A New Agenda for Anti-Corruption? What the war in Ukraine tells us about strategic corruption
In a new publication, Oksana Huss and Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez look at the war in Ukraine to stress that the focus of the anti-corruption agenda must shift to transnational networks.
Published on 23 March 2022
Photo by Lou Levit on Unsplash
Oksana Huss, BIT-ACT research fellow, and Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez, associate professor at the Osaka University, published the text entitled "Strategic Corruption as a Threat to Security and the New Agenda for Anti-Corruption" in which they discuss four mechanisms of strategic corruption: the revolving door between the public and private sectors; Illegitimate political finance; money laundering and judicial corruption.
To the authors, these mechanisms were used for the accumulation of illicit wealth by the Russian elite and have produced a constant stream of dirty money into the open financial centers of the world—particularly those of Europe and North America.
Huss and Pozsgai-Alvarez argue that strategic corruption undermines security by increasing dependency on the Western democracies on the economy of a country such as Russia. This makes the implementation of the sanctions more harmful than necessary to the Western countries when imposing them, as it happened in the war in Ukraine.
Therefore, according to the authors, a new agenda for anti-corruption is crucial. They stress that anti-corruption research must shift the focus to measuring and tackling corruption as transnational networks.
The full text can be accessed here.