Reflections: My Life, My Country Seven Years after 9/11: A Series of Essays from Across America

Al Qaeda Won

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The favour given to the client must be a good that can be individually appropriated, such as a job in the post office, a Christmas turkey or a get-out-of-jail card for a relative, rather than a public good or policy that applies to a broad class of people Eisenstadt and Roniger Patronage is sometimes distinguished from clientelism by scale; patronage relationships are typically face-to-face ones between patrons and clients and exist in all regimes whether authoritarian or democratic, while clientelism involves larger-scale exchanges of favours between patrons and clients, often requiring a hierarchy of intermediaries see Scott Clientelism thus exists primarily in democratic countries where large numbers of voters need to be mobilised Piattoni , pp.

Clientelism is considered a bad thing and a deviation from good democratic practice in several respects. Such choices are supposed to reflect general views of what is good for the political community as a whole and not just what is good for one individual voter. Of course, voters in advanced democracies cast their ballots according to their self-interest; programmes targeted at one group of citizens are nonetheless justified in terms of broad concepts of justice or the general good.

Moreover, targeted programmes must apply impartially not to individuals but to broad classes of people. Targeted benefits to individuals are bad from the standpoint of social justice. In clientelistic systems, redistributive programmes that are supposed to help all poor people, for example, end up benefiting only those poor people who support a particular politician.

This weakens support for effective universal policies and preserves existing social inequalities. Nevertheless, there is reason to think that clientelism is actually an early form of democratic participation. In the United States and other countries, it was a way of mobilising poor voters and therefore encouraging them to participate in a democratic political system. It was suboptimal when compared to programmatic voting, yet provided a degree of accountability insofar as the politician still felt obligated to provide some benefits in return for political support.

In that respect, clientelism is quite different from a more destructive form of corruption in which a politician simply steals from the public treasury for the benefit of his or her family, without any obligation to provide a public service in return. The problem with clientelism is that it usually does not remain confined to a mechanism for getting out the vote, but morphs into misappropriation.

A final conceptual distinction that needs to be made is between corruption and low state capacity. Yet they are very different: Beyond low levels of corruption, good governance requires state capacity — that is, the human, material and organisational resources necessary for governments to carry out their mandates effectively and efficiently. It is linked to the skills and knowledge of public officials and whether they are given sufficient autonomy and authority to carry out their tasks. Corruption, of course, tends to undermine state capacity for example, by replacing qualified officials with political patronage appointees ; conversely, highly professional bureaucracies tend to be less subject to bribery and theft.

Low levels of corruption and high state capacity therefore tend to be correlated around the world. But getting to good governance is a much larger task than simply fighting corruption. The distinction between corruption and low state capacity allows us to better understand differences between the effects of corruption in countries around the world. On the other hand, China has a great deal of state capacity. In the government effectiveness category, it is in the 66th percentile, while Romania is in the 55th and Ghana is in the 44th World Bank This validates the common perception that the Chinese Government has a great deal of capacity to achieve the ends it sets, despite strong perceptions of pervasive corruption.

The first generation of anti-corruption measures taken in the mids by development finance institutions involved ambitious efforts to overhaul civil service systems along Weberian lines: These measures had very little effect; the problem lay in the fact that corrupt governments were expected to police themselves and to implement bureaucratic systems developed over long periods in rich countries with very different histories. This has taken a variety of forms: Since governments cannot be trusted to police themselves, civil society has often been enlisted in a watchdog role and mobilised to demand accountability.

Mechanisms like anti-corruption commissions and special prosecutors have, if given enough autonomy, also shown some success in countries such as Indonesia and Romania. These later efforts, however, have also had uneven success see, for example, Kolstad and Wiig ; Mauro In particular, transparency initiatives by themselves do not guarantee changes in government behaviour.

For example, in countries where clientelism is organised along ethnic lines, co-ethnics are frequently tolerant of leaders who steal. Elsewhere, citizens may be outraged by news of corruption, but then have no clear way of holding individual politicians or bureaucrats accountable. In other cases, successes in punishing individual politicians are not sufficient to shift the normative framework in which virtually everyone in the political class expects to profit from office.

