development of the schizophrenic attitudes to corruption and its’ control
which arose as a result of Cold War geopolitics, before then providing a discussion of
the definitional problems involved in international and national legislation on
corruption and how these tie in with the underlying belief systems of orthodox
economic theory and ideas of development. The conclusion brings the arguments full
circle and calls for a practical and realistic co-operation between geography and
management/business studies in this field which, we suggest, has a vital part to play
both in the development of legislation and policy and in its’ effective legislation.

Critical geography and critical management studies

From the vantage point of a geographical discipline where critical perspectives,
however defined, have enjoyed a relatively strong disciplinary position since the
radical geography movement of the early 1970s (see Peet, 1977a; Gibbons, 2001),
management studies and, indeed, business studies more generally, have frequently
been viewed as areas of academic endeavour that, to put it bluntly, are firmly
enmeshed within the very heart of the international capitalist system. As such, there
has been a tendency amongst critical geographers to view the rapid expansion of
business studies in Northern universities[1] with some concern, viewing it as, for
example, intimately tied into the spread of the neo-liberal orthodoxies of deregulation
and privatization and the creeping commercialization of the higher education sector as
it has been driven to become more commercially-friendly, if not commercially-led.
Over recent years, however, there has been a gradual transformation in how
management and business studies are viewed by the critical geographical community.
This reflects, on the part of critical geographers, a more mature understanding of the
work that goes on in business schools and the complexities of business/civil society
relations, as well as the welcome growth of an important strand of critical enquiry
within management studies itself which is strongly critical of the neo-liberal project
and refreshingly self-reflective on the role of the business sector in the wider world. At
the same time, scholars in both fields have been exploring innovative new ways of
understanding the rapidly changing global political economy we find ourselves in, not
least through an engagement with the critical, post-Marxist economic analyses of
authors such as Steve Keen (Keen, 2001).
We see journals such as CPIB in particular as having a vital role for consolidating
the closer relationships gradually being established between critical geographers and
researchers within the diverse critical management studies fold. There are some
fundamental issues that bring us together. Some, such as our shared interests in
understanding the nature of globalization and its impacts or the complexities of
changing relations between the private and public spheres, are straightforward. There
are also, however, some less obvious connections that are worth exploring here in a
little more detail.
 Historically, geography played an important role in facilitating and justifying the The critical
exercise of political and economic power during the earlier imperial periods of the business of
evolution of the global capitalist system (Forbes, 1984, chapters 2 and 3). The discipline
has been, for example, termed the “imperial science” for the services it rendered in corruption
mapping the colonial territories and measuring resources (see also Kearns, 1997;
Bonnett, 2003; Driver, 1992; Godlewska and Smith, 1994). It is hopefully not pushing a
point too far to suggest that business studies has developed something of a similar role 277
in more recent times via its role in servicing the needs of the corporations that have
played such a central role within the spread of neo-liberal globalization. As Zald (2001)
suggests, it is difficult to “incorporate critical perspectives into a professional training
and research institution” (the business school as “the heartland of academic knowledge
capitalism” – Hassardi et al. (2001) “some of whose members seem to be apologists and
glorifiers of managerial capitalism”.
This is not to suggest, of course, that geographers have the answers to complex
questions about how to consolidate a disciplinary position for critical perspectives (or
what happens to the critical edge of critical perspectives when they become part of the
“disciplinary mainstream”[2]) or, still less, how we might reconcile the roles that we as
critical academics play within institutions and disciplines which remain a fundamental
part of the structures, powers etc. that most of us seek to transform (see Castree,
2000a, b; Masey, 1999; Blomley, 1994). We fervently believe, however, that by
establishing cross-disciplinary flows of research and communication and most
importantly by also reaching out to diverse activist communities beyond academia in
the process, as integral components of a whole, we can radically transform the process
of knowing in our own disciplines.
A crucial element in developing a more critical tradition in geography was the
establishment of radical journals such as Antipode, which played a key role in the
early 1970s (see the early editions of the journal from 1969 or an interesting
reassessment in Hague (2002)) and paved the way for later journals such as
Society and Space to flourish in the 1980s and for critical perspectives to become
more widely accepted within other more mainstream geography journals. The
emergence of CPOIB as a new forum for the nurturing of critical perspectives
within management and business studies is, therefore, an important component in
the strengthening of critical reflection.
Recent critical management studies literature reveals a similar series of
preoccupations to the ones that have exercised critical geographers over recent
years. Perhaps the most important of these relates to what it is precisely that makes
critical geography (or critical management studies) critical and why it matters[3].
Within both disciplinary frameworks it would appear that the use of the term critical
refers to two fundamental traits.
The first of these is where the descriptor “critical” denotes unhappiness with the
state of the world and, in particular, a concern to use our academic endeavours to
contribute towards overcoming exploitation and marginalization. In the words of the
statement of purpose of the International Critical Geography Group (ICGG, n.d.).
We are critical and internationalist as geographers because the discipline has long served
colonial, imperial and nationalist ends, generating the ideological discourses that help to
naturalise social inequality. We recognise the ties between knowledge and power and are
committed to unmasking them. We work as geographers because we believe that knowing
CPOIB the world in its detail and its geographical differences, from the local to the global scale, is a
vital key to confronting political power.
2,4
The second shared sense in which “critical” is used relates less to the potential wider
impacts of research and more to the conducting of the actual research itself. In this
usage, critical research is research that is self-reflective and self-critical, that is aware
of the role of the researcher in the generation of knowledge, that is sceptical of the
278 “truth claims” of any research process and sharply sensitive to issues of identity,
representation and personal politics. Thus, for Antonacopoulou (1999, p. 5) a large part
of critical management studies centres around a critique of the praxis of management
studies itself, through a questioning of the dominant rhetoric (the premises on which
arguments and propositions are made and the language used) and traditions of
management (the taken-for-grated beliefs and assumptions). It also involves
challenging notions of disciplinary authority and objectivity by stressing the
importance of embracing plurality and recognizing the value-laden nature of all forms
of knowledge. Plainly, this contradicts the current hegemonic definitional and
descriptive assertions of western/northern capitalist economic and management
theory, perhaps best summed up by Larry Summers at an IMF summit in Bangkok in
1991:
The laws of economics, it’s often forgotten, are like the laws of engineering. There’s only one
set of laws, and they work everywhere (quoted in Wade, 2004).
