Chapter 10 - The Last Honest Bandit: Transparency and Spectres of Illegality in the Republic of Georgia

Summary

In the wake of the Cold War the notion of ‘transparency’ became almost synonymous with that of ‘good governance’. Emerging as a keyword in programmes seeking to establish solid democracies in former authoritarian states, it was celebrated by international organisations, Western bilateral donors and the UN alike as a precondition for aid (West and Sanders 2003, 1). It became a ‘globalized governance ethos’ promoting formalised types of accountability (Ballestero 2012, 161; see also F. von Benda-Beckman, K. von Benda-Beckmann and Eckert 2009, Larson 2008). However, as Harry West and Todd Sanders have argued, there is reason to believe that despite the best efforts of such organisations and institutions, the operations of power and politics in the contemporary world are not necessarily becoming more transparent. As they note, ‘amid all this talk of transparency, many people have the sense that something is not as it is said to be – that power remains, notwithstanding official pronouncement, at least somewhat opaque’ (West and Sanders 2003, 2; see also Gotfredsen, this volume). Others have, in a similar vein, argued that political quests for order and clarity are fickle projects that may in the end create areas of absence in which life is anything but clear cut (Dunn and Frederiksen 2014; Hetherington 2012); spheres of invisibility and greyness that come to signify an ambiguous or even demonic place where certainty gives way to doubt and insecurity (Coombe 1997; see also Taussig 1980). This chapter departs from these considerations in exploring how and why, after the political introduction of ‘transparency’ and reforms seeking to diminish the role of informality and corruption, society in Georgia became so transparent that some phenomena (or figures) resided out of view. Empirically I focus on organised crime, informal practices and corruption. I argue that whereas crime and corruption before had been something that was plain to see, with the introduction of transparency such phenomena paradoxically became more hidden and inconspicuous.