Digital media and technologies in grassroots struggles against corruption

The chapter provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the multifaceted role of digital media in grassroots anti-corruption efforts. The chapter begins with a review of the existing literature on corruption studies and its limited coverage of the grassroots impact of digital media. It highlights the need to shift attention away from instrumental understandings of digital in activists' anti-corruption endeavours and introduces the concept of Anti-Corruption Technologies (ACTs) to this end. Emphasising that ACTs are not one-size-fits-all, the chapter illustrates how they come with different configurations of material, symbolic and social elements. In this regard, the chapter presents a typology of ACTs that takes into account the overarching goals of digital media in grassroots anti-corruption efforts, but at the same time highlights the interplay of material, symbolic and social elements in ACTs. Finally, the chapter previews the contributions of the edited volume, which includes empirically grounded chapters that explore the role of digital media in anti-corruption activism from different perspectives and in different countries around the world.