Category Archives: Announcement

New Podcast, Featuring Gary Kalman

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Gary Kalman, formerly (and at the time of the interview) the Executive Director of the FACT Coalition, and now the Director of the U.S. Office of Transparency International. The first part of our conversation focuses on the work Mr. Kalman did at the FACT Coalition on the push for new U.S. legislation to crack down on anonymous companies. We also discuss his vision, and top priorities, for Transparency International’s new U.S. office.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Tracking Corruption and Conflicts of Interest in the Trump Administration–February 2020 Update

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As regular readers of this blog are aware, since May 2017 we’ve been tracking and cataloguing credible allegations that President Trump, and his family members and close associates, have been corruptly, and possibly illegally, leveraging the power of the presidency to enrich themselves. The newest update is now available here.

A previously noted, while we try to include only those allegations that appear credible, many of the allegations that we discuss are speculative and/or contested. We also do not attempt a full analysis of the laws and regulations that may or may not have been broken if the allegations are true. (For an overview of some of the relevant federal laws and regulations that might apply to some of the alleged problematic conduct, see here.)

New Podcast, Featuring Andres Hernandez

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This episode features an interview with Andrés Hernández, the executive director of Transparencia por Colombia (the Colombian chapter of Transparency International). During the interview, Mr. Hernandez covers a range of topics including corruption in the Colombian judicial system, problems in the system for appointing senior public officials, the background and consequences of Colombia’s recent popular referendum of a slate of anticorruption measures, and how corruption may be a factor in recent popular street protests throughout the country. In the later part of the interview, Mr. Hernandez and I also discuss the proposal for the creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court, which the Colombian government has endorsed. The interview concludes with some broader reflections on how the corruption challenges have changed over the past two decades, and why there might be some reasons for cautious optimism about the potential for significant progress going forward.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Anticorruption Bibliography–January 2020 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

New Podcast, Featuring Charles Davidson

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Charles Davidson, currently the publisher of the American Interest magazine, and previously the co-founder of Global Financial Integrity and the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative. We discuss a variety of topics, including financial integrity, beneficial ownership transparency, and kleptocracy–including the threat that kleptocratic wealth from authoritarian states poses to liberal democracies, the use of targeted sanctions against individual corrupt actors, and concerns about how kleptocrats use Western institutions not only to launder their money, but also to launder their reputations.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

[NOTE: This episode begins with some introductory housekeeping material about future directions for the KickBack podcast. If you want to jump straight to the interview, it begins at 3:07.]

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Tracking Corruption and Conflicts of Interest in the Trump Administration–January 2020 Update

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As many regular readers of this blog are aware, since May 2017 we’ve been tracking and cataloguing credible allegations that President Trump, and his family members and close associates, have been corruptly, and possibly illegally, leveraging the power of the presidency to enrich themselves. The newest update is now available here.

A previously noted, while we try to include only those allegations that appear credible, many of the allegations that we discuss are speculative and/or contested. We also do not attempt a full analysis of the laws and regulations that may or may not have been broken if the allegations are true. (For an overview of some of the relevant federal laws and regulations that might apply to some of the alleged problematic conduct, see here.)

New Podcast–An End-of-Year Review Featuring Nils Köbis and Christopher Starke

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Happy (slightly belated) New Year! As our regular readers may have noticed, GAB has been on vacation for the past couple of weeks (partly because of the holidays, partly because your editor-in-chief has been away), but we’re back, and new content will be appearing imminently.

Partly because of our long hiatus, I neglected to post that a couple of weeks ago my ICRN collaborators Nils Köbis and Christopher Starke released a special year-end episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast; in this podcast, Nils and Christopher which recap some of the highlights of our 2019 podcast episodes, highlighting interesting insights, lessons, and thoughts regarding the future of anticorruption research and practice (as well as some reflections on our experiences with our foray into podcasting).

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Anticorruption Bibliography–December 2019 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Forum (June 2019)–Call for Papers

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The Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN), an important and influential organization on whose advisory board I am proud to sit, hosts an annual forum that brings together junior researchers (graduate students, post-docs, assistant professors, and the like) who are doing cutting-edge work on corruption-related issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. This year’s forum will be held from June 11-13, 2020, in Bergen, Norway at the Christian Michelsen Institute. The call for papers is now open, and the submission deadline is February 1, 2020. You can find more information about the Forum, along with the application form, here.

Tracking Corruption and Conflicts of Interest in the Trump Administration–December 2019 Update

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Earlier this week the U.S. House of Representatives filed articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. Understandably, those articles focused narrowly on the Ukraine scandal (specifically, that President Trump abused his power by improperly pressuring the Ukrainian government to open investigations, and obstructed Congress’s investigation into this wrongdoing), rather than also including other charges, such as that President Trump has improperly, and possibly illegally, leveraged the power of the presidency to enrich himself. Yet these concerns remain important, even if they will not feature prominently in the impeachment debate. So at GAB, we’re continuing the project we started over two years ago, to track and catalogue credible allegations of this sort of profiteering by President Trump and his family and cronies. Unfortunately, each month brings a new incidents, or new information about old incidents, and so we try to do regular updates of this catalogue, and the newest update is now available here.

A previously noted, while we try to include only those allegations that appear credible, many of the allegations that we discuss are speculative and/or contested. We also do not attempt a full analysis of the laws and regulations that may or may not have been broken if the allegations are true. (For an overview of some of the relevant federal laws and regulations that might apply to some of the alleged problematic conduct, see here.)