“Together, We Can Make Corruption a Thing of the Past”: Strategies of and Oppositions to the Anticorruption Discourse

Abstract

The main aim of the research is to discover the ways of the realization of the main strategies of the anticorruption discourse using the method of critical discourse analysis. The sources of the investigation are the texts of international anticorruption organizations, specifically, “Transparency International”. The intertextuality and interdiscoursivity of the anticorruption discourse demonstrate not only all of the trends that characterized the discourse of later capitalism, but also led to the creation of a new type of discourse. Anticorruption discourse is the kind of neoliberal discourse oriented to the dissemination of democratic regimes and principles of the free market on the global level. Referential and predicative strategies show that civil society takes the leadership in global anticorruption activity, emphasized by the demonstration of the weaknesses of governments and business. Both argumentation strategies and strategies of legitimation demonstrate the main aims of fighting corruption and the conditions of its effectiveness. The topoi of anticorruption discourse represent the features of anticorruption-ism that are formed according to the principle of the “mirror answer”; to be efficient, the curbing of corruption should have the same characteristics. Another kind of opposition includes the plain contrast between corruption and anticorruption-ism, which represents the “positive representation of the in-group (anticorruption civil society) and the negative representation of the out-group (corruption and corruptioners)”.