Seaports are among the most significant nodes in transnational criminal supply chains globally. The infrastructure and technical operations involved dictate the ease with which organised crime groups can exploit them. The political dynamics surrounding the sector and facilities are of key relevance to the ease of criminal penetration.

This evidence review will explore the linkages between transitional justice, corruption and organised crime, pooling concepts and evidence to promote a shared narrative and framework for thinking about, discussing and addressing accountability and justice for human rights violations, corruption, and organised crime.

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.

This reserach explores politically feasible security sector reform approaches to tackling serious organised crime, drawing on lessons of success from Georgia, Colombia and South Africa.

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.

The harms on economies and societies are significant when proceeds of crime and corruption are moved unimpeded through the global financial and trade systems. As policymakers are looking to identify ways to respond better to illicit financial flows (IFFs), this research project seeks to better understand what enables IFFs, if there is political will to address IFFs and what interventions have been successful in addressing IFFs as part of a politically sensitive approach. The overarching conclusion of the initial research was that the line between business, politics and crime has never been more blurred. The research proposes a framework, the so-called ‘IFFs pyramid’, to explain the three dominant means by which IFFs are enabled, moved and held: financial flows, trade flows and informal flows. In its second phase, the research project is testing the use and applicability of this framework in East and Southern Africa and the Mekong region. 

This research project will test an innovative new approach - the Corruption Functionality Framework - to developing more effective and politically feasible anti-corruption strategies and approaches in a way that brings together serious organised crime and corruption in specific sectors and/or contexts. The team will work with policymakers to test the approach in multi-agency settings, focusing on specific problems in specific locations. The approach combines facilitated workshops with country and sector experts followed by semi-structured interviews to assess whether participants found the CFF useful for triggering new thinking and potential strategic and/or operational approaches. The research will also help to develop more granular understanding of how functionality works in specific contexts that could, in future research, be developed into a series of comparative case studies. Insights from the research will also be used to adapt the CFF to help ensure it is as useful as possible. 

This research project is a detailed case study of state capture at the South African Revenue Service (SARS). State capture is more endemic than ordinary corruption at an individual level and occurs at a far wider systemic level. State capture entails a systematic and well organised effort of a group of people to misdirect public resources from their intended purpose into the hands of a private elite for corruption and political patronage purposes. It is supported by high-level political protection through the infiltration and weakening of state institutions.

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…

This research builds on previous work on how states and societies that are in the throes of violent conflict can evolve from exclusionary political systems anchored in narrow pacts and agreements among elites (or what is referred to in the literature as “elite bargains”) into more peaceful, open, representative and inclusive political systems in the longer term (see the synthesis report here). An important insight from that research was that organised crime actors remain a significant gap in the evidence base on elite bargains and political settlements (or the ‘rules of the game’, both on paper and how they are …