To simplify, we could perhaps talk of the existence of externalized (focussed on
questions of outcomes, relevance and activism) and internalized (focussed on academic
practice and understanding) dimensions to the development of critical perspectives in
our two areas of interest. As Fuller and Kitchin (2004) put it in relation to the more
self-reflective approaches:
[. . .] in the main these approaches work as theoretic critiques of academic practice and
society, rather than driving “on the streets” empirical research. This is not to say that . . . . that
they cannot be used as theoretic toolkits for underpinning activism or other kinds of praxis,
but that such radical use is relatively rare.
To us, the need for both of these components is self-evident and yet within both
disciplines it would appear that sharp dividing lines have frequently been drawn
between those who appear to favour one perspective over the other. Frequently, this
has been expressed as a conflict between a more activist, externally-oriented, political
economy tradition and a more internalized and reflective post-structural/post-modern
orientation. For example, as critical geography became more self-reflexive during the
1990s, those located within the Marxist-influenced political economy traditions which
had dominated the earlier cycles of radical geography frequently lamented (what they
viewed as) an increasing disengagement from concrete political struggles amongst
many critical geographers through increasing theoretical abstraction, self absorption
and the abandonment of class analysis[4].
Over recent years, however, we have been struck by an increasing rapprochement
between the protagonists of these debates. This reflects an increasing openness to new
ideas amongst Marxists (through, for example, engagement with the consciously
postmodern Marxism of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff), a reassessment of the
legacy of Marxism amongst those who had previously rejected it as having little
contemporary relevance and wide-ranging discussions over the political connotations The critical
of post-structural approaches[5]. For example, one of the major Marxist protagonists in business of
debates over the impacts of post-structuralism in critical geography, Peet (1977a),
p. 952) writes: “The tragedy of the time, from a personal view, was the antagonism that corruption
developed among the different schools of thought . . . ”. He then goes on to look at what
a more hopeful new phase of critical research in geography might look like and after
discussing some of the potential pitfalls, suggests the need for the “reconciliation and 279
mutual respect (that might be) achieved through philosophical hybrids and
comparative studies” (Peet (1997b), p. 953)[6].
We embarked upon this discussion of alternative conceptual frameworks by asking
what exactly the critical in critical geography or critical management studies should be
understood to mean. We also briefly mentioned the fact that there had recently been a
renewed series of reflections in geography journals about the supposedly limited
“relevance” of much geographical research, particularly that of critical geographers.
The most recent exchanges were sparked by an unashamedly polemical article by Ron
Martin (Martin, 2001) in which he offered a damning assessment of the limited impacts
of geographical research in addressing the social and economic challenges of our day
(see also Pacione, 1999; Dorling and Shaw, 2002). From Martin’s perspective, both of
the traditions explored above (the Marxist geography that dominated the early period
of “dissident geographies” (see Blunt and Wills, 2000) and the broad church of
post-modern-influenced perspectives that have grown up since then) have descended
into competing forms of academic navel-gazing, rather than engaging in any
meaningful way of tackling “real world” issues.
Such condemnation immediately raises important questions about who defines
what these “real world” issues are and in what ways we are supposed to be responding
to them. For Martin, the chief priority is for critical geographers to engage with
government in practical policy-related research projects that could have a real impact
on improving people’s lives. As he rightly suggests, this type of applied policy research
has been seriously undervalued within a research culture that prioritizes academic
publishing (i.e. the research assessment culture) and geographers have largely been
content to leave such efforts to other disciplines[7]. We don’t have the space to go into
all of the issues raised in the debates that have stemmed from the publication of
Martin’s article but it is worth making a couple of general points here[8].
First, there is the question of geography’s lack of visibility in policy circles[9] and, in
particular, the degree to which this stems from the lack of relevance to the needs of
policy-makers claimed by Martin or perhaps the fact that the critical slant of much
geographical research is not something that governments’ generally want to engage
with. Similarly, just because research does not involve closer contact with national
policy-makers, does not necessarily mean it is somehow less “useful”. Thus, whilst
critical geographers may not have had close working relationships with the state, they
have frequently worked closely with a range of other political actors (including
international NGOs, local community organizations, social movements (local, national
and regional), trade unions and so on).
Second, there is something problematic about Martin’s attempts to define relevance
primarily in terms of closer engagement with government. The argument appears to be
that “getting the ear” of government in order to improve/change policy must be the
ultimate goal of any critical academic committed to seeing some demonstrable impact
CPOIB of their work upon the issues that we claim to care about. However, we also need to ask
2,4 exactly why we are engaging with government, how that engagement is to be
structured and with what wider impacts. If this is to be a relationship of equals then so
be it – however, there is all too often a tendency for the relationship to be
client-sponsored, in which case the onus is on the client to give the sponsor what it
desires, politically.
280 Government-sponsored research by its’ very nature comes with un-stated (or
sometimes explicit) “expectations” about what the outcomes of the research will be.
There is also the question of the ownership of research (see Macmillan and Scott, 2003)
and the real possibilities for any truly critical engagement in policy debates[10].
Furthermore, there are also wider political concerns about the degree to which working
closely with government legitimizes the imposing of limits as to the scope of any
“critical” research into a particular policy issue. As Wilbert and Hoskyns (2004, p. 63)
put it:
[. . .] if there is . . . . a temptation to be “positive”, and “constructive” in terms of engagement
with official policy, there is also the potential that we can all too easily be always drawn into
trying to make such policies less bad, where we accept as legitimate the ground such policy
sets out. While we would not dismiss such approaches, we feel that limiting ourselves in such
ways takes us again into a realm of potential limitation of what is possible to the “new
realism” of neo-liberalism.
