Corruption
Key findings from PeaceRep research on corruption (2021 – 2026)
PeaceRep’s corruption research was led by LSE CCRG and the World Peace Foundation, Tufts University.
Corruption as Political Order: Understanding and Transforming Systemic Corruption in Conflict-Affected States
Corruption is often seen as a deviation from good governance — a symptom of weak institutions or moral failure. Yet PeaceRep research across conflict-affected contexts has shown that corruption is not peripheral to political life but central to how power is financed, exercised and maintained. In weakly institutionalised systems, it forms part of the logic of political order operating as a means through which authority is consolidated, alliances are sustained and control is negotiated.
At the same time, PeaceRep research has revealed that corruption cannot be understood within national boundaries alone. Donor financing, aid systems, reconstruction programmes, and global financial flows often reproduce the very same incentive structures they seek to dismantle. They show how corruption operates through interlocking local and international networks, shaped by domestic political settlements and transnational political economies and international interventions. Research across contexts points to overlapping patronage, business, and aid networks that link local brokers to international actors.
PeaceRep research has examined corruption as both political practice and global system. It has argued that meaningful transformation requires recognising corruption not as a pathology of fragile states but as a transnational one linking local authority, international markets and external interventions. In this light, reform depends on embedding accountability and integrity not only in state institutions but also within the global financial and aid regimes that help sustain them.
PeaceRep’s body of research contributes to a growing recognition that systemic corruption must be analysed relationally and across scales, as it links domestic political authority with global systems of finance, aid, and security. Addressing corruption requires a dual focus: confronting the internal logics of transactional politics while re-examining the external frameworks that generate them. Conceptually, this implies a trans-scalar approach that situates national practices within the broader global political economy that enables them. It calls for rethinking how international engagement, financial governance, and political reform intersect, and how integrity can be embedded across these levels.
Read key findings from our corruption research in the tabs below.
Corruption as Political Practice
In weakly institutionalised political systems, the exercise of power depends on access to resources — the financial means to sustain networks, secure loyalty, and mobilise coercion. Alex de Waal’s political marketplace framework provides a useful lens for understanding how power functions in such environments. It conceptualises politics as a continual process of monetised bargaining, in which loyalty, coercion, and protection are exchanged for material reward. Authority rests less on formal institutions than on negotiated transactions among elites, making corruption a central mechanism through which political order is organised and maintained.
Building on this framework, PeaceRep research has examined corruption as an integral component of political finance rather than an anomaly within it (Miller 2024). Drawing on cases from Nigeria, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, PeaceRep research has shown how political actors depend on informal resource flows to maintain authority, forge alliances, and fund competition within resource-dependent systems. Once entrenched, these practices become institutionalised, reproducing corrupt political orders that persist even as elites change. Electoral cycles demonstrate how political competition inflates the price of loyalty, redistributing rents among elites to sustain fragile coalitions. Recognising corruption as a core feature of political marketplaces helps identify where incentives might be shifted to support more durable reform (Miller 2024).
In Iraq, PeaceRep has examined how the muhasasa system institutionalised corruption as a mode of power-sharing that distributes state resources and positions among political factions (Jiyad 2023). Initially emerging after 2003 as a mechanism to prevent sectarian domination and ensure representation, it evolved into a political settlement in which ministries, contracts, and appointments are allocated through elite negotiation rather than merit or policy alignment. This arrangement entrenches rent-seeking at the core of governance: political financing, patronage, and administrative control are intertwined, transforming state institutions into instruments of coalition management. Corruption thus becomes a structuring principle of Iraq’s post-2003 political order to sustain elite coalitions and stability rather than institutional accountability (Jiyad 2023).
In Afghanistan, PeaceRep has used a network-based analysis to trace how the political marketplace in pre-2021 Afghanistan evolved into a criminalised system of exchange (Theros 2024). The Kabul Bank case revealed how political financing and state capture became entwined with illicit networks and international finance, transforming corruption from a means of political survival into a structure of criminalised accumulation. A pervasive culture of impunity reinforced this system, sustained by mutual protection among political and financial elites and by U.S. and allied strategies that treated corruption as a secondary concern to security and stabilisation, even as those same financial flows underwrote the political marketplace. This fusion of domestic patronage and external capital flows blurred distinctions between licit and illicit, public and private, national and international – demonstrating how the logic of the political marketplace can be extended and globalised through financial systems (Theros 2024).
In Somalia, PeaceRep research has applied the political marketplace framework to the Somali context, showing how corruption is embedded in the political settlement that underpins state authority (Majid & Abdirahman 2024; Jackson & Majid 2024). Despite repeated reform efforts, transactional politics continues to dominate, sustained by elite bargaining over access to external and domestic resources. International engagement reinforces these dynamics: donor-financed procurement in logistics, security, and development sectors channels rents through a layered contracting economy, providing liquidity that sustains patronage networks and political competition. These flows intensify during election cycles, when political finance becomes essential for securing alliances and votes. In this system, aid and state revenues merge into a political economy of power, linking domestic authority to external funding structures (Majid & Abdirahman 2024; Jackson & Majid 2024).
Across these cases, corruption functions as political practice: a set of informal rules that organise exchange, distribute resources, and underpin authority. Viewing corruption in this way shifts the analytical lens from individual misconduct toward the structural incentives and political economies that reproduce and sustain it.
