THE PATRIMONIAL REVOLUTION From the Behavioral to the Patrimonial Field: A Paradigmatic Break in the Fight Against Corruption

This article proposes a shift in the anti-corruption struggle from the behavioural domain to the patrimonial domain, contributing to the understanding and addressing of systemic corruption in Africa. While the dominant approach for decades has focused on moralizing individual behaviours and sanctioning corrupt acts, this research proposes a paradigmatic break based on a fundamental observation: corruption is a binary phenomenon that necessarily translates into an illegitimate patrimonial transfer of public resources to private patrimonies. The article demonstrates that every act of corruption generates two inseparable elements: upstream, the behavioural circumstances of its accomplishment; downstream, the resulting patrimonial asset. This binary nature reveals that the true field of action for anti-corruption is not that of behaviours but of their material effects. The Patrimonial Revolution thus proposes a radical methodological shift: moving from repression of intention to neutralization of result, from presumption of virtue to traceability of common good, from belief to proof. The guiding principle is simple but revolutionary: what is illegitimate must become inoperative. This theoretical contribution establishes a new intellectual framework where anti-corruption struggle ceases to be moral to become structural, ceases to be passively reactive to become offensively preventive.