Aiysha Varraich, Ph.D. Candidate
aiysha.varraich@gu.se
Gothenburg University
About Me:
I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science and the Quality of Government Institute since 2014. I have a Master’s degree in International Administration and Global Governance from the University of Gothenburg, and an LLB Law degree from London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Before joining the department, as a reseach associate, I carried out research for the American Bar Association and the UNDP at the International Legal Resource Centre, in Washington DC.
Research Interests
Religion & Politics
Elections, Election Administration, and Voting Behavior
Political Psychology
Human Rights
Governance
Corruption
Clientelism
Countries of Interest
Pakistan
My Research:
My research interests include clientelism, religion, trust and corruption in developing countries. My earlier research focused on quality of government, decentralisation, corruption and service delivery within developing countries. As a research associate within the interdisciplinary project Anti-Corruption Policies Revisited (ANTICORRP), I mapped corruption and its overlaps with concepts such as clientelism and state capture.Other research interests include South Asia, survey experiments and security studies.In my dissertation I focus on clientelism and its effects on democratic processes in developing democracies, specifically the effects of religious clientelism spilling over to political clientelism. Furthermore, the dissertation recasts clientelism, through focusing on the currency of exchange between the parties, from merely a material exchange to including non-material (non-economic) exchanges; broadening the concept to allow for religious/spiritual incentives as part and parcel of the exhange itself.
Publications:
Books Written:
This book investigates the pervasive problem of corruption across the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on the specifics of the local context, the book explores how corruption in the region is actuated through informal practices that coexist and work in parallel to formal institutions. When informal practices become vehicles for corruption, they can have negative ripple effects across many aspects of society, but on the other hand, informal practices could also have the potential to be leveraged to reinforce formal institutions to help fight corruption. Drawing on a range of cases including Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia or Israel the book first explores the mechanisms and dynamics of corruption and informal practices in the region, before looking at the successes and failures of anti-corruption initiatives. The final section focuses on gender perspectives on corruption, which are often overlooked in corruption literature, and the role of women in the Middle East. With insights drawn from a range of disciplines, this book will be of interest to researchers and students across political science, philosophy, socio-legal studies, public administration, and Middle Eastern studies, as well as to policy makers and practitioners working in the region.
Corruption is a serious threat to prosperity, democracy and human well-being, with mounting empirical evidence highlighting its detrimental effects on society. Yet defining this threat has resulted in profound disagreement, producing a multidimensional concept. Tackling this important and provocative topic, the authors provide an accessible and systematic analysis of how our understanding of corruption has evolved. They identify gaps in the research and make connections between related concepts such as clientelism, patronage, patrimonialism, particularism and state capture. A fundamental issue discussed is how the opposite of corruption should be defined. By arguing for the possibility of a universal understanding of corruption, and specifically what corruption is not, an innovative solution to this problem is presented. This book provides an accessible overview of corruption, allowing scholars and students alike to see the far reaching place it has within academic research.
Other:
During the past two decades, research on corruption has steadily been growing. It has gone from being a taboo subject, where it would only be referred to as the C-word, to to-day’s state of the art where it is found across different social science disciplines; whether this is political science, psychology, economics or anthropology (Rothstein and Varraich 2017). With this steady upsurge there has also been constant additions to the toolbox used for researching the subject. It is this toolbox that was the focal point at the work-shop during the Interdisciplinary Forum “How to Research Corruption”; where not only the tools were discussed but also shared between the participants in order to further our own research interests. It also allowed us to acquaint ourselves with methods that were unfamiliar to us. The “tools”, or rather methods, range from the latest fad of experiments to the less often used qualitative method of interviewing, as well as the mainstream statistical analyses. The aim of this paper is to present interviewing as a “tool” to research corruption. This will be done by answering two questions. First, “why use it?” discussing both the advantages and disadvantages of the method. Second, addressing “what is it?” describing and explaining what interviewing (i.e. the data collection stages) involves. Important aspects of interviewing range from how to present yourself as the interviewer to how to keep a field diary. Finally, this essay will address the limitations of the method as a whole. Since this will be part of conference proceedings, the paper will limit itself to the data collection stages.
Research surrounding corruption has grown exponentially in the past decade, during which various concepts have been drawn into the corruption realm; whereby independent concepts now share space with corruption. This paper attempts to recast the concept of corruption as an umbrella concept in order to highlight the family resemblance that exists between corruption and respective concepts such as clientelism, patronage, patrimonialism and state capture. This effectively shows the connections between the related concepts and corruption within academic research. It enhances corruption to a category that can fit many cases reasonably well, but as Wittgenstein points out “on close examination it can become clear that for most cases the fit is not perfect.” This particular approach results in expounding each of the side-lying concepts as concepts in their own right, simultaneously elaborating on the space shared by the related concept and corruption – this not only clarifies a set of commonalities, that are analytically important (Collier and Mahon 1993), but effectively explains the survival of the implicit understanding of these concepts as corruption thus far.
Media Appearances:
Radio Appearances:
Commenting on the importance of Malala Yousafzai winning the Nobel Peace Prize and its long-term effects on the future of Pakistani youth, especially within the rural settings