This book analyses the development of anti-corruption as a policy field in the European Union with a particular focus on the EU Anti-Corruption Report. It reconstructs the origins of anti-corruption policy in the 1990s when the EU started to recognise corruption as a serious crime with a cross-border dimension. It also analyses the processes surrounding the downfall of the Santer Commission on charges of corruption in 1999 and the enlargement of the EU. This incorporation of transitional new Member States was accompanied by a number of specific measures, instruments and monitoring mechanisms to combat corruption at the supranational level, finally leading to the introduction of the EU-wide Anti-Corruption Report in 2014. The book presents an in-depth analysis of its implementation, abandonment and the way forward under the European Semester as the new instrument for achieving EU anti-corruption reforms. It offers a new interpretation of the Report as a form of reflexive governance that operates at multiple levels and involves not only the European institutions and national governments, but also the role of civil society actors in the process of developing anti-corruption policy. It applies the theory of reflexive governance in analysing the impact of the Report in the UK, Romania and Albania, including the involvement of non-state actors in anti-corruption policy making in these countries. The book concludes with a discussion on how future EU Anti-Corruption policy can make use of reflexive governance and offers recommendations to enhance anti-corruption policies of the EU, the Member States and Candidate States.

In An introduction to political crime, Jeffrey Ian Ross provides the most comprehensive and contemporary analysis of political crime addressing both violent and nonviolent crimes committed by and against the state (e.g. political corruption, illegal domestic surveillance, and human rights violations) in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and other advanced industrialized democracies since the 1960s. Written by a respected social scientist, this book reviews appropriate theories of political crime and explains numerous definitional and conceptual issues, causes of political crimes, ways to control it, and effects of different types of political crime. Ross integrates new scholarship on state crime, and post 9/11 developments in both scholarship and current affairs and uses numerous examples to help readers understand the issues. The book is supported by a companion website, containing additional materials for both students and lecturers, which is available from the link above.

Governance and ethics are intertwined. A government functions within certain broad moral and ethical parameters, integrally linked with the sociological foundation of the polity in which it is articulated. The importance of ethics in governance has acquired a significant place in contemporary theoretical discussion. This book situates ethics in governance in India in the national frame and incorporates the context of globalization, allowing for the increasing importance of non-state global actors in national decision making. The author argues that a lack of ethics quickly turns into corruption and leads to governmental efforts to deal with it. He proposes that ethics are a set of standards that a society places on itself to articulate its responses to societal needs, and discusses the efforts of the Indian government at eradicating corruption and its failure. A theoretical approach to the issues of ethics in governance and corruption, this book is of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Politics, in particular Indian politics, and political philosophy.

Gabriel Ferreyra presents a comprehensive analysis of drug trafficking in Mexico and the United States by examining the roots, development, consolidation, and cultural ramifications of this phenomenon in the past century as well as its negative consequences in contemporary Mexico. Ferreyra discusses the most devastating effects correlated to drug trafficking such as high murder rates, gruesome violence, disappearances, and mass graves to emphasize how Mexican society bears the brunt of this phenomenon while the United States insists on the futility of drug prohibition. Unlike other publications, this book provides an interdisciplinary social science approach where drug trafficking is conceptualized as a multifaceted social, political, economic, and cultural problem, rather than just a criminal justice issue. Drug Trafficking in Mexico and the United States also revisits the war on drugs and provides an argument how drug control is the primary force behind drug trafficking. In that respect, there is an analysis on how the DEA has reinforced the war on drugs model and why it became a reactionary agency that opposes any comprehensive alternative to the American drug problem besides drug control. The author concludes with recommendations to implement forward-thinking measures such as decriminalization, reclassification, and legalization of drugs to effectively address the illicit drug trade.

The book provides an institutional, historical, and sectorial analysis of Argentina's structural corruption. Looking back over the last 200 years, the book demonstrates that Argentina has historically addressed corruption through ineffective debates between public-private biases or a cultural-criminal approach reinforced by modernization theory, neither of which have helped tackle the problem. Instead, Volosin proposes meaningful institutional reforms to reduce opportunities for corruption and to increase monitoring incentives and capabilities. The book argues that political economy hindrances for reform are as significant as reform itself and shows that in times of crisis or scandal, the need to move quickly to satisfy citizen demands forces politicians to promote unplanned changes that lack real teeth. Moreover, the machine's reach over most public and private actors precludes regime-undermining reform, which is precisely what is needed to meaningfully attack entrenched structural corruption. In order to combat serious deficits in the public procurement regime, Volosin recommends a micro-sectorial analysis of government procurement, supported by an innovative human rights strategy to help measure and disclose corruption's hidden social cost, raise awareness, integrate vulnerability criteria into the fight against corruption, and employ local, regional, and international litigation and monitoring tools to compel the political branches to perform structural change. This innovative exploration into corruption in Argentina will be of interest to researchers working on public policy, administrative law, anticorruption studies, law and development, and governance both in Argentina, and beyond.