Finally, anti-corruption campaigns may disrupt informal understandings and personal relationships that underpin investment and trade: There is a single truth underlying the indifferent success of existing transparency and accountability measures to control corruption. The sources of corruption are deeply political. Without a political strategy for overcoming this problem, any given solution will fail. Corruption in its various forms — patronage, clientelism, rent-seeking and outright theft — all benefit existing stakeholders in the political system, who are generally very powerful players.

Lecturing them about good government or setting up formal systems designed to work in modern political systems will not affect their incentives and therefore will have little transformative effect. That is why transparency initiatives on their own often fail. Citizens may be outraged by news about corruption, but nothing will happen without collective-action mechanisms to bring about change. Outside pressure in the form of loan conditionality, technical assistance or moral pressure is almost never sufficient to do the job.

Anti- corruption commissions and special prosecutors who have had success in jailing corrupt officials have done so only because they receive strong grassroots political backing from citizens. The political nature of corruption and the necessarily political nature of the reform process can be illustrated by the experience of the United States in the 19th century as I describe in Fukuyama , chapters 9— American politics in that period was not too different from politics in contemporary developing democratic countries such as India, Brazil or Indonesia.

Beginning in the s, American states began extending the franchise to include all white males, vastly expanding the voter base and presenting politicians with the challenge of mobilising relatively poor and poorly educated voters. The solution, which appeared particularly after the presidential election that brought Andrew Jackson to power, was the creation of a vast clientelistic system.

Elected politicians appointed their supporters to positions in the bureaucracy or rewarded them with individual payoffs like Christmas turkeys or bottles of bourbon. This system, known as the spoils or patronage system, characterised American government for the next century, from the highest federal offices down to local postmasters in every American town or city.

As with other clientelistic systems, patronage led to astonishing levels of corruption, particularly in cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago where machine politicians ruled for generations. This system began to change only in the s as a consequence of economic development. New technologies like the railroads were transforming the country from a primarily agrarian society into an urban industrial one.

There were increasing demands from business leaders and from a newly emerging civil society for a different, more modern form of government that would prioritise merit and knowledge over political connections. Following the assassination of the newly elected President James A. Garfield in by a would-be office seeker, Congress was embarrassed into passing the Pendleton Act.

It established a US Civil Service Commission for the first time and the principle that public officials should be chosen on the basis of merit. Even so, expanding the number of classified i. Individual municipal political machines such as Tammany Hall in New York were not dismantled completely until the middle of the 20th century. The American experience highlights a number of features of both corruption and the reform of corrupt systems.

First, the incentives that led to the creation of the clientelistic system were deeply political. Politicians got into office via their ability to distribute patronage; they had no incentive to vote in favour of something like the Pendleton Act that would take away those privileges. The only reason it passed was a tragic exogenous event — the Garfield assassination — which mobilised public opinion in favour of a more modern governmental system.

Second, reform of the system was similarly political.

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The Progressive Era saw the emergence of a vast reform coalition made up of business leaders, urban reformers, farmers and ordinary citizens who were fed up with the existing patronage system. It also required a clear reform agenda pointing towards modern government, formulated by intellectuals such as Frank Goodnow, Dorman Eaton and Woodrow Wilson.

Finally, reform was helped along by economic development. Industrialisation in the US produced new social groups such as business leaders who needed efficient government services, a broad and better-educated middle class who could mobilise for reform, and a grassroots organisation of civil society groups.

The American experience is suggestive of how progress in the fight against corruption may be waged in contemporary societies suffering from it. Reform is always a political matter that will require formation of a broad coalition of groups opposed to an existing system of corrupt politicians. Grassroots activism in favour of reform may emerge spontaneously, but such sentiments will not be translated into real change until it receives good leadership and organisation.

Reform also has a socio-economic basis: America points to another feature of anti-corruption efforts. Control of corruption was very much bound up with efforts to increase state capacity. The period that saw the emergence of an industrial economy was also characterised by huge increases in levels of education — particularly higher education, which produced an entirely new class of professionals who worked for both private businesses and the government.

