Policing Corruption Post-and Pre-Crime: Collective Action and Private Authority in the Maritime Industry

Abstract:How are we to understand the proliferating attempts amongst transnational corporations (TNCs) at collectively reducing the risk of corruption in business operations and interactions with state officials around the world? How are these endeavors linked to transformations of public and private authority in the global political economy? Premised on the observation that corruption is globalized and the growing efforts at tackling it equally so, this article draws on the literatures on private authority, governmentality, and criminological studies to explore anticorruption in terms of pre-crime and post-crime policing. The case of the maritime industry is analyzed, including the ways in which corruption is policed post-crime by governments and pre-crime by a collective action initiative, the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN). The paper finally discusses how the incipient collective policing of corruption undertaken by corporations nowadays intersects with changes in the organization of public and private authority. Corporate policing of corruption does not imply a simple shift from public toward private authority, but rather a growing emphasis on pre-crime interventions in a largely disaggregated, polycentric, and liquid global governance set-up, with corporations and their collective action initiatives emphasizing anticipatory logics and attempts at forestalling corruption.