This research results from the opportunity provided by the approval and implementation of the Total Peace policy in Colombia, a country that, despite the signature of a peace process in 2016, still has numerous armed and criminal groups inflicting significant violence onto the population. The Total Peace policy allows the government to negotiate with armed and criminal groups in order to reduce violence and protect life, providing a unique opportunity to conduct research on ongoing negotiations. This project aims to research the legal framework applied for the different types of engagement at the local and national level, the way in which criminal governance and the Total Peace policy interacts and identify the extent into which legal frameworks and local criminal governance structures shape negotiations with armed and criminal groups in Colombia.

This research examines the evolution of thinking on SOC and development since 2011 and includes a policy review to understand how they’ve evolved as separate, and larger approaches. Key government officials engaged in the SOC-development policy debate since 2010 will be interviewed to identify government priorities to engage on the development/ SOC nexus, and the challenges that were faced at different times.

This research analyses the impact of whistleblower reward programmes and scrutinises whether the concerns that have been raised regarding their implementation have eventuated in practice. Furthermore, it considers what factors have been shown to be necessary for such a scheme to operate as part of a wider strategy to increase the effectiveness of economic crime investigations and concludes with observations for policymakers considering the introduction of whistleblower rewards.

Like most cities, the Medellín Mayor’s Office and the Colombian police focus their efforts on managing what they measure--homicides and violent crime. While of course there are legitimate reasons to tackle violence, there is relatively less attention to other deleterious effects of SOC: high levels of civilian extortion, criminal political control of civilians, criminal capture of local state and community governments, retail drug sales, and so forth. In addition to being costly in and of themselves, these actions also undermine the local control and legitimacy of the state. We believe that these harmful consequences are overlooked in part because they are not measured. We aim to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting a wide variety of metrics on SOC and establish the practice of collecting, monitoring, and using these metrics for policy analysis and program/policy design and evaluation.

The research project aims to deepen the evidence base on the connections between SSR/G and SOC – how they influence and impact one another, positively and adversely. It seeks to encourage collaboration across academic disciplines and professional silos, integrating SSR/G perspectives and programming into the fight against SOC and vice versa.

This project aims to better understand some of the interoperability challenges for improved multi-agency collaboration and decision-making. While a growing body of evidence suggests we need to develop more problem-driven, politically feasible strategies and operations on organised crime and corruption, there are often differences of opinion in multi-agency teams on what this means and what is needed. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with policymakers and practitioners from a range of agencies, we will design sensemaking workshops to build better understanding of bottlenecks for communications and implications of missing or ambiguous information, and proposing potential solutions to these problems. While generating useful insights in its own right, workshops will also inform the potential development of a Cooperative AI system to improve decision-making for strategies and interventions in the future.

The aim of the research to test the effects of awareness-raising about corruption and SOC in Albania. Awareness-raising efforts are prominent in many counter-SOC and anticorruption policy strategies. This study tests five different messages that are hypothesized to have a positive influence in fostering supportive counter-SOC and anticorruption attitudes and resemble those that are most likely to be used in policy. The study aims to identify what types of messages might be useful and which ones should be avoided for policy makers. Research findings have the potential to enable policy makers to design more effective counter-SOC and anticorruption messaging strategies in the future…

Grand corruption is a transnational problem requiring cooperation among anti-corruption actors. Law enforcement actors find that cooperation is difficult to achieve. This has been attributed to; the political sensitivity of investigations, lack of trust among agencies, difficulties in sharing intelligence securely, weaknesses and discrepancies in capacity, and organisational incentive structures that favour quick and easy cases. However, investigative journalists, increasingly cooperate across borders to investigate, and expose corruption. This research explores these two under-researched sets of anti-corruption actors, specifically the challenges to cooperation and possible solutions among law enforcement agencies; among investigative journalists; and between the two groups of actors.