Paul C. Light examines and evaluates the 100 most significant investigations of policy failures, bureaucratic mistakes, and personal misconduct undertaken by the U.S. federal government between 1945 and 2012. Launched by Congress or the president, sometimes by both at the same time, the investigations at the core of this book were driven by the search for answers about significant breakdowns in government performance. Light reveals which investigations were most effective, and why.

Corruption cost taxpayers around R1.5 trillion during Jacob Zuma’s spell as president of South Africa. Despite attempts by the police, the courts and the Public Protector to stem the rising tide of graft in South Africa, several politicians were rewarded with high office after stealing the aspirations of millions of people.

Fred Daniel, one citizen among many targeted by predator politicians, stood up against the scourge. The retaliation he faced after attempts by corrupt politicians to grab his nature reserve in Mpumalanga included vandalism, arson, smears and death threats. His nemesis is Deputy President D.D. Mabuza, who presided over several departments in the province that were wrecked by graft before he ascended to the position of the second most powerful politician in the country. Fred has won more than twenty cases over the past fifteen years in magistrates' and high courts where his claims of corruption-related harassment were found credible. The North Gauteng High Court is hearing his damages claim against Mabuza, government departments and officials amounting to more than R1 billion. It stems from Fred’s exposure of fraudulent land scams allegedly orchestrated by Mabuza.

At great personal cost, Fred and his family stood up to corruption. They endured the loss of a livelihood and their home – and the fear that follows when the government places a target on the back of a citizen blowing the whistle on its misdeeds. Fred will not back down. For him, failure is not an option.

Multiple crises have led many to conclude that the current economic and political system is broken. The present and future look increasingly precarious - if not outright dystopian Stephen McBride calls for radical solutions to these crises to provide a more rational and sustainable future. He critiques other potential responses which would further curtail democracy and increase the inequalities associated with neoliberal globalism. Demonstrating how mainstream ideas, powerful interests and political institutions face major challenges but block progressive alternatives, he argues that for radical transformation to succeed, institutional changes are necessary.

THE NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'A blockbuster . . . Essential reading' GUARDIAN 'Packed with hair-raising revelations' OBSERVER The definitive behind-the-scenes story of Trump's final year in office, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporters and authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller, A Very Stable Genius The true story of what took place in Donald Trump's White House during a disastrous 2020 has never before been told in full. Focused on Trump and the key players around him, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig provide a forensic account of the most devastating year in a presidency like no other. With unparalleled access, they reveal exactly who enabled and who foiled Trump as he sought desperately to cling to power.

This book investigates parliaments' role in curbing corruption. In addition to discussing the definition, causes, and costs of corruption and the role that parliaments have in reducing corruption, the authors consider contemporary issues that parliamentarians - and others - need to be aware of. These include the importance of broad-based coalitions to fight corruption and networking at the country, regional and global level, the importance - and difficulties - of establishing parliamentary codes of ethics/conduct, legislative oversight tools and mechanisms, and regional/international conventions against corruption. Attention will also be given to parliaments and anti-money laundering. Corruption and Legislatures presents a non-technical review of contemporary issues and recent developments in curbing corruption, and concludes with practical advice as to what can be done to ensure more effective parliamentary involvement in curbing corruption.

Never before has the call for good governance been greater. The Arab Spring in early 2011 has inspired people all over the world to fight to end the abuse of power by politicians and civic officials and create more transparent, accountable, and honest governments. In Waging War on Corruption: Inside the Movement Fighting the Abuse of Power, Frank Vogl, one of the leaders of the worldwide anticorruption movement, shares a history filled with stories of heroes and victims of corruption. He chronicles the successful campaigns by enormously courageous civil society activists, journalists, and public prosecutors and explains the crucial challenges that now must be confronted. At stake is nothing less than our global security, the reduction of poverty, the stability of our economic and financial systems, and the cause of freedom and democracy. Waging War on Corruption will be of interest to readers of politics and government, business, human rights, and law.

In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always "cooked" during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information-such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers-acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.

Despite being least affected by the virus itself, children and young people bore the brunt of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. When schools were closed, playgrounds taped up and play outlawed, children's lives were closed down. The catastrophic impact on children and young people's education, mental health, wellbeing, and life chances is becoming ever clearer, with the most disadvantaged suffering disproportionately. In May 2020 Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley founded UsForThem to advocate - in an often hostile climate - for children to be prioritised during the pandemic response. Having heard from thousands of families, and having often clashed with policymakers, they have a unique perspective on how the state's response to the pandemic has affected our children. Here they document their shocking findings: how completely children's health and welfare were sacrificed for that of adults; how policymakers appeared to disregard the harms they were causing; and how adults charged with protecting the young stood by and watched as children visibly struggled or slipped out of sight altogether. This dereliction of duty should haunt us for decades to come. With exclusive testimony from academics, politicians, scientists, educators, and parents, as well as former Children's Commissioners, the book exposes the problems at the heart of policymaking which led to the systemic and ongoing betrayal of children. From public health to politics, and from media discourse to safeguarding, the authors show how children were too often used as the means to further adult interests. Ahead of the public inquiry, the authors call for an honest appraisal of what went wrong, and commitment from stakeholders to reimagine - not just recover - childhood.