Suffice it to say that from our perspective, Martin’s original suggestions do not go far
enough – there is a great need, not simply for seeking ways of engagement with
government, but for analysing what government means in the current phase of
globalization. What, for example, do the ideas of decentralization, transparency and
accountability gaily bandied around by the World Bank and the IMF really mean
within global financial and commercial networks which allocate more and more power
to the increasingly opaque and unaccountable decision-making processes of
multi-national boards and international finance corporations? How are ideas of
supranational government such as the International Criminal Court and the pressure
for a globalized introduction of a Tobin Tax to be reconciled with initiatives such as
the GATS and the Bolkestein agreement in the EEC, which effectively seek to
incorporate untrammelled laissez-faire capitalization as an integral part of the global
political economy?[11]
Our hope is that CPIB will provide another forum where there is, not only a degree
of conceptual and political pluralism amongst critical researchers (although we would
certainly welcome this), but also real interaction between those adopting contrasting
positions. We hope particularly that, as critical academics get to grips with the reality
of the political economy in what we see as the latest phase of capitalization in a
historical spectrum of phases (rather than the doxa of a monolithic, unbegotten monad
called Capitalism), we may join with critical business men and women, as well as social
and environmental activists of various stripes, to provide effective inputs into
critiquing the hegemony of neo-classical orthodoxy, re-thinking the role of the state,
improving the regulation of multi-national business and reclaiming the progressive
role that could be played by supra-national international financial institutions and
other regulatory bodies.
So far in this paper, we have outlined what we see as some potential areas of
resonance for those pursuing critical approaches within our two disciplinary
frameworks. Given the space available, there are, of course, omissions and The critical
over-simplifications and we are quite sure that we will be picked up on these. business of
However, if we are to encourage real interdisciplinary collaboration, we need to move
on from generalities to explore potential areas of mutual interest in more specific corruption
research areas. In what remains of this paper, therefore, we attempt to do just this by
offering an overview of ongoing attempts to develop a new critical and
multi-disciplinary perspective on the current international preoccupation with 281
corruption and anti-corruption initiatives. This touches upon how we might work
together to develop perspectives that can tackle both the broader political economy of
anti-corruption initiatives (e.g. the geopolitics of North-South relations, the neo-liberal
frameworks within which anti-corruption strategies have been designed by
international agencies and the impacts of globalization on the nature and dynamics
of “corrupt” financial interactions), as well as culturally defined questions as to the
changing meanings assigned to the idea of corruption over space and time. It also
raises complex questions as to how best to articulate this critique so that it might
influence the praxis of anti-corruption activities, bearing in mind our prior discussions
over the relationship between critical researchers and policy-makers and
implementers.

Critical perspectives on corruption

Recently, together with several other commentators (Hanlon, 2004; Harrison, 2003;
Polzer, 2001; Szeftel, 1998; Williams and Beare, 1999; Michael, 2004), we have been
promoting the need for critical academic reflection upon the growing calls for an
international “anti-corruption” crusade. Our shared interest in delving into this
complex political economy, as we explain in our first paper on the theme (Brown and
Cloke, 2004), derived from our experiences conducting research in Nicaragua under the
administration of Arnoldo Aleman. In particular, we had been struck by the
incongruity between what we consistently heard from Nicaraguans of all walks of life
about the all-pervasive levels of a generalized miasma of corruption presided over by
Aleman and the continuing claims of the international financial institutions (and
bilateral donors such as USAID (2000)) that transparency and openness in Nicaraguan
governance was being improved under their tutelage and that the Aleman
administration was championing a clear anti-corruption agenda (for more detail on
the Nicaraguan example see Brown and Cloke, 2005).
These concerns led us to us to a more general exploration of the impacts of the
international campaign being waged against corruption. Were the contradictions we
had observed a more general tendency? Was the massive increase in the funding of
anti-corruption interventions over the past decade leading to demonstrable
achievements?
The answers to these questions are not straight-forward. There are a number of
national examples as blatant as that of Nicaragua but each one bears the unique
characteristics of that country’s history, culture, socio-economic background and
degree and type of insertion into the global political economy. Why, for instance, has
the US recently denied access to the Millennium Challenge Funds to the Philippines on
the grounds of insufficient success at implementing anti-corruption, transparency and
governability initiatives[12] at the same time that Nicaragua, by nobody’s estimation
less corrupt than the Philippines and arguably more so in a number of respects, has
CPOIB been given a favoured position? We would argue that the reason for this is the still-vital
2,4 place that Nicaragua occupies as an ally of strategic, symbolic and financial
importance to the Republican right in the current US administration, juxtaposed to the
decision of the Philippine government to unilaterally withdraw its’ troops from Iraq,
rather than any pragmatic, neutral assessment of the levels and types of corruption in
the two countries.
282 This lack of detailed, contextualized analysis of the implementation of supposed
anti-corruption initiatives is, we would argue, reflected everywhere, rather than
having anything to do with any uniqueness of Nicaraguan circumstances.
Similarly, whilst there are many supportive statements on the impacts of
anti-corruption initiatives emanating from the organizations funding such activities
and those closest to the industry (see World Bank, 1999; World Bank, 2000;
Campbell and Stapenhurst, 2005; USAID, 2000; International Chamber of
Commerce, 2003; United Nations, 2004), we have also come across a series of
major reservations expressed particularly by those whose evaluation of such
activities stems from long-term research experience in the country concerned
(amongst which see Szeftel, 1998; Hawley, 2000; Harsch, 1999; Krastev, 2001).
There are, in addition, whole areas of international commerce that appear to be
simply out of bounds for open, frank discussion and research so far as the UK
and US governments are concerned, such as the oil industry and the arms trade.
Our misgivings about the impacts of anti-corruption initiatives should not,
however, be interpreted as in any way suggesting that those phenomena those
measures are designed to tackle are unimportant – although we would, nonetheless,
suggest that many pronouncements about the massive negative impacts of corruption
upon economic growth (or the possibilities for success of global anti-poverty initiatives
such as the Millennium Development Goals – MDGs)[13] are probably over-stated
(Jain, 2001; Chetwynd et al., 2003). Some of the more obvious behaviours and practices
labelled as corrupt do clearly have an impact upon economic growth but the direction
of that relationship is not automatic (Moran, 1998; Quah, 2002; Kang, 2002), and the
cultural and political economy contexts are vital.
