ABSTRACT
In 1996, not long after the global anti-corruption NGO Transparency International was founded by a former World Bank staff member, World Bank president James Wolfensohn gave a speech in which he talked about the ‘cancer of corruption’, kickstarting what rapidly turned into a series of global anticorruption activities and commitments. By 2003, the United Nations had ratified the UN Convention Against Corruption, and in 2016, corruption was explicitly included in the UN’s global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and SDG16 specifically, with reporting requirements on bribery, corruption and illicit financial flows and illicit arms flows, among other things. While corruption’s long history rooted in political theory may mean it has been ‘over-theorised’ over time, the opposite may be true of organised crime, particularly as it is a relatively young field of study in comparison.
