Who Is Exempt: Selective Enforcement as an Economic Resource in Russia and Ukraine

Description:

Where enforcement is discretionary, the assurance that a rule will not be applied to you is scarce, allocated by an identifiable authority, and costly to obtain. It behaves, in short, like an asset — one that attaches to a person's standing in an informal hierarchy. Drawing on 55 interviews conducted in Moscow and Kyiv in 2021 and on more than thirty years of work in the region, this talk treats exemption from enforcement as the organising resource of what is usually called corruption, and asks what determines its price, how it is converted into market position, and under what conditions it loses value. The comparison between Russia and Ukraine turns not on how much corruption each has but on whether control over the decision to enforce was successfully monopolised — a political outcome rather than a cultural one. The argument has an uncomfortable implication for reform design: building enforcement capacity without changing who controls its activation raises the value of exemption rather than reducing it.

About the speaker:

Michael Derrer is Professor of Economic Sociology at 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.

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