1st Edition

Law, Society and Corruption Lessons from the Central Asian Context

By Rustamjon Urinboyev, Måns Svensson Copyright 2025
    146 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book presents new socio-legal perspectives and insights on the social life of corruption and anti-corruption in authoritarian regimes.

    This book takes up the case of Uzbekistan—an authoritarian regime in Central Asia and one of the most corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index—and examines the corruption that developed in a tightly closed authoritarian regime permeated by a large-scale shadow economy, a weak rule of law, and a collectivist legal culture. Building on socio-legal frameworks of legal compliance, living law and legal pluralism, the central argument of the book is that the roles, meanings, and logics of corruption are fluid, and depend on a myriad of structural variables, and contextual and situational factors. 

    This book will be of value to researchers, academics and students in the fields of sociology of law, legal anthropology and Central Asian studies, especially those with an interest on the intersection of law, society and corruption in authoritarian regime contexts.

    1: Understanding Corruption in Authoritarian Regimes 2: Political Environment and Governance Trajectories in Uzbekistan 3: Anticorruption Laws, Policies, and Initiatives in Uzbekistan: An Overview of the Legal and Institutional Environment 4: Law, Society, and Corruption in Uzbekistan: A Socio-legal Analysis of Macro-Level Developments 5: Corruption, Informality and Coping Strategies in Meso-Level Arenas 6: The Social Life of Corruption in Micro-Level Arenas 7: The Interplay Between Law, Society and (Anti-) Corruption in Authoritarian Regimes

    Biography

    Rustamjon Urinboyev is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at Tashkent State University of Economics, Uzbekistan.

    Måns Svensson is Full Professor of Sociology of Law at the School of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences at Halmstad University, Sweden, and President of Jönköping University, Sweden.