Vitamin Sea against Corruption: Informality and Corruption through the Interdisciplinary Lens

Abstract This conference report combines the latest theoretical developments within the areas of corruption and informality research in Southeastern Europe from the eighteenth until the twenty-first century with a presentation of the ongoing research conducted by the Regensburg Corruption Cluster and the inputs of some of the leading experts within these fields. The authors outline a practical interdisciplinary framework for developing a historical anthropology of corruption, by integrating knowledge and methods from various disciplines, such as history, linguistics and business studies. In doing so, they show how the ideological–normativistic approaches of the so-called “anticorruption consensus” can be overcome: by lowering the analytical scale to the level of informal practices and following their evolution through historical circumstances. This report also shows the persistent difficulties in establishing “ethical universalism” in Southeastern Europe with examples ranging from eighteenth-century Phanariot rule in Wallachia to twenty-first-century corruption scandals in Serbia and Croatia.