Corruption and Religion: Orthodox Christianity in Russia and Serbia

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Klaus Buchenau; Professor Dr. Björn Hansen; Professor Dr. Thomas Steger
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Operations Management and Computer Science for Business Administration
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 418675522

This three-year research project is a continuation of the interdisciplinary joint project "From Informality to Corruption (1817-2018): Serbia and Croatia in Comparison", which was funded by the DFG between 2020 and 2023. It deals with the understanding of corruption in Orthodox Christianity and focuses on the traditionally Orthodox countries of Russia and Serbia. The project contains three sub-projects from three different disciplines: a historical one (The Russian Orthodox Discourse on Corruption, 1856-1918 and 2000-2023; applicant Klaus Buchenau), a management science one (The Church as Organization and Actor. Informality and Corruption in Serbia and the Role of the Serbian Orthodox Church (1991-2023), applicant Thomas Steger) and a linguistic one (Does the Church Speak Its Own Language? Secular and religious corruption lexis of Russian in transition (1856-1917 and 2000-2023), applicant Björn Hansen). The historical sub-project concentrates on what the Russian Orthodox Church understands by corruption and attempts a discourse-analytical longitudinal section. The management science sub-project deals with a shorter period of time, but has a broader research interest, because here the understanding of corruption also includes concrete practices and their organizational and legal requirements. The linguistic sub-project uses some of the same sources as the historical sub-project and subjects this material to a corpus linguistic analysis in order to find out how different secular and religious talk about corruption is in Russia. With this project, we want to make a contribution to research into the nexus of corruption and religion. There is hardly any qualitative research in this area, and Orthodox Christianity in particular is largely unexplored in this respect. There is a general view that Orthodox Christianity has historically contributed little to the fight against corruption, unlike Protestantism, for example. It is not our aim to decide this question - rather, we would like to shed light on what the Orthodox Church understands by corruption, how it is institutionally positioned in the fight against corruption and to what extent its concepts are compatible with those of the secular corruption discourse. At a time when "universal", Western-led anti-corruption is being ground down in growing geopolitical rivalries, we believe it is important to engage more intensively with "autochthonous" sources of moral guidance, such as the Orthodox churches for Eastern Europe.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants