Category Archives: Announcement

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Kieu Vien

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Nguyen Thi Kieu Vien, the founder and executive director of Towards Transparency, an anticorruption civil society organization based in Vietnam and affiliated with the Transparency International movement. In the conversation, Vien discusses the history of her organization, the corruption challenges facing Vietnam, some of Towards Transparency’s major initiatives, and the promises and limitations of the Vietnamese government’s recent anticorruption reforms. Vien and I also discuss some of the special challenges of operating an anticorruption NGO in an environment like Vietnam, and how Towards Transparency has tried to overcome these challenges in order to achieve meaningful results within the constraints imposed by the political and legal environment.

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.

Working Paper on “Corruption as a Self-Reinforcing ‘Trap’: Implications for Reform Strategy”

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Last month the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute at the University of Gothenburg published a working paper of mine, entitled Corruption as a Self-Reinforcing “Trap”: Implications for Reform Strategy, as part of their QoG working paper series. Here’s the abstract:

Corruption is widely believed to be a self-reinforcing phenomenon, in the sense that the incentive to engage in corrupt acts increases as corruption becomes more widespread in the relevant community. Leading scholars have argued that corruption’s self-reinforcing property implies that incremental anticorruption reforms cannot be effective, and that the only way to escape a high-corruption equilibrium “trap” is through a so-called “big bang” or “big push.” This widespread view is mistaken. After surveying the reasons corruption might be self-reinforcing (or in some cases self-limiting), this paper demonstrates that corruption’s self-reinforcing property does not imply the necessity of a “big bang” approach to reform, and indeed may strengthen the case for pursuing sustained, cumulative incremental anticorruption reforms.

I hope that some readers might find the paper to be of interest. Constructive criticism and other feedback are of course most welcome!

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Cristina Bicchieri

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, Nils Köbis interviews University of Pennsylvania Professor Cristina Bicchieri about her interdisciplinary work on corruption and anticorruption, which addresses a range of questions including why corruption can be so “sticky,” the role of social norms in shaping corrupt or non-corrupt behavior, how and why perceptions and attitudes toward corruption may differ between men and women, and what the implications of social norm theory are for effective anticorruption strategy.

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.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Oz Dincer

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This week’s episode features an interview with Professor Oguzhan “Oz” Dincer, the Director of the Institute for Corruption Studies at Illinois State University. In the interview, Professor Dincer and I discuss a range of topics, including new approaches to the challenges of measuring corruption, the concept of “legal corruption,” the role of cultural factors in influencing corrupt behavior (both internationally and within the United States), and troubling developments related to political corruption in Turkey.

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–July 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.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Elise Bean

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This week’s episode features an interview with Elise Bean, who previously worked for U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich) as staff director and chief counsel of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), which Senator Levin chaired. In the interview, Ms. Bean (who has also written a book about the Permanent Subcommittee’s work) discuss the role of legislative oversight, and the PSI in particular, in addressing money laundering, corruption, and related matters like financial fraud and tax evasion. Ms. Bean also addresses that various weaknesses and loopholes in current U.S. law on these topics and offers suggestions for reforms.

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.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Debra LaPrevotte

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This week’s episode features an interview with Debra LaPrevotte. After a long and distinguished career with the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), where she specialized in asset seizure cases (among other things), Ms. LaPrevotte joined The Sentry, an international non-governmental organization that fights war cries and other atrocities in sub-Saharan Africa by “following the money”–shining a light on how kleptocrats and their cronies try to hide the assets that they amass from their illegal and exploitative activities. In the interview, Ms. LaPrevotte discusses here work on asset seizure at the FBI, her work on tracking and exposing kleptocratic assets for The Sentry, and her reflections and insights regarding broader controversies and policy questions related to the asset recovery and return process.

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.

Announcement: ASIL Anti-Corruption Conference–Call for Papers

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Jan Dunin-Wasowicz, Vice Chair of the Anti-Corruption Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), contributes today’s post, which announces a conference that might interest GAB readers:

The ASIL Anti-Corruption Law Interest Group (ACLIG) has recently released a call for papers for its first works-in-progress conference. The conference is cosponsored with the Faculty of Law at Ono Academic College and is organized in close cooperation with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This conference presents an opportunity for critical evaluation of and feedback on new cutting-edge ideas and papers in the process of being created. The one-day event will take place in Kiryat Ono, Israel, on December 16 2019.

The organizers are soliciting presentation proposals from scholars, private sector professionals and practitioners, government officials, policy makers, civil society representatives and the broader international anti-corruption community on a wide range of topics relevant to the activities of the ACLIG and the anti-corruption work of the OECD. Themes of this first works-in-progress conference include, but are not limited to:

  • Cohesion and fragmentation in international anticorruption law
  • Multi-jurisdictional enforcement
  • Transnational compliance
  • Anticorruption and human rights
  • Anticorruption and climate change
  • Anticorruption and artificial intelligence
  • Anticorruption and rule of law
  • Anticorruption, privacy and data protection regulations
  • Evaluation of corruption control programs and policies
  • Ways and means to improve the measurement of corruption.

Presentation proposals are due by September 13, 2019.  Additional details on how to contribute to the conference are available here.

We hope many GAB contributors and readers will participate.

Anticorruption Bibliography–June 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.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin about the development of her interest in corruption, how her research led her to theorize about, and empirically document, a basic distinction between “particularism” and “ethical universalism” as organizing principles of governance, and what sorts of future research are needed in order to deepen our understanding about how to bring about a transition from the former to the latter. Professor Mungiu-Pippidi also shares her views on how external actors can help–but also how they may inadvertently make the problem worse.

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.