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The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Regensburg (UR) for another three years: It will focus on "corruption thinking" in Orthodox Christianity.
“The global fight against corruption has reached an impasse. The issue is no longer mobilizing, instead helplessness and cynicism are spreading as hostile camps heap accusations of corruption on each other and authoritarian governments have their opponents prosecuted for alleged corruption": a statement by three academics from the University of Regensburg (UR), who have been conducting interdisciplinary research in the Regensburg Corruption Cluster since 2020 and are now receiving support from the German Research Foundation for a further three years to focus on the role of religion in ‘corruption thinking’.
The historian Professor Dr. Klaus Buchenau conducts research at the Chair of History of Southeastern and Eastern European History at the UR, Professor Dr. Björn Hansen is a linguist (Chair of Slavic Philology) and Professor Dr. Thomas Steger (Chair of Business Administration II) focuses on leadership and organization. In the second round of DFG funding, the interdisciplinary team has joined forces to explore religion as an important aspect of the phenomenon of corruption that has so far received little attention.
Analyzing Concepts, Language, Ressources
From a historical perspective, the focus is on a long-term examination of Russian Orthodox corruption concepts; the linguistic sub-project compares the ecclesiastical with the secular Russian corruption lexicon and thus contrasts linguistically mediated world views; finally, management science deals with the flow of resources in and around the Serbian Orthodox Church, the corresponding regulations, realities, and interpretations.
“Back in the 2010s, when political consultants still believed in the possibility of ever better governance, sociologist Alena Ledeneva warned that corruption could only be successfully curbed if local understandings of corruption and ideas of justice were included,” explains Buchenau. “However, this hardly ever happened; instead, the growing 'anti-corruption industry' saw itself more as a door opener for large companies, which were to find the clearest possible conditions when entering the market.”
Not least due to this focus, a gap has opened up in many societies between anti-corruption and ideas of the common good. “Locally, anti-corruption was now often seen as a covert strategy of Western dominance and the accusation of corruption was degraded to a rhetorical projectile in political trench warfare,” the researchers say.
Religion in “Corruption Thinking”
Against this background, their DFG joint project sees itself as a repair - as an attempt to understand local, culturally deeply rooted ideas of corruption and to feed them into corruption research. These basic resources include religion, whose “corruption thinking” has so far received little attention in research. This applies in particular to Orthodox Christianity, the strongest religious community in Eastern Europe, which - according to the well-known corruption indices - allegedly has a greater corruption problem than Catholic and especially Protestant Western Europe. Nevertheless, Orthodoxy has its own anti-corruption ideas, anchored in sacred texts and tradition, whose content and relationship to other, competing norms the researchers want to shed light on.
Topics of the three sub-projects
- Corruption as incompleteness. Concepts of corruption in the Russian Orthodox Church 1856-1917 and 2000-2023
- Does the Church Speak Its Own Language? Secular and religious corruption lexis of Russian in transition (1856-1917 and 2000-2023)
- The Church as an Organization and Actor. Informality and corruption in Serbia and the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church (1991-2023)
informalityregensburg@gmail.com Prof. Dr. Klaus Buchenau, Prof. Dr. Björn Hansen, Prof. Dr. Thomas Steger
https://informalityregensburg.com/news/ /Regensburg Corruption Cluster
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