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In 2026, Global Financial Integrity, Academics Stand Against Poverty and Yale’s Global Justice Program will be awarding the 13th annual Amartya Sen Prizes to the best original essays examining one particular component of illicit financial flows, the resulting harms, and possible avenues of reform.  Essays should be about 7,000 to 9,000 words long. We expect to award prizes totaling USD 8,000 to two or three winners, for example a first prize of USD 5,000 and a second prize of USD 3,000. Winning essays must be available for presentation at the next Yale Global Justice Program conference and for publication in the journal Academics Stand Against Poverty. Past winners are not eligible.

Illicit financial flows are explicitly recognized as an obstacle to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and singled out as target #4 of SDG 16. They are defined as cross-border movements of funds that are illegally earned, transferred, or used – such as funds earned through illegal trafficking in persons, drugs or weapons; funds illegally transferred through mispriced exchanges (e.g., among affiliates of a multinational firm seeking to shift profits to reduce taxes); goods misinvoiced or funds moved in order to evade taxes; and funds used for corruption of or by public or corporate officials.  

Components of illicit financial flows can be delimited by sector or geographically. Delimitation by sector might focus your essay on some specific activity, business or industry – such as art, real estate, health care, technology, entertainment, shipping, weapons, agriculture, sports, gaming, education, politics, tourism, natural resource extraction, banking and financial services – or on an even narrower subsector such as the diamond trade, hunting, insurance, or prostitution. Delimitation by geography might further narrow the essay’s focus to some region, country, or province.

Your essay should describe the problematic activity and evaluate the adverse effects that make it problematic. You should estimate, in quantitative terms if possible, the magnitude of the relevant outflows as well as the damage they do to affected institutions and populations. This might include harm from abuse, exploitation and impoverishment of individuals, harm through subdued economic activity and reduced prosperity, and/or harm through diminished tax revenues that depress public spending.

Your essay should also explain the persistence of the harmful activity in terms of relevant incentives and enabling conditions and, based on your explanation, propose plausible ways to curtail the problem. Such reform efforts might be proposed at diverse levels, including supranational rules and regimes, national rules, corporate policies, professional ethics, individual initiatives, or any combination thereof. The task is to identify who has the responsibility, the capacity and (potentially) the knowledge and motivation to change behavior toward effective curtailment. Special credit will be given to papers that provide a detailed description of how change may come about in a particular geographical or sectoral context.

We welcome authors from diverse academic disciplines and from outside the academy. Please send your entry by email attachment on or before 31 August 2026 to Tom Cardamone at SenPrize@gfintegrity.org. While your message should identify you, your essay should be stripped of self-identifying references, formatted for blind review.

While your message should identify you, your essay should be stripped of self-identifying references, formatted for blind review.