1st Edition

Law, Society and Corruption Lessons from the Central Asian Context

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

    This book presents new socio-legal perspectives and insights on the social life of corruption and anticorruption 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 in the intersection of law, society, and corruption in authoritarian regime contexts.

    The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.

    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, Professor in the Department of International Law and Human Rights at Tashkent State University of Law, Uzbekistan, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Social Sciences, 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.