This is the story of the world’s biggest unprosecuted fraud. A fraud that in today’s terms amounts to R26 billion.

The cast is stellar: top financial institutions, leading bankers, a world where every other player is a lawyer, a world where Brett Kebble was king. This is a world of outright denial and selective amnesia, of complex financial transactions designed to confuse, obfuscate and hide the spoils. This is a world of dirty dealings across the upper strata of the socio-political system.

Barry Sergeant, hard-hitting, bestselling author of Brett Kebble: The Inside Story, now tackles the murky world of shady financial dealings, post the Kebble murder. A frightening world, where whistle-blowers have to watch their backs. A world where so many major players are involved to such an extent that none of them can afford the cost of the truth. This is a major work that relies on painstaking details and many years of preparation. It is ultimately about unravelling one of the world’s biggest cover-ups.

In China, the central government has the political will to control organized crime, which is seen as a national security threat. The crux of the problem is how to control local governments that have demonstrated lax enforcement without sufficient regulation from the provincial governments. The development of prostitution, underground gambling and narcotics production has become so serious that the central government has to rely on anti-crime campaigns to combat these "three evils". This book explores the specific role of government institutions and agencies, notably the police, in controlling organised and cross-border crime in Greater China. Drawing heavily on original empirical data, it compares the both the states of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, as well as city-states Hong Kong and Macao. This region has become increasingly economically integrated, and human interactions have been enhanced through improved trade relations, tourism, and increased individual freedom. The book argues that the regime capacity of crime control across Greater China has been expanded through regional and international police cooperation as well as anti-crime campaigns. It suggests that a strong central state in China is necessary to rein in the local states and to prevent the risk of deteriorating into a political-criminal nexus. Focusing on regime capacity in crime control, regime autonomy from crime groups, and regime legitimacy in the fight against organized crime, this thought-provoking book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics and criminology more broadly.

'A fascinating insider account' Grace Blakeley British democracy is on trial. We can no longer hold our leaders to account; the state has too much power; and the truth doesn't matter at all. Those we voted into government have nothing but contempt for the democratic system that got them there. When the Prime Minister illegally prorogued Parliament, barrister Sam Fowles was part of the team that took him to court, and won. The scenes of the police violently restraining women at a vigil for Sarah Everard shook the nation. In a high-profile parliamentary inquiry, Fowles proved the Met's actions fundamentally breached our right to protest. For decades, the Post Office pursued criminal prosecutions against its own employees, knowing the evidence was dodgy all along. Fowles helped reveal the rot at the heart of a trusted national institution. We shouldn't have to take our rulers to court just to get them to follow the rules. At a crucial juncture for British governance, Fowles urges us not to take our freedoms for granted.

Since the early 1990s, a series of major scandals in both the financial and most especially the political world has resulted in close attention being paid to the issue of corruption and its links to political legitimacy and stability. Indeed, in many countries - in both the developed as well as the developing world - corruption seems to have become almost an obsession. Concern about corruption has become a powerful policy narrative: the explanation of last resort for a whole range of failures and disappointments in the fields of politics, economics and culture. In the more established democracies, worries about corruption have become enmeshed in a wider debate about trust in the political class. Corruption remains as widespread today, possibly even more so, as it was when concerted international attention started being devoted to the issue following the end of the Cold War. This Handbook provides a showcase of the most innovative and exciting research being conducted in Europe and North America in the field of political corruption, as well as providing a new point of reference for all who are interested in the topic. The Handbook is structured around four core themes in the study of corruption in the contemporary world: understanding and defining the nature of corruption; identifying its causes; measuring its extent; and analysing its consequences. Each of these themes is addressed from various perspectives in the first four sections of the Handbook, whilst the fifth section explores new directions that are emerging in corruption research. The contributors are experts in their field, working across a range of different social-science perspectives.

Renowned historical sociologist Charles Tilly wrote many years ago that "banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war-making all belong on the same continuum." This volume pursues the idea by revealing how lawbreakers and lawmakers have related to one another on the shadowy terrains of power over wide stretches of time and space. Illicit activities and forces have been more important in state building and state maintenance than conventional histories have acknowledged. Covering vast chronological and global terrain, this book traces the contested and often overlapping boundaries between these practices in such very different polities as the pre-modern city-states of Europe, the modern nation-states of France and Japan, the imperial power of Britain in India and North America, Africa's and Southeast Asia's postcolonial states, and the emerging postmodern regional entity of the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, the contemporary explosion of transnational crime raises the question of whether or not the relationship of illicit to licit practices may be mutating once more, leading to new political forms beyond the nation-state.