In fact, the reason why corruption should be of concern to critical academics stems
from the fact that it is the poor who invariably bear the brunt of negative impacts, for
example through the diversion of funds intended for anti-poverty programmes.
Corruption is also important because, when perceived as widespread and ingrained
within particular political cultures, it can erode support for democratic processes
further solidifying those circumstances where, whether encouraged or sustained by
external pressures or internally specific ones, “corrupt” socio-cultural processes have
come to facilitate the existence of a quasi-state (the shadow state) by which a small
minority of elites, sustained by extensive clientelistic networks, effectively by-pass and
subvert official governance structures in a way that excludes and impoverishes the
majority of citizens. There are, then, compelling ethical and political arguments as to
why critical researchers should treat those behaviours falling under the heading of
corruption seriously (reflecting, at the simplest level the simple desire to ensure that
tax revenues are used for the purposes for which they were designated) and should
support the moves being made to address deep-seated dysfunctions of the state, not
least through providing support to those putting their lives on the line to highlight
entrenched corruption.
 Nevertheless, a recognition of the validity of the political arguments for tackling The critical
corruption does not automatically lead to an acceptance of either: the argument that business of
“corruption” has suddenly become a bigger problem than it was in the past (we remain,
for example, suspicious as to why major international agencies and powerful corruption
governments have suddenly placed corruption at the centre of international agendas
(why wasn’t it deemed important before now?); or the appropriateness of the ways in
which the global anti-corruption crusade has been formulated and enacted. In Brown 283
and Cloke (2004) we advance a much more detailed critique of the nature of this
anti-corruption crusade. There we suggest that, whilst we should recognize the
advances (particularly in the work of Transparency International) made in raising the
profile of issues related to democracy, governability and transparency, there are
reasons to be sceptical about the ability of anti-corruption programmes to adequately
deal with the phenomena. We argue that these problems derive from specifically
targeted, ideology-driven conceptual frameworks, which have framed the dominant
perspectives on corruption.
The first limitation derives from a tendency to treat corruption as an inherently
domestic problem (leading to the familiar focus upon the need for better national
institutions, laws etc.) and a failure to understand the increasingly global sources and
dynamics of corruption. The geographies of corruption, (including not only processes,
activities and actions but how they gain their significance and the ways in which
those labels are defined), have been altered under the conditions of contemporary
globalization. Clearly, there are forms of “corrupt” practices and behaviours whose
boundaries can be drawn more locally but our point is that increasingly such
behaviour is something that occurs through the transfer of resources across
international boundaries. We are thinking here of the practices of international
institutions, aid agencies, NGOs and particularly transnational corporations in
particular instances (e.g. Hawley (2000) estimate that $80 billion dollars are annually
paid in bribes in Southern countries by Northern corporations). It can be no
coincidence that whilst G8 governments and international institutions are happy to
support and indeed encourage governments in which bribery is the norm, when
geo-strategic purposes such as the need for oil or to sell weapons suit, they are at the
same time framing a malleable rhetoric around the labelling of only specific,
carefully-defined, behaviours as corrupt, which is intended as a support for the
neo-liberal model of capitalism – bribery may or may not be acceptable depending on
the circumstances.
This suggests another important element which is often present in discussions of
corruption its labelling as a predominantly Southern phenomena. Of course we
recognize that major instances of particular types of corruption do seem to occur in
Southern countries particularly (see, for example, the lists of “worst abusers” produced
by Transparency International: www.transparency.org) but this reflects the dominant
forms of labelling of what forms of corruption are considered most important. The very
term corruption, along with culturally- and politically-specific differences in definition,
is obviously part of the problem, in that it is used to refer to both the corporate scandals
that have rocked the very heart of the corporate world (Enron, Worldcom etc.) and the
day-to-day petty corruption of say police officers on the streets of Tegucigalpa[14].
In the official discourses informing anti-corruption strategies there is an
over-dependence upon economistic understandings of corruption which view it as
CPOIB primarily about the rent-seeking activities of individuals, together with an unhelpful
2,4 focus on the state as the fundamental site of corruption (and liberalization and
privatization as the solution), rather than a recognition of the importance of complex
public/private intersections in the generation of individual and collective opportunities
for corrupt behaviour. Clearly, if we are to take a broader, more holistic, understanding
of corruption then such perspectives are unhelpful and, given the record of abuse
284 associated with privatizations, even counter-productive. We do not view this
over-dependence as either coincidental or accidental, but rather as the product of the
same political economy processes through which Rostow produced his take-off theory
in 1960, in other words as a theoretical underpinning intended to act as a justification
for free-market capitalism and to denote its’ inevitability and Manichaean nature,
rather than to reflect careful empirical analysis of the character and processes of what
corruption might actually be.
Taken together, these points reflect our concerns that in too many cases what is
referred to as corruption has been taken out of the context within which it occurs both
globally (in terms of the interactions between North and South, the transforming
influence of globalization etc.) and locally (reflecting a tendency to seek for global
explanations for and solutions to a monolithic signifier named corruption, rather than
more detailed considerations of the complex dynamics of the nature of multiple,
interlinked corruptions within individual societies). We will show in the following
section how this cultural and political unease reflects itself most clearly in the current
legislative environment in the UK and elsewhere, and in the debates over that
legislation and what is, or is not, “acceptable” negotiating behaviour.

The legislative environment: a troubled historical legacy

The emergent international business seeking to expand commercial activities outside
its country of origin faces a legislative landscape of great uncertainty and instability in
many regions. During the immediate post-World War II period prior to and during the
widespread success of independence movements in Asia, Oceania, Africa and Latin
America, markets in raw materials, manufactures and industrial goods outside Europe,
the USA and the USSR were to a great extent subject to the dictates of remnant colonial
administrations and the necessities of the emerging Cold War. In other words, where
and how a company could trade were processes that were frequently subject to given
administrative regimes subservient to determinedly political processes. Within the
strictures of these processes regulation was a more straightforward issue than it has
become over the last three decades; bribery was an acceptable if not necessary part of a
paradigm within which trade was both an objective, and at the same time a vital
component, of the political economy.
