“Strategic corruption” has rapidly emerged as a popular but also highly contested concept for understanding corruption as a geopolitical instrument. It has been variably used across grey and academic literature to designate vastly different empirical phenomena. This article systematically analyzes the adoption and application of the “strategic corruption” concept in the academic and policy literature. Using a mapping review and qualitative evidence synthesis, we extract 144 individual cases from 71 documents, to show variation in how the concept has been defined and operationalized. Findings reveal a surge in the term’s use since 2020, with most cases focusing on Russia and China as source countries and the United States, Europe, and the Global South described as targets or victims. Diverse interpretations of strategic corruption are identified, which range from narrow bribery-related definitions to broader understandings in the sense of malign authoritarian influence or as a structural element of “thugocracy.” By stressing the relevance of strategic corruption as a type of covert and often indirect interaction between sovereign states and scrutinizing the current empirical basis of the strategic corruption discourse, this study lays the groundwork for a more coherent and academically robust application of the concept in future research.
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