State-Building by Other Means: Selective Enforcement and the Capital of Impunity

Most work on corruption assumes it is an exception: rules exist, most people follow them, some do not. From that assumption follow the standard instruments — measure how much corruption there is, design reforms to reduce the number of violations.

This talk is about places where that assumption does not hold. Breaking rules there is an ordinary condition of doing business. What is "corruption" in such a context, once it can no longer be described as a set of violations? Derrer’s research finds that in these societies some may break the rules without consequence and others may not. What matters, therefore, is not simply who violates the law, but who is protected from its consequences and who remains exposed to them. The unequal distribution of impunity is what constitutes hierarchy. Impunity becomes a scarce resource — handed out, convertible into power and opportunities, and paid for.

Russia and Ukraine differ in who controls this protection. In Russia one centre came to control it, and the outcome is not disorder but a type of state building. In Ukraine several centres compete, and none can guarantee protection reliably. The implication is uncomfortable. Every new rule and every additional inspector provides another opportunity to extort and extract while the decision of who is exempt stays in the same hands. Anticorruption reform can therefore drive up the price of protection. What it leaves untouched is the system that distributes impunity. The talk draws on 55 interviews conducted in Moscow and Kyiv in 2021, in the last months before such conversations became impossible.

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Michael Derrer is a Professor of Economic Sociology at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) in Switzerland. He has worked in Russia and Ukraine for more than thirty years, first as a business consultant and then as a researcher, and holds a doctorate from the University of Warsaw. His three-volume study of informal governance in the two countries appears with Peter Lang from November 2026. Alongside his chair he sits as an elected district judge in Switzerland and works as a certified interpreter for the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office.