Available online at www.ijournalse.org Emerging Science Journal (ISSN: 2610-9182) Vol. 5, No. 2, April, 2021 Page | 171 Left by the West? Academic Discourse on Corruption for a Better Social Resilience Bohuslav Pernica 1 , Marcel Pikhart 2* 1 Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic 2 Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic Abstract The paper deals with the topic of corruption that has been understood as a global social problem since the 1990s. Its theoretical background is rooted in the theory of social constructivism. Social constructivism highlights the social strategy in which increased social discourse about a particular topic implies and reflects a growing interest of the society in the topic to arouse a robust awareness of the issue as a social problem. It analyses academic journals and conference paper proceedings that appear in a well-known database of academic journals and texts, namely in Web of Science. The research follows PRISMA methodology and it was conducted as an analysis of the terms and collocations that are connected to the issue of corruption with the aim to identify relevant research papers which have appeared in Web of Science since 1995. The idea behind this analysis was not only to identify the journal papers and papers published as conference proceedings but to compare the results geographically with well-known officially acknowledged state and government data dealing with the issue of corruption, and then to look for connections between these two areas, i.e. academic and governmental data. The results show significant differences between post- communist countries versus the so-called West regarding how they present information about corruption in their academic discourse. Despite the fact that the West supports the East in its fight with corruption economically, it is not reflected sufficiently and adequately in the relevant academic discourse. This paper suggests that societal resilience against corruption can dramatically be supported by enhanced academic discourse about the topic that is still not sufficient. Keywords: Corruption; Discourse Analysis; Post-Communism; Social Constructivism; Sustainability; Societal Resilience. Article History: Received: 06 January 2021 Revised: 02 March 2021 Accepted: 12 March 2021 Published: 01 April 2021 1- Introduction The collapse of communism raised closer attention to the issue of corruption in the 1990s. In particular, international organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the United Nations (UN), systematically provide their financial international development aid, and this effort has addressed the challenge of corruption in countries receiving this aid. Supported by the most generous donor nations, such as the US, Japan, and Germany, they set an anti-corruption agenda and promote it as a global sustainable development strategy. Moreover, a significant sample of countries started to be annually compared by various assessment tools, such as the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), the Worldwide Governing Indicators (WGI) in the 1990s, to provide investors and governments with a compass of risk for corruption assessment of a particular country. The progress in counter-corruption activities done in post-communist countries after the collapse of communism 30 years ago seems to be rather limited. Embezzlement of European money by oligarchs in Central and Eastern Europe is * CONTACT: Marcel.pikhart@uhk.cz DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.28991/esj-2021-01266 © 2021 by the authors. Licensee ESJ, Italy. This is an open access article under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).