“MOCCA: Multi-level orders of corruption in Central Asia” project was held in Istanbul on January 5-6, 2023. The kick-off meeting was organized in order to discuss the project plans and coordinate research and secondment activities with project participants from European countries, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The kick-off meeting helped to establish project governance structures, such as Ethics Advisory Board and Academic Advisory Board. The meeting also helped to identify participants’ research interests and design the project plans for the duration of the project.   Experienced researchers of the project were allocated project research streams to work on.

EU Commission’s European Research Executive Agency representative, who will also be overseeing the project’s progress for the next four years, talked about the project requirements and deliverables and answered some practical questions about the management of the project. The kick-off meeting also featured presentations from project participants. For example, the principal investigator of the project – Rustam Urinboyev from Lund University, talked about the (anti-) corruption issue from an interdisciplinary and multilevel perspective, while Sherzod Eraliev reviewed the global indicators of governance and corruption. Patrik Olsson from Lund University presented research on the sociology of law in non-western contexts and made a comparison of Latin America and Central Asia. The presentation by Uygun Nigmadjanov (Academy of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Uzbekistan) focused on anti-corruption issues and policies from a practitioner’s perspective.