Anti-corruption and National Security: The Case of Romania and Georgia

• In Event: Society for Romanian Studies

Abstract

The issue of corruption has reached such a significant level that has become dominant in many developing countries around the world. This has fueled state-sponsored anti-corruption campaigns and propelled social movements demanding political reform, increasingly repressive criminal legislation, and institutional change. In this paper, I seek to show that the securitization of corruption can be an effective way of facilitating the use of non-judiciary state resources in the fight against political corruption. But in order to be effective, it requires a relative dilution of democratic and rule-of-law mechanisms that constrain the power of state institutions. For this purpose, I look at the recent anti-corruption campaigns in Romania and Georgia, which both framed corruption as a national security threat, in order to show how this process takes place and which are its main effects and how can we explain the backlash to anti-corruption campaigns that took place in both countries.

Author

• Georgian-Marius Ghincea, European University Institute