Rethinking Cross-Border Corruption: Limits of Conventional Paradigms: A Special Issue of American Behavioral Scientist

In October 2024, an interdisciplinary group of over thirty social scientists gathered in Barcelona, Spain, at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), to reconsider the analytical and policy challenges of cross-border corruption. The conference was sponsored by the European Union under the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Programme for Research and Innovation, Grant Agreement number 101132483 (Project: BridgeGap). This special issue advances an analytical rethinking of cross-border corruption as a structural and relational phenomenon that transcends the nation-state framework. The contributions examine how corruption operates through transnational governance networks, institutional asymmetries, and the strategic behaviors of political, financial, and criminal actors. Across diverse regional contexts, the authors show that cross-border corruption cannot be reduced to isolated acts of bribery or enforcement gaps; rather, it must be understood as a patterned mode of exchange and influence embedded within global systems of regulation, finance, and legitimacy. Collectively, these papers underscore the inadequacy of technocratic “good governance” approaches and call for integrative frameworks that link political economy, law, and media analysis to explain how corruption adapts, persists, and legitimizes itself within global governance.