Corruption at the Crossroads: Gender, Education and Violence in Vietnam

• In Event: Education for Peacebuilding: Tensions and Opportunities for Future Research

Proposal

There is growing evidence that men and women perceive, experience, and manage corruption differently. An UNDP (2012) study found that 76% of women in 11 communities across eight countries identified corruption as their greatest barrier to accessing public goods and services. While many governments, multilateral organizations, corporations, and civil society actors support gender equality goals and increased transparency, few directly connect their anti-corruption work to gender equality or vice-versa. This is because the scholarly literature on gender and corruption has historically been focused on women in politics. This literature tends to represent women as morally pure “political cleaners” who can help countries, companies or organizations reduce corruption by their very presence (Goetz, 2007). Such a logic reproduces gender as a biological given with women as either victims or morally pure agents of change. Feminist scholars have begun to take notice and have responded with corrective research. However, it remains primarily focused on Global North experiences, and on women in politics.

This paper serves as a corrective to the scholarly literature on gender and corruption by focusing on its impact on education during peacebuilding. It also serves as a corrective to the gray literature which although focused on diverse Global South experiences, tends to construct gender as a binary, and women as a stand-in for “gender,” or constructs women as a homogenous group. This paper starts with an integrative literature review of the gender-education-corruption-peace nexus, and then introduces cases drawn from ongoing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam. Findings reveal opportunities for feminist, intersectional and interdisciplinary research centering Global South experiences of corruption in education, and for research to better connect gender, education and anti-corruption work to peacebuilding.

Author

• Kristy Kelly, Columbia University