Plainly, trade regimes amongst the carefully protected US and European market
economies and those that soon arose to join them (such as Japan, South Korea and
Singapore) differed greatly from the internal trade mechanisms of the COMECON
network and the variously aligned economies of what came to be termed the third
world. For this last group, colonial history, socio-cultural structures, and external
intervention due to varying degrees of Cold War strategic importance[15] helped to
determine the trade regime. For both the USSR and the US/NATO alliance, internal
trade/business regulation increasingly functioned in an entirely different manner from
that expressed to outside countries – for the rest of the world expressions of “Market The critical
Capitalism” or “Socialist Fraternity” rarely came their way without strings attached. business of
Additionally, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the type of commerce engaged in or the
sort of materials involved determined the regulatory environment in which business corruption
operated; those closest to the most pressing strategic needs of the country were
increasingly given carte blanche. Thus, during the post-war era in the UK, the oil trade
and the weapons industry in particular evolved (under the careful nurturing and fierce 285
protection of the government) to become virtual arms of state policy whose operations
were effectively outside international treaties and internal regulation. Clearly, Northern
companies and their governments can act as a key source of corruption in the South
(Johnstone and Brown, 2004, p. 3).
The international business environment underwent a rapid change following the
collapse of the Socialist bloc from 1989 onwards, as Cold War real politik suddenly lost
rationale. The “triumph” of laissez-faire capitalism that seemed to issue forth from the
loins of victorious neo-liberalism and the fundamentalist nostrums of Hayek and
Friedman came accompanied by increasing market instability, a spreading of
“low-intensity” warfare in countries that no longer had the dead hand of a Cold-War
ally to control internal cultural, political, social and religious difference, and a growing
recognition of the massive economic and social damage caused by the unquestioning
acceptance of the behaviour of “corrupt” and repressive “allies” by the US and USSR
respectively.
From the conferences of Bretton Woods in 1944 and Savannah in 1946, the
global commercial environment in poorer countries had also been strongly affected
by the regulatory conditions created by the IMF and the World Bank. These
International Financial Institutions (IFIs) gradually moved away from Keynes’
original concept of them as neutral international clearing banks with responsibility
for maintaining a stable global economy, towards becoming the enforcers of
US-orientated, laissez-faire globalizing capitalism that they became in the 1980s,
after flirting with import-substituting state-directed capitalist development in the
1960s and 1970s[16]. As a direct corollary to providing practical and financial
support for a particular vision of globalizing capitalism, to an increasing extent
the IFIs were both postulated as, and willingly became synonymous with, a
process of ideological semiotics known as development. This not only affected the
regulation of the global economy, but in asserting and creating a concrete process
called development within a framework of neutral, deterministic economic laws
and processes, created a special regulatory, fiscal and macro-economic environment
for business to operate in.
By the time of the collapse of the socialist bloc, the particular form of development
encoded in the strictest neo-liberal economy orthodoxy espoused by the IFIs, and
roughly set out in the Washington Consensus (Williamson, 1990), had reached its’
apogee. Given policy impetus by the Debt Crisis of 1980-1982 and institutionalized by a
wave of neo-conservative governments in the rich north throughout the 1980s, the
forms of conditionality enshrined in the structural adjustment programmes of the IFIs,
particularly the strong emphasis on liberalization and privatization, constituted a
massive legislative, financial and political incentive for companies wishing to do
business in resource- and labour-rich Southern countries.
CPOIB A peculiar form of theoretical and practical contradiction (as well as
2,4 concentrated pragmatism) has come to characterize the regulation of and policy
towards international commerce in the 1990s and early 2000s, comprised of an
assortment of characteristics. On the one hand there are the remnants of
colonial/Cold War relationships (such as those of the French in West Africa or the
USA in Central and South America) reinforced by the precepts of neo-liberal
286 structural adjustment; on the other hand there is the triumphal rhetoric of
victorious western/northern capitalism urging on a stronger obedience to the
liberalization and privatization of everything (in defiance of the history of
capitalist development in the rich north and seemingly oblivious to the massive
ramparts of protectionism, tariff and non-tariff barriers and subsidy that protect
European/US markets). Under these circumstances, the forms of
politically-determinated corruption that had historically characterized commercial
relationships between rich and poor countries (as well as between rich and rich,
poor and poor) changed to adapt to new circumstances, taking advantage of the
new opportunities offered by the thirst for de-regulation and finding new territory
in the break-up of socialist bloc economies under the aegis of the IFIs.
At the same time, the ability of national governments to control multi-national
commerce weakened substantially in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
Far from being an inevitable facet of globalizing capitalism, this has largely reflected a
series of ideological choices concerning the way that the state-private sector
relationship should be visualized, and the consequent product of a theoretical blurring
of the barriers between government structures and the private sector. During the last
three decades of the twentieth century, as a multiplicity of initiatives towards
international legislation and regulation have seemed to represent an overt acceptance
of the necessity for global regulation of the most serious problems facing humanity,
national governments have not only voluntarily dismantled the regulatory machinery
by which they represented electorates in key areas of their own and the global
economy, they have increasingly waived their theoretical or political rights to do so.
The consequent shuttling of public functionaries between the private and state sector
(and the increased possibilities for individual and collective enrichment involved in so
doing) once again serve to underline the difficulties in describing and defining
corruption.
In the midst of such changes in the role of government, it is scarcely surprising that
companies seeking to do international business have done so in a way that sought to
take advantage of existing governmental and supranational structures and policies,
and of the changes to them. Thus, for example, major international construction firms
such as Balfour Beatty have developed into specialists in taking advantage of the
infra-structural programmes and loans offered by the World Bank as a way of bringing
“modernity” to less industrialized economies. In a separate vein, arms companies such
as BAE evolved in the same period under a determination by a series of UK
governments that the arms industry was a strategic instrument for assisting allies.
