Today’s guest announcement is from Bonnie Jo Palifka, Professor at the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tecnológico de Monterrey.

The Call for Papers for the 2025 Academia against Corruption in the Americas (ACA) Conference is out! We’re excited to be hosted by the Observatorio Fiscal, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, on May 21-23, 2025.

I founded ACA in 2018, inspired by two events. First, in 2016, I attended the International Anti-Corruption Conference in Panama. This was my first anticorruption conference, and I was excited to be surrounded by so many like-minded people. One moment that struck me occurred during a panel session, when Louise Shelley, in the audience, expressed how happy she was to see scholars (not only practitioners) at the conference and how important it is to teach anti-corruption to the new generations. The following year, at a conference on teaching anticorruption at the UNODC in Vienna, Matthew Stephenson (founder of the GAB) and I lamented the fact that most academic anticorruption conferences are held in Europe, Africa, and Asia. With two small children at home, making it difficult for me to travel (the aforementioned conferences notwithstanding), I decided to bring the scholars to me. Matthew and Louise were keynote speakers at the 2018 and 2019 conferences, respectively, in Monterrey, Mexico. Other keynote speakers have included Susan Rose-Ackerman, Michael Johnston, and Stephen Morris, as well as several rising stars. Our peer-reviewed sessions have featured presenters from top universities and important organizations from around the world.

The ACA Conference has three main goals:

1. to enrich and promote multidisciplinary research on corruption and anticorruption in the Americas.
2. to promote the inclusion of courses or sub-topics on corruption in university curricula.
3. to form a research and teaching network in the Americas. (See our group on LinkedIn and our nascent YouTube channel, where we will eventually post the videos from previous ACA conferences and our new online seminar series, the ACA Forum.)

We accept three types of submissions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. (Presentations at the conference may be in English or Spanish):

1. research on corruption and anticorruption, especially in the Americas
2. didactic tools and examples of teaching corruption and anticorruption
3. anticorruption tools and initiatives from civil society

While the ACA is a marriage of my interests—Corruption Studies and Latin American Studies—note that our focus is on the Americas more broadly.  Research on corruption in the United States, for example, would be especially timely.

We invite professors, researchers, and civil society organizations from all disciplines to submit proposals (full papers or reports, at any stage from draft through published) before February 28, 2025.

Please send any queries to anticorruption.academia@gmail.com.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and hope to see you at the conference in person or online.