ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some aspects of Albanian cultural and juridical traditions to investigate the ways in which economic and political interests are affecting changes in such traditions, bringing about widespread corruption.1 The Albanian case offers similarities with other, especially but not exclusively post-Socialist, European contexts. However, it also presents an intriguing peculiarity. As I shall explain, the concept of corruption as it is defined in Western jurisprudence is foreign to the Albanian traditional juridical system, which is codified in the Kanun, the Canon of Customary Law. I suggest that, in order to understand the way in which phenomena such as corruption occur and are experienced in a society, we should contextualize them in the historical and cultural traditions of that specific society. Furthermore, in looking at such phenomena as corruption, we should consider the discrepancy between, on the one hand, codes of behaviour and people’s perception of actions which are legally defined as crime and, on the other hand, the legal system which should punish such crimes. In particular, we should consider that actions are seldom sanctioned or sanctionable per se, but they are so in the context of given relations, of the ethical vision of such relations and of what is considered to be proper behaviour. As Pardo (2000) suggests, people do not automatically accept as legitimate legal rules and behaviour, similarly, they do not necessarily perceive as morally illegitimate actions that, by definition, might not fall within the strict boundaries of the law.