Involvement in bribery under such conditions was (until very recently) of so little
moment that when the DESO was created to help UK companies in their efforts to
expand abroad, one of the tacitly accepted functions of the DESO was to facilitate what
were deemed inevitable “commissions” and “fees” (The Guardian, Special Report,
Friday June 13th 2003)[17].
 The socio-economic damage done by corruption resulting from infra-structure The critical
projects, arms deals and oil exploration rights in poorer countries is well-documented, business of
however, especially those where the legal system is weak and ineffective, where
clientelistic patronage system effectively replace the state in many functions, and corruption
where Western strategic interests are deemed to operate. In the “remarkably candid”
words of a 1996 US Government Accounting Office study of the operations of the
World Bank, as cited by Jeffrey Winters (2000): 287
[. . .] much of the impetus behind US participation in the Bank during the Cold War era was
derived from the perceived utility of the Bank in containing communist expansionism in the
developing world. One Bank official commented, for example, that because of US concern
about communist insurgency in the area, the Bank remained active in several Sub-Saharan
African countries long after the corrupt nature of these governments became evident.

International legislation and definitions of corruption

Although legislation provides that things should not be given or received “corruptly”, there is
no statutory definition of “corruption” or “corruptly” in English law (Johnstone and Brown,
2004, p. 9).
The world of uncertainty that the business sector finds itself in is reflected no less in
the world of uncertainty that academics and practitioners seem to find themselves in
save, apparently, for one cardinal rule – when in doubt, start with the state. Thus, for
example, when Jain (2001, p. 74) seeks to define three fundamental kinds of corruption
within democratic societies, they are listed as the grand corruption of the political elite
using power to influence public policies, bureaucratic corruption which is the
corruption of appointed public officers when dealing with superiors or public, and
legislative corruption, by which the behaviour of legislators can be influenced. It seems
that beginning with the state has become a doxa, that which is accepted without
question, and yet one essential purpose of this article is to suggest that, in insisting on
starting with the state as a means by which to get to a definition of corruption, we
seriously limit our understanding of the phenomena. In the words of the old joke about
stopping and asking for directions, you don’t really want to be starting from here.
In tackling the shibboleth of the state, we believe that it is far more appropriate,
when analysing what is or is not corruption, to deal with it in terms of relationships of
power as they relate to individual societies and cultures. That which the current
orthodoxies choose to view monothematically as a primarily financial, state-based
phenomena is far more complex than this and needs to be examined within the context
of hegemony and networks of power. Going back to fundamentals leads, as Jain (2001,
p. 7) also points out, one to the conclusion that: “Corruption requires, above all, that
someone has discretionary powers over the allocation of resources,” as a necessary but
not sufficient condition. Using this fundamental condition, it rapidly becomes obvious
that this control could just as easily be exercised by the owner(s) of a business, a
religious leader, an indigenous tribal leader or any one of a set of actors, depending on
local culture and circumstances – whether those actors choose to express their actions
through state mechanisms is by no means certain and might in fact be irrelevant.
In order for the economistic models to be accurate in their definitions and
descriptions of corruption, there are further pre-conditions that we contest; that state
and private actors are distinct and different, and that as a consequence of this there is
CPOIB an essentially oppositional relationship between the state and the private sector. From
2,4 our experience of researching governance issues in Central America, we know this not
to be the case – in virtually every country in the region, structures of government have
evolved as a direct result of the emancipation of powerful landed and mercantile
families and groups from the Spanish crown. Those elite groupings have effectively
shaped and used the state according to their own designs over hundreds of years,
288 sharing the spoils of power[18] and moving into and out of state offices as the strategic
necessities of family/clan loyalty demand. The “private sector” clientelistic power
structures that have formed the modern and pre-modern Central American State
precede it by hundreds of years in some cases, and the bloody history of the region
owes much to the frequently violent attempts by internal and external actors to wrest
control of the state from opposition groups, and certainly not from any attempt by the
state itself to assume an independence of character.
The role of external intervention in both defining and shaping corruption within a
given country or region is another aspect of international patterns of corruption of
which, in the economistic models, analysis or even mention is “a custom more
honoured in the breach than in the observance”. This strange silence is all the more
puzzling in areas that, like Central America, have been continuously and strongly
“intervened” as a result of the Cold War:
[. . .] the rise of Korea, accompanied as it was by extensive corruption, leads to questions
about how and why the Korean state had the opportunity to act as it did. International
finance, the actions of international institutions, and the actions of the United States were all
crucial for Korean development. In the study of development, as important as the study of
domestic politics is the study of what international factors sustained the domestic situation,
what international pressures existed, and what external actors participated in a domestic
configuration or allowed it to exist (Kang, 2002, p. 179).
It is past belief that the omission of such vital geo-strategic components in the structure
and processes of corruption globally is oversight or accident. The total silence on these
issues within the dominant neo-liberal interpretations of corruption, we ascribe to an
underlying need to construct a normative, neutral economic model of corruption that
avoids asking difficult political questions and in particular seeks to exculpate the role
of rich, successful capitalist countries historically in not only seeking to encourage
corruption but in utilizing it as an essential dynamic in their own success.
In order to illustrate the complexities discussed briefly above and how important
the development of holistic critiques of corruption are, there can be few better recent
examples than that of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny oil-producing country off the coast of
West Africa. Since 1997 the amount of oil produced in Equatorial Guinea has increased
by a factor of seven, and the country has become the third-largest producer of oil in
Sub-Saharan Africa (US Department of State, 2005); this has been accomplished with
the help of Exxon Mobil, Amerada Hess, Marathon Oil, ChevronTexaco, Devon Energy
and CMS Energy (Blum, 2004).
