Is Ukraine too corrupt to be a part of the European Union? In a recent Rethinking European Development and Security (REDS) seminar talk co-hosted by CDDRL and The Europe Center, Maria Popova, McGill University Associate Professor of Political Science, assessed how serious the issue of Ukrainian corruption really is. While some observers have claimed that Ukraine’s corruption renders it unprepared for EU accession, Popova’s research suggests otherwise. Contrasting Ukraine to recent EU entrants — Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia — she finds that corruption indices are not very helpful in drawing reliable conclusions.

In all four said countries, corruption is touted as the most salient issue, with strikingly similar scandals occurring across them. Over the last ten years, Ukraine has developed an extensive anti-corruption infrastructure, forming institutions for the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of corruption cases, as well as for asset recovery. These institutions have produced mixed results, and issues of political competition between institutions have tainted their wider reputation, with the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption receiving the most positive feedback. Innovative e-procurement systems like ProZorro have been internationally praised. Ukraine is unique in that its anti-corruption infrastructure came well before attempting EU accession. 

Bulgaria, on the other hand, established its anti-corruption agencies ten years after becoming an EU member. These institutions have since become politically compromised; so much so that anti-corruption reformists recently forced their abolition. 

In Romania, institutions were created around the time of accession and have been successful in holding corrupt oligarchs accountable. Similarly, Croatia’s anti-corruption reforms proceeded during accession negotiations.

Although the four countries adopted similar anti-corruption institutional reforms, today Ukraine tracks as significantly more corrupt than the EU members across measures of regime, public sector, executive, and political corruption, even though it is cleaner than Romania was when it started accession negotiations, more corrupt than Bulgaria was, and equally corrupt as Croatia at its start of negotiations. Why? Popova argued that the indices are fundamentally non-comparative and thus need to be taken with a grain of salt. The score for each country is determined by experts that focus exclusively on that country, who consider variation in corruption over time only. Moreover, the abstract conceptual definition of corruption is applied to their narrow case knowledge and experience and thus reflects local, rather than generalizable conceptualization. 

While index scores correlate with local perceptions, this, too, may just reflect a narrative on the ground. If the local narrative is that the country is highly corrupt, the population will likely perceive it to be, with no sense of its real magnitude. 

When analyzing Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions, Popova finds that Ukraine is better prepared for EU accession than is widely assumed.

Can indigenous communities ruling through politically autonomous institutions better protect against cartel takeover? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Beatriz Magaloni, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of CDDRL’s Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab argued that in Mexico, indigenous communities ruled by traditional governance have proven more resilient against cartel takeovers than comparable municipalities relying on state-backed security provision. 

Existing literature typically frames violence in developing countries as a manifestation of state weakness. But, in many areas of the world, organized criminal groups infiltrate the state, buying off intelligence, protection, and impunity. 

In Mexico, cartels infiltrate local governments by funding political campaigns, killing those who refuse to be bought off. In this context, the selection of leaders through conventional Western multi-party elections is an effective vehicle through which cartels can extend their influence. 

The capture of municipal political bodies is advantageous to cartels as it allows them to diversify their revenue generation. Access to intelligence, resources, and territory makes demanding regular payments and extracting natural resources far easier. It also allows cartels to gain discretionary power in the decision of who the state grants protection to or not. This bleak reality in which the borders between the state, organized crime, rule of law, and impunity are blurred elevates the urgency of investigating to what extent “opting out” of the state represents a viable alternative in the provision of security. 

In Oaxaca and other regions across Mexico, indigenous communities have the right to govern autonomously. In their traditional form of governance, known as “usos y costumbres,” local elections and political parties are banned. Authorities are instead selected through community assemblies, in which decision-making is highly participatory. Based on this traditional governance, a growing number of indigenous communities have established community police groups, which are detached from the state and constituted by local community members with little or no professional police training. 

Importantly, autonomous indigenous municipalities still receive state transfers and cannot be punished for opting out of the party system. In conducting extensive qualitative fieldwork, Magaloni sought to understand whether this traditional governance structure prohibits cartel infiltration and keeps communities safer. 

The team hypothesized that higher levels of cartel presence would increase violence – which they proxied with homicide rates. They expected less cartel presence and less violence in Usos (autonomous indigenous communities) relative to party-controlled municipalities. Lower levels of police corruption and better deterrence against criminal cells were also expected for communities ruled by Usos. 

The initial exploratory analysis showed that following the autonomous governance reform, Usos communities experienced a sharp decrease in violence. When the drug war began in 2006, these communities continued to see low levels of violence, whereas comparable municipalities suffered a sharp increase. 

Magaloni employed a variety of difference in difference analyses to control for possible confounders. Usos communities were compared to similarly sized, similarly indigenous communities. Using a geographic discontinuity design, Usos were also compared to municipalities just 1 km from the border of Oaxaca – those ruled by multi-party elections. The analysis controlled for opium poppy suitability and history of ancestral governance practices. 

The analysis confirmed that the more cartel presence, the more violence a community experienced. Across all models, the team was able to conclude that Usos communities saw significantly less cartel presence, fewer homicides, and less violence. 

Magaloni’s work highlights the state's limitations in creating order in circumstances where criminal groups have compromised it. It also suggests that in the context of these predatory regimes, indigenous political autonomy can serve as a powerful rampart to the corrosive presence of organized crime.

Reunions are always marked by the distinct nostalgia of your most memorable moments with people whom you shared lengths of time with. No doubt that the Leadership Network for Change reunion held this past summer at Stanford was one such event for me. Right from walking back into Munger residence, I immediately remembered how, with newly made friends in the Draper Hills class of 2018, we chatted as we walked back and forth to our classes or spent many hours sitting on the benches talking about global events or sharing personal stories – almost always with a bottle of wine (the famous room 555 of the class of 2018 comes to mind). For most of the people I spoke to during this reunion, there was a shared sense despite our different cohorts, of how ‘not long ago’ it was since leaving (not even the occurrence of the pandemic made it seem like it was a long time ago). It felt like we’d just been there months earlier. It speaks to how impactful our time together was and the deep connections made in and out of class experiences. 

Seeing the familiar faces of Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Michael McFaul, Kathryn Stoner, and Erik Jensen reminded me how fortunate I was to have had access to legendary global democracy shaping minds. What is always humbling, however, is when they each tell you that it is an honor for them to meet us.

In 1999, Lyubov Sobol was a serious eleven-year-old with aspirations to be a Sherlock Holmes-style private detective. That same year, Vladimir Putin, a small-time FSB agent and mid-level cabinet member for former Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak, was abruptly placed into the national spotlight by then-president Boris Yeltsin. Never in her wildest dreams could young Lyubov have imagined that 20 years later, she would be facing off against now-President Putin and working on the front lines to investigate and expose the corruption of the most powerful people in Russia.

For the last twelve years, Sobol has been a lawyer and political activist with the Anti-Corruption Foundation of Russia (FKB), the country’s most prominent pro-democracy movement. She works closely with the group’s founder, Alexei Navalny, to push for the democratization of Russia and advocate against Putin's policies through on-the-ground and digital outreach. She is currently at Stanford as a visiting scholar with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

As the war in Ukraine continues and free speech and other rights within Russia are further curtailed, many activists, Sobol included, have had to adapt or leave the country. To help contextualize the work she and other activists are currently doing, she explains where the roots of the democracy movement in modern Russia began, and the place she hopes it will take on the global stage in the future.