Practical Challenges Mitigating Strategic Corruption

This article contributes to the expanding literature on strategic corruption in two significant ways. First, it addresses conceptual challenges that complicate defining strategic corruption, shedding light on how definitional ambiguities hinder practical efforts to address it effectively. Second, it examines operational challenges associated with addressing strategic corruption in practice and incorporating concerns related to strategic corruption into institutional ways of working. Specifically, the article contributes to the emerging literature on strategic corruption by discussing six practical challenges associated with addressing the concept in practice: (1) incorporating a new concept into institutional ways of working; (2) international collaboration hurdles in identifying strategic corruption and bringing perpetrators to account; (3) domestic institutional vulnerabilities exploited by strategic corruption schemes; (4) trade-offs between transparency and securitisation of countering strategic corruption; (5) barriers to identifying and mitigating long-term schemes that involve corrosive capital, combined with exploitation of legal loopholes to influence political figures and processes; and (6) difficulties in identifying and addressing strategic corruption that is perpetrated as part of a broader malign foreign influence campaign and hybrid attacks.