Corruption, Trust, Inclusion and Cohesion in North Africa and the Middle East

Roger Sapsford; Gerasimos Tsourapas; Pamela  Abbott; Andrea Teti

doi:10.1007/s11482-017-9578-8

Corruption, Trust, Inclusion and Cohesion in North Africa and the Middle East

Roger Sapsford^* (Corresponding Author), Gerasimos Tsourapas, Pamela Abbott, Andrea Teti

^*Corresponding author for this work

University of Birmingham

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)

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Abstract

Corruption provokes much anger in the Middle East and North African (MENA) and was important in the Arab Uprisings; it was government corruption that sparked the greatest anger among the population. The argument of this Report is (a) that corruption is a major and obvious breach of trust, (b) that the same is true for ‘civil’ corruption – ‘wasta’ in employment, business corruption – (c) that as well as not trusting their government and its institutions, MENA residents do not trust each other either, to the detriment of maintaining functional nation states without coercion, and (d) that corruption is a special case of breach of the Rule of Law which is essential for a decent society. The initial focus on corruption leads to consideration of what people think they can reasonably expect from government and from each other. Ultimately, corruption divides the society into those who extort bribes or dispense favours and those who are required to pay bribes and are excluded from favour – in other words, there is a breakdown of social inclusion. Further, it destroys trust between people and trust in social institutions, which breaks the cords that hold modern societies together - it is an attack on social cohesion. The article is based mainly on the Arab Transformations Survey, carried out in six developing MENA countries in 2014, three years after the ‘Arab Spring’.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-21
Number of pages	21
Journal	Applied Research in Quality of Life
Volume	14
Issue number	1
Early online date	26 Dec 2017
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-017-9578-8
Publication status	Published - 15 Mar 2019

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements
This article is based mainly on a survey funded by the European Union under the FP7 framework, Grant No. 320214. An earlier version appeared as one of Aberdeen University’s Arab Transformations Working Papers (Sapsford et al. 2016). We are grateful to Viola Sanelli and Ilia Xypolia, at the University of Aberdeen, for material they supplied on the history and politics of the region.

The authors alone remain responsible for the content of the article. It does not necessarily represent the views of the EU, the Court of the University of Aberdeen or any of the ArabTrans project partners.

Keywords

corruption
trust
rule of law
social inclusion
social cohesion
MENA

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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Corruption, Trust, Inclusion and Cohesion in North Africa and the Middle East
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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Cite this

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abstract = "Corruption provokes much anger in the Middle East and North African (MENA) and was important in the Arab Uprisings; it was government corruption that sparked the greatest anger among the population. The argument of this Report is (a) that corruption is a major and obvious breach of trust, (b) that the same is true for {\textquoteleft}civil{\textquoteright} corruption – {\textquoteleft}wasta{\textquoteright} in employment, business corruption – (c) that as well as not trusting their government and its institutions, MENA residents do not trust each other either, to the detriment of maintaining functional nation states without coercion, and (d) that corruption is a special case of breach of the Rule of Law which is essential for a decent society. The initial focus on corruption leads to consideration of what people think they can reasonably expect from government and from each other. Ultimately, corruption divides the society into those who extort bribes or dispense favours and those who are required to pay bribes and are excluded from favour – in other words, there is a breakdown of social inclusion. Further, it destroys trust between people and trust in social institutions, which breaks the cords that hold modern societies together - it is an attack on social cohesion. The article is based mainly on the Arab Transformations Survey, carried out in six developing MENA countries in 2014, three years after the {\textquoteleft}Arab Spring{\textquoteright}.",

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Corruption, Trust, Inclusion and Cohesion in North Africa and the Middle East

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

UN SDGs

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