By Michael Picard and Colby Goodman

As armed conflicts surge and organised crime activity rises, a new report from Transparency International Defence & Security (TI-DS) and Transparency International US (TI-US) reveals how corruption is quietly but consistently enabling weapons to fall into the wrong hands.

Under the Radar: Corruption’s Role in Fueling Arms Diversion investigates over 400 cases of diversion across 70 countries and shows how corruption, including bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of authority, serves as a key enabler of illicit arms flows.

The report’s release comes at a time of intensifying global concern over weapons diversion. It shows how corruption-fuelled diversion has empowered organised crime, fuelled armed conflict and violence, weakened military effectiveness, and undermined governance and security around the world.

“Despite greater recognition of corruption’s corrosive effect on arms control policies, corruption has often been sidelined in efforts to assess risks of arms diversion like a detective ignoring key clues in a recurring crime,” said Colby Goodman, Senior Researcher at TI US and TI-DS and one of the report’s authors. “Some states’ actions in recent years to add corruption risk assessments are a critical first step to better tackling this global scourge.”

The report provides critical information and tools for states to help identify and mitigate corruption-fuelled arms diversion as they develop new national arms control policies and engage in ongoing discussions within the United Nations on curbing arms diversion.

“The vast amounts of weapons diverted to terrorist groups in the past war on terror is a stark reminder of what happens when governments lose sight of corruption risks in the name of national security,” said Dr. Francesca Grandi, Head of Advocacy at Transparency International Defence & Security. “As demand for arms imports grows amid increasing global insecurity, this report offers practical and effective tools for arms exporting countries to strengthen integrity in their export control systems. It should also help spark more serious conversations globally, at the United Nations and in other fora, about sharing corruption-related information to prevent arms diversion.”

Some of the reports key findings include:

• The theft or embezzlement of state-owned weapons for private gain is the most common type of corruption-fuelled diversion, accounting for over 350 cases. Bribery and abuse of authority remain a serious concern for diversion.

• Corruption facilitates diversion at each stage of a weapon’s lifecycle, including production, international transfers, active use and storage, and disposal. The active use and storage stage had the most corruption-fuelled diversion cases followed by the disposal, international transfer, and production stages.

• Many of the corruption-fuelled diversion cases resulted in devastating consequences for civilians. In more than 200 cases, military or security personnel reportedly colluded with illicit actors, such as insurgents or terrorists, in connection with arms diversion, which resulted in hundreds of deaths and injuries.

To address this urgent issue, the report offers key analysis and recommendations for states engaged in arms exports and imports:

• Strengthen national policies by explicitly identifying corruption as a key risk for arms diversion and developing implementation guidelines that incorporate targeted risk assessment questions that measure key, often overlooked defence and security institutional controls.

• Improve international collaboration on corruption in arms transfers by sharing information on corruption risks in arms transfers within the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) framework and establishing working groups within the ATT and other multilateral for deeper discussions on the topic.

• Support research and foreign aid to curb corruption-fuelled arms diversion, including funding studies on related issues and efforts to strengthen the integrity of defence and security institutions.

London: Transparency International, 2025. 50p.

By Adam Baird , Matthew Louis Bishop , Dylan Kerrigan

The Southern Caribbean became a key hemispheric drug transhipment point in the late 1990s, to which the alarmingly high level of homicidal violence in Trinidad is often attributed. Existing research, concentrated in criminology and mainstream international relations, as well as the anti-drug policy establishment, tends to accept this correlation, framing the challenge as a typical post-Westphalian security threat. However, conventional accounts struggle to explain why murders have continued to rise even as the relative salience of narcotrafficking has actually declined. By consciously disentangling the main variables, we advance a more nuanced empirical account of how ‘the local’ is both inserted into and mediates the impact of ‘the global’. Relatively little violence can be ascribed to the drug trade directly: cocaine frequently transits through Trinidad peacefully, whereas firearms stubbornly remain within a distinctive geostrategic context we term a ‘weapons sink’. The ensuing murders are driven by the ways in which these ‘residues’ of the trade reconstitute the domestic gangscape. As guns filter inexorably into the community, they reshape the norms and practices underpinning acceptable and anticipated gang behaviour, generating specifically ‘residual’ forms of violence that are not new in genesis, but rather draw on long historical antecedents to exacerbate the homicide panorama. Our analysis emphasises the importance of taking firearms more seriously in understanding the diversity of historically constituted violences in places that appear to resemble—but differ to—the predominant Latin American cases from which the conventional wisdom about supposed ‘drug violence’ is generally distilled.

Political Geography. Volume 106, October 2023, 102966

by Julia Stanyard

The development of transport infrastructure boosts trade and stimulates economic growth. However, this infrastructure can also benefit criminal networks, which use air transport to traffic illicit goods such as drugs, wildlife and gold. Their activities are disguised from regulatory bodies, and many act in collusion with corrupt officials. However, this can be countered by implementing effective oversight measures. This is crucial considering the substantial expansion of African air traffic in recent years, forecasts that Africa will continue to be one of the fastest-growing regions in the world for aviation, and the challenges that the aviation sector globally is facing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

ENACT Africa, 2023. 18p.

By Mohamed Daghar, Willis Okumu and Tadesse Simie Metekia

This study explores links between cattle rustling in East Africa’s Karamoja Cluster and the flow of illicit arms into this ungoverned space.

This study looks at the links between cattle rustling in East Africa’s Karamoja Cluster and the flow of illicit arms into this ungoverned space. It looks at the actors involved in the illicit arms trade, the sources of the weapons, and the need for responses other than civilian disarmament exercises, which so far have been unsuccessful.

ENACT Africa, 2023. 20p.

Edited by Gerben Bruinsma

In the past two decades, the study of transnational crime has developed from a subset of the study of organized crime to its own recognized field of study, covering distinct societal threats and requiring a particular approach. This volume provides examples of transnational crime, and places them in a broad historical context, which has so far been missing from this field of study. The contributions to this comprehensive volume explore the causes and historical precursors of six main types of transnational crime: piracy, human smuggling, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, art and antique trafficking and corporate crime. The historical contributions demonstrate that transnational crime is not a novel phenomenon of recent globalization and that, beyond organized crime groups, powerful individuals, governments and business corporations have been heavily involved.

New York: Springer, 2015. 201p.

By InSight Crime

CACIF is the de facto political party of Guatemala's economic elites. It unites the most important economic actors and is capable of integrating, via informal mechanisms, the heads of consortia and family groups with significant weight in a variety of economic sectors. Private security firms under the umbrella of the “Illegal Clandestine Security Apparatuses (Cuerpos Ilegales y Aparatos Clandestinos deSeguridad - CIACS) weave in and out of organized crime activity involving drug, arms and human trafficking, systematically blocking investigations and operating with impunity. The CIACS are what raised the alarm to spur creation of the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala.

Washington, DC: InSight Crime, 2016. 112p.

By Sight Crime

Colombia's elite has always been made up predominantly of Colombian nationals. The country's economic and political elites overlap to a large extent, and the wealthy exert political power. The lack of government presence in many parts of the country and a tradition of contraband smuggling created trafficking expertise and a tolerance for illicit activities. The mass purchase of land by drug traffickers was so substantial that it is known as the "counter-reform" -- skewing Colombia's land further into the hands of the few. The paper also traces the rise and fall of drug lord Pablo Escobar and the Medellín cartel.

Washington, DC: InSight Crime, 2016. 117p.