Corruption, so it seems, is everywhere. One indicator of this is the amount of coverage that it gets in the popular press. In 2015, for example, the word “corruption” appeared 1,240 times in UK newspaper article headlines. “Fraud” was even more prevalent, appearing on 4,177 occasions. The word “bribery”, meanwhile, came up a mere 264 times. The types of cases covered were wide, varied and often bewildering. On one day alone in the UK (24 November 2015), The Independent was analysing how the Vatican was putting reporters on trial who had previously uncovered corruption cases in its midst, while The Times was reporting a story about an apprentice jockey who was facing a ban from horse racing on account of deliberately riding to lose. At the same time, The Herald was discussing Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s anti-corruption reforms, while The Guardian was analysing FIFA’s alleged corruption problems.

The world of academia is also covering issues of corruption in ever more depth and breadth; a search in mid-2016 for the term “corruption” on JSTOR, the digital library of academic publications, revealed no less than 169,941 journal articles in which corruption was mentioned. “Fraud”, meanwhile, appeared in 105,144 articles, and “bribery” came up on 22,971 occasions. While not all of those articles will have been on corruption as it is understood in the social sciences, it is still clear that the term, and concepts that are closely linked to it, are on a lot of people’s minds.

There are plenty of good reasons for that. In 2014, the World Economic Forum estimated that $2.6 trillion was being lost yearly to corruption, while the World Bank has claimed that $1 trillion is paid out every year in bribes (OECD 2014: 1). In 2015, Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based non-governmental organization (NGO), bemoaned the fact that between 2004 and 2013 developing and emerging economies lost $7.8 trillon in illicit financial flows (Kar & Spankers 2015). Furthermore, it is not just in the most impoverished parts of the world that corruption takes place; as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, it has been estimated that between 5 and 10 per cent of the budgets of Medicare and Medicaid, the American health care programmes, go missing on account of corruption (OECD 2014: 3).