When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, many believed it would lead to more secure, transparent and less corrupt borders. New regulations, infrastructure modernisation and digitalised customs procedures all followed. European standards and money arrived together.
Yet corruption did not disappear at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint, the main land crossing between Bulgaria and Türkiye and one of the busiest gateways between Europe and Asia. Instead, it evolved.
Published in the Journal of Illicit Trade, Financial Crime, and Compliance, this article examines how Bulgaria’s 2007 accession to the European Union transformed illegal activities and corruption at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint.
The Basel Institute on Governance offers a four-day training course covering the fundamentals of crypto, financial crime and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance.
Delivered virtually over four interactive three-hour sessions, the course equips practitioners from law enforcement, financial and business sectors to prevent, detect and investigate the use of crypto for illicit activities.
Corruption at land and sea borders facilitates smuggling, sanctions evasion, tax offences and the entry of counterfeit, substandard or unsafe goods into countries including EU member states. This report conceptualises border corruption as a complex system of actors, events and illicit exchanges that is difficult to detect and investigate.
Corruption at borders poses a significant threat to the integrity of the European Union’s external borders, undermining security, trust, and governance. And border corruption is not static — it evolves in response to new controls, technologies and enforcement strategies. This means that even well-designed measures may lose effectiveness over time.
A new Policy Brief by the FALCON (Fight Against Large-scale Corruption and Organised Crime Networks) project outlines actionable recommendations for EU policymakers and officials involved preventing and combatting border corruption.
Corruption is not just a collection of isolated acts by individuals. It is a complex, adaptive system that evolves in response to efforts to control it. And seeing it this way opens up new possibilities to tackle it more effectively.
This was the central message of a recent Basel Institute on Governance research webinar exploring how corruption evolves and what this means for designing interventions that remain effective over time.
A free webinar on how corruption adapts – and how to stay ahead of it.
Corruption does not disappear under pressure – it adapts. Join us for a deep dive into our latest research on how corrupt networks evolve in response to anti-corruption measures and controls, and what this means for designing interventions that remain relevant and effective over time.
In a new peer-reviewed journal article, Jacopo Costa and Claudia Baez Camargo look into why and how corruption evolves over time, drawing on an empirical analysis from Italy. The article was published in Trends in Organized Crime.
Corruption evolves over time. This paper investigates why and how this evolution happens. The analysis has employed a combination of qualitative network and document analysis to explore the configuration of corruption in two moments in Italy and the changes that have happened in between them.
In this joint paper with Adam Smith International, authors Claudia Baez Camargo and Renee Kantelberg show how anti-corruption efforts require more than mere technical fixes, such as capacity building for civil society alone, to drive lasting change.
Anti-corruption work is often embedded in complex, politically charged environments. This requires thinking and working politically. Engaging with complex social and economic systems also means recognising that change is not linear or even predictable. What to do then?
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