From Chile to New York City: Systemic Corruption and Oligarchic Domination

Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile examining the relation between inequality, corruption, and domination, as well as how to institutionally empower common people to resist oppression from the powerful few. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge, conducting research on plebeian rights and the author of Systemic Corruption. Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (2020). In this essay, Vergara takes us back to her upbringing in Chile, during the Pinochet dictatorship, which she partially spend on her grandfather’s ranch, as the granddaughter of the patrón. Vergara unfolds how unequal power relations are reproduced through legal and regulatory structures, and how global inequality continues to be upheld by the oligarchisation of power through systemic corruption, at both national and international levels.