Corruption in Crisis: Amplifying Women’s Vulnerabilities in Conflict and Disasters

A recent report by Transparency International highlights the still underexplored intersection of gender, corruption, and conflict. While existing research has examined the pairwise links between conflict and gender, conflict and corruption, and corruption and gender, fewer studies analyze how all three dimensions interact in comparative perspective. This gap extends to crisis settings more broadly. Crises, understood as periods of rapid, high-stakes decision-making, can intensify corruption by expanding discretion and weakening oversight, and corruption in turn can amplify gendered harms and burdens, particularly for women and people with diverse sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. This chapter responds to the call for more comparative research by outlining the core mechanisms through which corruption acts as a crisis multiplier and by illustrating how these dynamics operate across conflict, disasters, and economic crises. It concludes by translating these insights into actionable implications for anticorruption policy and gender equality agendas in crisis governance.