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Suspicion and expertise: following the money in an offshore investigation

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Abstract

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pThis article explores the relation between suspicion and expertise in the context of activist investigations of offshore corruption. I reconstruct one investigation of alleged corruption in the Azerbaijani oil sector, conducted by a British organization called Global Witness, to explore how suspicion is learned and practised in the face of impenetrable offshore secrecy. For these detectives of global capital, suspicion is both a tool for arriving at an understanding of offshore corporate networks and an orientation that helps them overcome the limits of this understanding, allowing them to make political claims that go beyond what is strictly afforded by evidence and libel law. Extending recent anthropological scholarship that revises the disciplinary emphasis on truth and certainty as the mainstays of expert knowledge, I argue that investigative expertise provides imprecise and suspicious understandings of its objects that are useful despite, or even because of, the ambivalence and suspicion it entails.</jats:p>

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Keywords

4301 Archaeology, 4401 Anthropology, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Journal Title

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1359-0987
1467-9655

Volume Title

27

Publisher

Wiley

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
European Research Council (683033)
I acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 683033).