Throughout history, public corruption has been endemic. Exceptionally, it was significantly suppressed in modern times in northwestern Europe. Why did that happen? Why did politicians introduce measures that acted against their own interests? And are the political forces that then induced reform alive in today's world? Neild explores these highly topical questions by looking at the suppression of corruption in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in four countries - France, Germany, Britain and the USA; at the evolution of independent judiciaries; at developments in the twentieth century, including a reminder of how widely corruption was used as a weapon in the Cold War, particularly in the Third World. Finally, and most devastatingly, he analyses the rise and decline in standards of public life in Britain in the twentieth century.

Labeling a person, institution or particular behavior as "corrupt" signals both political and moral disapproval and, in a functioning democracy, should stimulate inquiry, discussion, and, if the charge is well-founded, reform. This book argues, in a set of closely related chapters, that the political community and scholars alike have underestimated the extent of corruption in the United States and elsewhere and thus, awareness of wrong-doing is limited and discussion of necessary reform is stunted. In fact, there is a class of behaviors and institutions that are legal, but corrupt. They are accepted as legitimate by statute and practice, but they inflict very real social, economic, and political damage. This book explains why it is important to identify legally accepted corruption and provides a series of examples of corruption using this perspective.

Have you ever asked yourself what gives comfort to someone who demands and accepts a bribe, sells drugs or commits professional crimes for money? The majority of these people are not wealthy, and they accept small amounts of money every day from their victims. Cash, Corruption and Economic Development examines the causes of corruption and crime and highlights what brings comfort to all those who accept bribes and kickbacks, arguing that it is paper currency because it does not leave a signature of its movement from one entity to another. The author proposes that today, with the technology available, we can make the transition to a paper currency-free economy, which will help reduce corruption and crime and give a boost to economic development. The book analyses the causes of corruption and presents a replacement for the current model, to be implemented by a central bank and followed by banks operating within its jurisdiction. This book will be of interest to economists, students of economics and finance, and all those who have suffered as a result of corruption and professional crime and want these practices to end.

The US government has spent as much time covering up conspiracies as it has helping the American people. In Hidden History, you will see the amount of effort that our government has dedicated over the past fifty years to lying and covering up the truth to the world. Starting with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don Jeffries chronicles a wide variety of issues that have plagued our country's history. Whether it is the assassinations of MLK and RFK, Iran-Contra, the Oklahoma City bombing, TWA Flight 800, voting fraud, or 9/11, every major disaster or war that we've witnessed has somehow been distorted by those who are supposed to be protecting us. Jeffries also delves into extensive research on the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. - and what he finds will shock you. So whether you've only heard bits and pieces of these stories or you've read several books on the topics, Hidden History is the book that belongs in every conspiracy theorist's library, as the information included here has never been collected together in any other published work available. So sit down, strap in, and get ready to be shocked and awed by how much has been hidden by our government over the past fifty years. Updated, this version features a new introduction by political insider Roger Stone.

In this incisive and razor-sharp analysis of one of the most important issues facing us today, leading Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt draw on their combined expertise of over 40 years to examine how dictators come to power, and how they help to foster a poisonous culture of polarisation, fear and suspicion that persists even after their time in power is over.

Using contemporary examples including the Capitol riots and voter suppression in the US, as well as global examples from history including post-1945 Germany and Brazil and Chile during the '60s and '70s, the authors dissect conservative resistance to pluralism and modern threats to multiracial democracy (including the unwillingness of political parties to adapt to modern times, and a growing disregard for constitutional norms and free and fair elections) while imploring readers to stand up in its defence.

Focusing on the forthcoming American election as an essential case study, Saving Democracy offers us imperative tools for implementing urgent democratic reform, brilliantly illuminating how we can respond to the political battles ahead.

Corruption is a serious problem in many countries around the world, according to Transparency International's 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the World Bank's 2011 Control of Corruption governance indicator. However, some countries like New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Singapore and Hong Kong, have consistently performed better on these two indicators than other countries. While some research has been done in the form of case studies on combating corruption there has been no comparative study on how these five countries have succeeded in curbing corruption and the lessons to be learnt by other countries from their experiences. This book seeks to explain why these five countries have succeeded in combating corruption; and identify the lessons which other countries can learn from these successful experiences. Of interest to policy-makers, anti-corruption practitioners and civil society activists, the edited book will also be a useful resource for undergraduate and graduate courses on corruption and governance in universities as well as for training courses on anti-corruption strategies conducted by anti-corruption agencies and international organizations in various countries.