CCS Workshop: Corruption, corporate bribery, arms deals and social critique, 21 August Speakers: Ed Harriman, Khadija Sharife and Sarah Bracking Date: Wednesday, 21 August, 2013 Time: 10:00-16:00 (with noon-2pm video screening break) Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College, University of KwaZulu-Natal Topic: The growth of corrupt practices, especially in relation to the arms trade, has generated a strong social backlash, ranging from the new British Bribery Act to South Africa's Seriti Commission to the Durban Manase Report. The destruction of democracy and development across the world can often be traced to rampant power and profit by multinational corporations and unethical arms dealers (Harriman shows). Yet transparency initiatives are largely ineffectual, as witnessed in the diamond and oil industries stretching from Zimbabwe to Angola (according to Sharife). To reduce corruption (Bracking argues) requires that politicians and public sector workers register their private businesses and refrain from related trading; that the state distributes economic opportunity more widely; that political party financing is reformed; and that corporate law is changed to prevent new forms of corruption. Reactions to the Manase Report concerning widespread Durban municipal corruption will also be reviewed from 3-4pm. (Copies of videos plus the Manase Report will be provided to anyone who brings a 4+ gigabyte memory stick.) Speakers: Ed Harriman is a London-based investigative reporter and documentarist. In the last five years, he produced or directed several major documentaries: Human Cost of the Credit Crunch, Heat or Eat The Pensioners' Dilemma, Undercover Debt Collector, Confessions of a Nurse, The War You Don't See, The World's Deadliest Arms Race and No Bribes, Please! We're British. He written in the London Review of Books about repression in Iraq: http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/ed-harriman (two of his films will be screened during the noon-2pm slot). Khadija Sharife coordinates Africa-wide work on the Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade Project in conjunction with CCS and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and is a member of the Forum for African Investigative Reporters. She has published on business and corruption in The Africa Report, African Banker, African Business, Pambazuka and World Policy Journal, and was primary author of the book Tax us if you can with the Tax Justice Network. Sarah Bracking is a professor of development studies at the University of Manchester, and a visiting scholar at CCS. She is editor of Corruption and Development (Palgrave, 2007) and author of Money and Power (Pluto, 2009). Her next book is The Financialisation of Power in Africa (Routledge), and she recently authored a study taking forward analysis of corruption to a new level: A qualitative reframing of private sector corruption: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?2,68,3,3010  Back