Border and bribery: An anthropology of corruption

Abstract

Corruption has been characterized as a disease of failed states and poor statecraft – a deviation from virtuous development that corrupts economic progress. The dominant paradigm, in which international institutions and policy-makers concur, is one of hard binaries between state and society, law and crime. This article resists binary thinking through ethnographic fieldwork in Mae Sot, a Thai-Myanmar border town. Rather than strangling development, border corruption – as varied as patronage-based bribery and ethnic extortion – has been at the heart of state-building on the periphery and a key characteristic of capital accumulation in global value chains. By immobilizing and categorizing migrant workers, corruption regimes create the flexible labour conditions necessary for border capitalism while simultaneously opening spaces for migrant negotiation and resistance. These complex dynamics reveal how corruption functions not as an exception but as a structuring norm, producing overlapping states of inclusion and exclusion that serve state control and capitalist interests while continually contested by those subjected to them.