Capitalism and Economic Crime in Africa: The Neoliberal Period

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of economic crimes and market ’irregularities’, including matters of trickery, parallel economy, illicit trade, economies of violence and criminalisation of the poor in neoliberal Africa. It investigates economic crime as a phenomenon of neoliberal reform and transformation, and it unpacks crime as a societal - and particularly as a political-economic - phenomenon under capitalism. The book brings together a collection of research articles, briefings and updated blog posts that were published over a period of nearly 40 years (1986-2023), in the acclaimed journal Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and on its website roape.net.

Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field, including a foreword by Yusuf K. Serunkuma and an afterword by Laureen Snider, this volume explores what these crimes have to do with, and can tell us about, state-business relations, regulation, capitalist transformation, and the corporation on the continent, shedding light on the co-production of the crimes by a range of actors from the realms of business, politics, state and international development, including major reform advocates such as international financial institutions (IFIs) and other donors. It responds to the imperative to advance the analysis of the link between capitalism and crime in Africa and to locate capitalism more centrally in the analysis of economic crimes, as more African countries move from being societies with capitalism to capitalist societies.

Illustrating the relevance of African countries to debates in criminology, corporate crime, state crime, crimes of the powerful and illegality, this volume engages with and mobilises a variety of literatures to analyse economic crimes as phenomena of global and local capitalism and provides readers from academia, government, business, media, civil society and education a striking source of information and analysis.

Jörg Wiegratz is Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds, School of Politics and International Studies. He is Senior Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg, and Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, United States International University-Africa, Nairobi. He specializes in neoliberalism, fraud and anti-fraud measures, commercialization and economic pressure and related aspects of moral and political economy, with a focus on Uganda and Kenya. He is member of the editorial working group of Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and author of Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural ChangeandFraud in Uganda, and co-editor of Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud (with David Whyte). He is editor of the blog series Economic trickery, fraud and crime in Africa and Capitalism in Africa (roape.net).