Corruption

Abstract

This article explores the multiple meanings and realities that we name under the key term corruption. In order to develop an understandig of these multiples meanings and realities, we conceive the term corruption as an essentially contestable concept, as a concept that refers controversially to the reality it purports to describe. With this objective in mind the article reconstructs some historical instances where the phenomenon and the concept corruption play a central role on the political and social life of the communities. In the first part, I focus in the political history of democracy, its effects on the political factionalism, which can lead to extreme positions, resulting in corruption and civil war. In the second part, I review the socioanthropological perspectives on corruption, which analyzes extreme social division in unequal power relations between groups, in order to understand the social roots of this phenomenon. I focus particularly in the correlates between the phenomenon of factionalism and extreme social division.