Anti-Corruption Campaigns and the Rise of ‘Integrity-Tech’

Just 30 years ago practices which go by the label ‘corruption’ were tacitly accepted and recognised as not only inevitable but even desirable (Huntington 1987) in western discourse. The past three decades however have seen corruption catapult to the top of the global policy agenda. Western governments consider ‘foreign’ corruption a threat to national security, and former socialist states see it as the bane of their transitions. This article will focus on the global ascendance of anti-corruption in development discourse - the strategic application of digitalisation as an anti-corruption tool. A range of international development actors are promoting the use of information systems and digitalisation initiatives of all sorts, including Distributed Ledger Technology (or blockchain), in government to stamp out corruption. Often dubbed the rise of integrity-tech (Santiso 2019), it is widely seen as a ‘silver bullet’ capable of ‘hacking’ corruption and heralding a new era of efficient (‘smart’) government which promises greater transparency by dematerialising services and limiting human interaction. This article will zoom in on the use and public reception in Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine of elite discourse aiming to manufacture appeal for the ideological promise of digital government to do away with the need to protect the fictional boundary (Bratsis 2003) between normal and pathological presence of self-interest within the public sphere (by removing the human element in the functioning of public administration).