The president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang, and his family have made
their country the largest depositor in Riggs Bank of Washington, with $700 million on
deposit by 2003. President Obiang was a valued client of Riggs Bank and Riggs helped
Obiang create a Bahamas-based company, into which Obiang deposited $11.5 million
in the space of two years. According to a Riggs internal report, more than $35 million
was wired out of the Equatorial Guinea oil account from 1998 to 2002 to accounts in
offshore banking havens, from which Riggs could obtain no details as to ownership. The critical
According to the US Senate investigation of Riggs Bank (US Senate, 2004), President business of
Obiang and his wife deposited nearly $13 million in three years into Riggs, but the
bank failed to file any suspicious activity reports at all to federal regulators, as corruption
required by US law; in May of 2004 Riggs Bank was fined $25 million for repeated
violations of money laundering laws.
In terms of the oil companies, financial links with the ruling elites of Equatorial 289
Guinea are multiple and extensive; ExxonMobil, Amerada Hess and Marathon Oil were
frequently in the habit of using companies in which the ruling family had an interest
for various services. The oil companies also paid more than $4 million towards grants
for more than 100 students from Equatorial Guinea who were mainly relatives of
wealthy or powerful officials studying abroad, whilst a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil
leased buildings and land from the president’s wife and also paid for security services
from a company owned by the president’s brother (Blum, 2004).
Although it is legitimate to say that Equatorial Guinea is by no means typical, such
a wealth of detail serves to illustrate the most important point about corruption in
Africa; that there are no isolated instances of gross corruption involving public
finances committed by aberrant individuals. All such corruption takes place within the
context of complex networks of financial and political relationships, involving
politicians and governments inside and outside Africa, banking systems ranging from
established and institutional to obscure and offshore and a wide range of supporting
corporate actors. If no effort is made to analyze these systemic relationships and they
are simply left in place, then recent initiatives to palliate the poverty of African nations
through extensive programmes of debt relief, by itself or accompanied by more capital
inflows, will simply fail.

Conclusions
Towards the beginning of the twenty-first century it appeared to a number of observers
that the G8 countries in general, and the UK in particular, had emerged into the “broad,
sunlit uplands” of a hyper-capitalist society (Heilbronner, 1990; Sweezy, 1997; Comaroff
and Comaroff, 2001). The UK has the lowest unemployment figures in decades, economic
growth is unspectacular but steady (Kern, 2005) and expansion of the growing service
and IT sectors would suggest a stable future – and yet, a growing clamour of public
unease with life in the UK (BBC, 2002, 2005; Daily Mail, 2005) seems to be daily more
evident. In choosing to look at the ideas represented by corruption, it is not too much of
an exaggeration to say that we believe we are examining the primordial, inchoate fears
of a society that no longer trusts government or politicians, a society fearful of losing an
essential identity, a society that feels daily more helpless in the face of a perceived
corporatization of daily life, down to the most apparently irrelevant minutiae.
The labelling of corruption as the aberrant social behaviour of “others”, as we have
touched on in this article, runs contrary to the history of post-war commerce in the UK,
itself riddled with gross corruption of various sorts even as the UK has become one of
the richest nations on earth. Elsewhere in the world there have developed “other”
socio-economic and political systems, incorporating as given social practices that the
Anglo-Saxon countries now shun as corrupt, and yet which have accompanied radical
and dramatic transformations of erstwhile agrarian backwaters into powerful
mercantile nations, fully linked into the global economy. The reason for the difference
CPOIB in perceptions and historical experience (we have suggested) has a lot more to do with
2,4 ideological perceptions of, and competition in, a globalized economy than with any
notions of cultural superiority.
In the first part of this paper, we outlined some of the ways in which collaboration
between critical scholars in geography and management studies could be enriching for
both. More precisely, it is in these areas of the comparative political economy, culture
290 and history of contested phenomena such as corruption that we believe there is most
room for the evolution of a fruitful synthesis that will provide a challenge to the
theoretical and political status quo.
As the first draft of this article was being finalized in June 2005, the G8 announced a
write-off $40 billion of the debts of 18 heavily indebted poor countries (Financial Times,
2005) held by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African
Development Bank in an effort to induce lasting socio-economic progress in Africa.
Mainstream press and political commentators were, however, already voicing fears
over the utilization of resources freed by this process and the implications for future
aid, fears which were couched in a discourse which has focused intently on questions of
corruption (Daily Telegraph, 2005; HMG, 2005; CAFOD, 2005) and not without reason –
a recent report from the African Union estimated that corruption costs Africa more
than $148 billion a year, some 25 percent of Africa’s entire GDP (Ayittey, 2004). Absent
from this critique, however, was an open and honest appreciation of the role of the G8
and their financial and economic structures in helping to create the status quo in Africa
(Mohau, 2005) and the role of Western corporations, particularly where mineral and oil
wealth are concerned, in supporting and encouraging corrupt regimes (as outlined in
the example of Equatorial Guinea above (see also Leigh and Pallister, 2005)), not to
mention violent regime change. If there is a strategically vital role for ourselves as
critical academics, it is in trying to add an urgently-needed balance to this analysis.
Without properly examining the complexity of corruptions, without examining the
roles and responsibilities of business, governments and supra-national institutions
alike, there can be no valid assessment of corruption, and as a consequence no
re-validation of ourselves and our society. We suggest that the assignment of
corruption to various categories of “other” that are not ourselves:
.
ignores that very real part played by the rich, “moral” countries in fostering what
we ourselves define as corrupt practices;
.
says nothing of any use of those practices; and
.
serves continually to undermine the perceptual foundations of whatever
consensual, democratic (and dare we say it, moral) basis we believe our own
society to have.

In trawling through the political economy of the development of an idea, corruption, as

an integral part of the idea of development, we have sought to demonstrate not just the
necessary part that we believe a critical geographical narrative has to play in
informing policy, but the vital links that geography itself has to make with the critical
appraisal of business, of business management, and of economics. The challenge for all
of us is, as we hope that we have made clear here, to find ways to combine our insights
to better assess what is signified by corruption, how the concept is used, and how to
convince policy-makers that, in this area at least, there is no such thing as
consequence-free policy.
Notes The critical
1. Over the three decades from 1967 the number of MBAs on offer in the UK increased from 2 to business of
200 (Woolf, 2004, p. 33).