International Dimensions and the Global Political Economy of Corruption
The entanglement of corruption with international systems is evident in how global aid, finance, and intervention shape the very political marketplaces they aim to reform. Corruption circulates through transnational networks that move rents and incentives across borders, linking external resources to domestic power structures. Whether channelled through reconstruction funds, donor assistance, military contracts, or illicit financial flows, these resources provide the liquidity that sustains political bargaining and embeds external interests within domestic political orders.
The design of international engagement often reinforces rather than transforms these dynamics, as donor funding cycles and projectised aid modalities privilege short-term outputs and upward accountability over the incentive systems they generate on the ground. In many conflict-affected and transitional contexts, external actors effectively become participants in domestic rent economies: contracting, procurement, and risk management replicating the same hierarchies of access and control that define local political orders.
The case of Afghanistan illustrates these dynamics clearly. Market-oriented reforms and large-scale aid inflows produced a criminalised political marketplace. The Kabul Bank crisis revealed how liberalisation and donor financing fused global finance with local patronage and criminal networks. For international actors, the primacy of security and stabilisation meant that corruption was managed rather than confronted, treated as a necessary cost of alliance-building and counterinsurgency. Operationally, fragmented mandates, short funding cycles, and reliance on intermediaries reinforced a focus on delivery and risk management over accountability or reform. In this way, the architecture of reconstruction entrenched rent capture (Theros 2024).
Comparable dynamics are evident in Somalia. PeaceRep research has traced how international contracting in the security and development sectors generates political finance for elites (Majid & Abdirahman 2024). The research has extended this analysis to the humanitarian sphere, showing how corruption and diversion are embedded within the architecture of aid delivery (Jackson & Majid 2024). Multi-layered subcontracting, remote management, and third-party monitoring have evolved into self-perpetuating systems that diffuse responsibility and obscure accountability. Pressures to deliver assistance rapidly and at scale encourage risk-averse practices that sustain, rather than disrupt, existing patronage networks. These patterns reflect a similar logic: the administrative and financial practices of the international system mirror the rent-seeking and transactional structures they aim to constrain.
As de Waal (2021) and Kaldor (2012, 2018) observe, contemporary conflicts function as transnational political economies in which external rents and local markets of power are mutually constitutive. Within this globalised political marketplace, corruption is not a governance failure but a mode through which power and access are organised. Recognising this interdependence highlights how international aid, finance, and market incentives co-produce the environments in which corruption thrives and why meaningful reform must confront the international incentive structures that sustain them.
From Anti-Corruption to Transforming Corruption
Traditional anti-corruption approaches conceptualise corruption as an institutional deficit that can be corrected through compliance and control. Yet in systems where corruption is entrenched within both domestic and international structures, such interventions rarely produce lasting change. PeaceRep research has called for a shift from anti-corruption to transforming corruption: a re-orientation toward altering the incentive structures and political economies that make corruption viable (Miller 2024). It has also argued that transformation must address not only domestic governance but also the international frameworks that underpin it. This analysis demonstrates the utility of network approaches in explaining how political, financial, and criminal systems interconnect across levels and why conventional anti-corruption tools fail to address these interdependencies (Theros 2024).
Transformation begins with recognising the interdependence between internal political dynamics and external engagement. This trans-scalar perspective highlights that reform must extend beyond state institutions to the global actors and architectures – financial, institutional, and contractual – that sustain systemic corruption. PeaceRep research has pointed to several strategies for shifting these incentive systems:
- Reciprocal accountability: Domestic integrity measures must be matched by independent oversight of international agencies and contractors, recognising their role in shaping incentive environments (Jackson & Majid 2024).
- Streamlined aid delivery: Reducing multi-layered contracting and implementation chains can limit opportunities for diversion and strengthen accountability among credible local actors (Jackson & Majid 2024).
- Reform of political finance and contracting: Transparency and conditionality in security, logistics, and reconstruction contracting can help shift the flows of rents sustaining elite bargains (Majid & Abdirahman 2024; Jiyad 2023).
- Coalitions for integrity: Cross-sectoral networks can generate internal counterweights to systemic capture, provided they are protected from political retaliation.
These approaches reflect a more adaptive understanding of corruption as both political and transnational. Transformation, in this sense, seeks to reshape the incentive systems through which authority and finance circulate.
References
PeaceRep’s key findings series presents a top-line overview of findings from the breadth and depth of the consortium’s data-driven and in-country research between 2021 – 2026. The findings presented here represent our main contributions to the field, but are not necessarily exhaustive of all PeaceRep work on each thematic and geographic area. To view all PeaceRep publications, visit the publications database.
Researchers involved
Marika Theros, Nisar Majid, Khalif Abdirahman, Alex de Waal, Jared Miller, Ashley Jackson, Sajad Jiyad
Citation
Theros, M. & Majid, N. (2026). PeaceRep Key Findings: Corruption. PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
References
Jiyad, S. (2023). Corruption is the Lifeblood of Politics in Iraq. LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series No. 77. London School of Economics and Political Science.
Majid, N. & Abdirahman, K. (2024). Mid-term, Corruption and International Engagement. PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Majid, N. & Jackson, A. (2024). Time for Change: The Normalisation of Corruption and Diversion in the Humanitarian Sector. PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Miller, J. (2024). Understanding Systemic Corruption: The Political Role of Corruption in Weakly Institutionalised Political Systems. PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh
Theros, M. (2024). Natural Bedfellows: Corruption, Criminality and the Failure of International Reconstruction. A Case Study of the Kabul Bank. Conflict, Security & Development, 24(4), 369–395.