2. Recent interventions (e.g. Hague, 2002) for example, suggest the potential (and actual)
corruption
dangers of the consolidation of critical geography within the discipline to the strength/wider
impacts of the critique being articulated.
3. For debates on this in geography see Katz et al. (1998); Castree (2000a, b); Gibbons (2001). 291
See Antonacopoulou (1999); Carr (2004); Reedy (2003) for examples from the critical
management studies literature. The on-line journal Ephemera, published a transcript of a
workshop entitled “Radicalizing organization studies and the meaning of critique” held by
the egosnetwork. It includes contributions from a range of leading voices in critical
management studies, available at: www.ephermeraweb.org (accessed 24 February 2005).
4. Examples of such positions and the more general Marxist critiques of Postmodernism which
they drew upon include: Harvey (1990), Callinicos (1990), Albritton (1993), Sayer (1993),
Ashley et al. (1997); Norris (1997), Peet (1997) and Mitchell (2004). Similar arguments in the
CMS literature include Grice and Humphries (1997) and Hassardi et al. (2001).
5. Important contributions include Noel Castree’s excellent reflections on the future of Marxist
analysis in Geography (Castree, 1999), Roger Lee’s (2000) piece on progressive
postmodernism and the continuing efforts towards rethinking Marxism in the light of the
post-structural critique to be found in the pages of Rethinking Marxism. See Prichard and
Alvehus (2003) for a discussion of similar themes from the CMS literature.
6. It is very much within this vein of philosophical hybridity that we have, for instance, sought
to place our recent work on the complex mass of socio-economic phenomena and processes
that fall under the broad title of corruption, which we explore in the final section of this
paper.
7. He uses the example of how it has largely been left to economists like Paul Krugman to stress
to policymakers the continuing salience of geography to economic development under
globalization.
8. For further details on all of these debates see Castree (2000c), Massey (2000); Peck (1999);
Harvey (1974) and Henry et al. (2001).
9. Some responses to Martin’s article have questioned the validity of his characterization of the
poor state of policy-based research in geography, arguing that a lot of policy-based research
does, in fact, go on in geography but that it takes place in areas other than the economic
policy arenas within which Martin himself works or is conducted on behalf of other levels of
government or in collaboration with other stakeholders.
10. See Sinclair (2001) for a fascinating case study from critical management studies.
11. We explore the complex debates around the potential impacts of GATS on the water sector
in the South in a special edition of Progress in Development Studies which we are currently
guest editing with our colleague Mansoor Ali.
12. Paul Applegarth, CEO of Millennium Challenge Corporation Foreign Press Center Briefing
Washington, DC, US Department of State, http://fpc.state.gov/fpc/37995.htm (accessed
November 9, 2004).
13. We are also wary of the whole MDG process itself: in that, whilst the renewed attention being
paid to bringing real progress to the struggle to eradicate global poverty is to be welcomed,
there is a danger that the concentration of development assistance budgets onto the meeting
of those targets could cause longer-term problems, and renders the whole process susceptible
to the suspicion that it is being used as a carrot-and-stick approach for the fulfilment of US
foreign policy and ideological aims. Some commentators have been even less sanguine about
CPOIB the potential damage that might be inflicted by the international community’s pursuit of
these “Most distracting gimmicks” (phrase taken from Antrobus (2004) (see also Clemens
2,4 et al. 2004).
14. For further discussion about the complex debates over the nature of different types of
corruption and the contested meaning of corruption itself, see Brown and Cloke (2004).
15. For a fuller account of the material benefits and kick-start to development to be accrued from
292 being considered a vital/strategic ally in the Cold War, see Bello and Rosenfeld (1992).
16. During which period the poorest countries and those generally labelled as “developing”
recorded far higher rates of growth than at any period since.
17. Any of a wide range of major corporations involved in these industries could have been
referred to in this paragraph to illustrate the general point that we wish to make. The two
companies mentioned were picked out because of the major controversies with which they
have been associated. Balfour Beatty were banned from bidding for contracts in Singapore in
1996 (due to corruption charges which the company denied), the company was also a
member of the consortium found guilty of bribery in the Lesotho Highland Project
Contractors consortium scandal in the 1990s and was also involved in the Pergau dam affair
in Malaysia. BAE, for their part, were investigated by the Guardian in 2003 because of
allegations of a £20 million “slush fund” to bribe Saudi officials, similar allegations have
been made relating to arms sales in India and South Africa. Even more recently it has
emerged that the Serious Fraud Office is intending to launch an investigation into
disclosures that BAE secretly paid more than £1 million to the former Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet (Sources: UK Parliament International Development Select Committee
(2000), SADCC (2002), Hawley (2002), Lilley (2003), Pottinger (2000), Palast (2000); McGreal
(2001); Leigh and Evans (2005); Carroll et al. (2003).
18. Indeed, throughout Latin America a common term used to describe the state is the estado
botin, the booty state.

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About the authors

Ed Brown has been a Lecturer in Geography at Loughborough University since 1991. He is a
Central American specialist with interests in the political economy of Neoliberal reforms in the
region and the impacts of globalization more generally. His publications include: Structural
Adjustment: Theory, Practice and Impacts (co-author: Routledge, 2000) and articles in journals
including: “Political geography, antipode, geoforum”, Area and the Journal of Historical
Geography. He is also Chair of the Leicester Masaya Link Group, an NGO promoting links
between the cities of Leicester and Masaya in Nicaragua. Ed Brown is the corresponding author
and can be contacted at: e.d.brown@lboro.ac.uk
Jonathan Cloke is currently a Lecturer in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Geography
Department. He was awarded his PhD in 2003, having come to academia belatedly following
periods spent in the voluntary sector from 1997 as a Rehabilitation Officer for street sleepers
under New Labour’s Rough Sleeper Initiative and from 1993 in the Benefits Agency as a
specialist dealing with refugees in Oxfordshire. Jon is also a member of different activist groups
working under the umbrella of the European Social Forum, part of the World Social Forum
movement set up as a progressive counter-balance to the World Economic Forum at Davos; he
also contributes to the work of the Leicester Masaya Link Group as a member of the Executive
Committee.

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