One of the first government agencies to be modernised in the late 19th century was the US Department of Agriculture, which benefited from a generation of professional agronomists trained in the numerous land-grant universities that sprang up around the United States. The latter, in turn, were the product of the far-sighted Morrill Act of that sought to increase agricultural productivity among other things through higher education. It would not have been possible to reform the old patronage-based bureaucracy without access to the human capital represented by this entire generation of university- educated officials.

Every important reform effort undertaken to create modern state bureaucracies — in Germany, Britain, France, Japan and elsewhere — was accompanied by parallel efforts to modernise the higher education system in ways that would benefit public administration. Today development finance institutions focus on helping to provide universal primary and secondary education to poor countries and have largely given up on supporting elite education.

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The reasons for this are understandable, but do not correspond to the historical experience of state modernisation in countries that became rich in earlier eras. These general observations about historical efforts to build modern uncorrupt administrations suggest that the process will be an extended one, characterised by prolonged political struggle.

Fortunately, having a modern bureaucracy is not a sine qua non of economic development. No existing rich country had a squeaky-clean government in its early stages of economic growth — neither Britain, nor the United States in the 19th century, nor China today. Corruption and weak governance are obstacles to economic growth, but economic growth can happen also in poorly governed societies and will produce, over time, social conditions and resources that will make government reform more feasible.

But it is also a realistic assessment derived from the historical record. Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy.

Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence in Asia. World Development, 37 3 , pp. Clientelism, Interests and Democratic Representation: More recently, he is the author of Political Order and Political Decay: Corruption does not happen everywhere, it is concentrated in pockets: Among industries, natural resource extraction and construction have long been seen as exceptionally prone to corruption.

This is partly because projects in these sectors are idiosyncratic and difficult to scrutinise. Places where grand corruption is perceived to be flourishing are rare, but Afghanistan and Angola are examples of these extreme conditions. As to periods, Britain in the 18th century exemplified the behaviours that would now lead to a miserable ranking in corruption indices. More pertinently, there is good reason to think that, globally, there has been an upsurge in corruption in recent decades. Reversing this upsurge calls for concerted effort. Alongside these pockets of high corruption, other industries, other societies and other times are virtually corruption-free.

Denmark is currently seen as the least corrupt place in the world and many non-Western countries such as Botswana are also viewed as relatively untainted Transparency International In most societies, corruption is not normal: Corruption is concentrated in pockets because it depends upon common expectations of behaviour. Where corruption is the norm, getting rid of it poses a co-ordination problem: Because of this, pockets of corruption have proved to be highly persistent: Similarly, honesty is persistent. In the first TI survey conducted in , Denmark was rated second globally.

This persistence is not a matter of chance. Danes are born into an honest society and so inherit the expectation that they themselves will be trustworthy. Being trusted is a valuable asset: In consequence, individual Danes have a strong incentive not to squander this valuable asset through behaving opportunistically. Because people have rationally chosen to protect their reputation for honesty, the entire society has stayed honest.

But change is possible. Until well into the 19th century, the British public sector was very corrupt. Positions were bought and sold and contracts were awarded in return for bribes. Crises such as military humiliation in the Crimean War helped to shock governments into change. Opportunities for corruption were curtailed: A new purposive ethic was promoted and serving the nation became the pinnacle of social prestige and self-worth.

By the late 19th century, the British Civil Service had become honest and competent. This transformation was largely fortuitous rather than the result of a properly thought-through strategy. But its success reveals the key components of how change can be brought about.

Societies do not have to wait for military humiliation and a moral revival: In Britain, two key things — closing off the major opportunities for corruption and making working for the public good more prestigious and satisfying than abusing office for private gain — happened together. These two approaches are jointly critical in breaking cultures of corruption. Just as 19th-century Britain implemented both of them without international help, there is much that societies currently beset by corruption can do for themselves.

However, the globalisation of business and social networks has created an important role for international action. Countries such as Britain can contribute to encouraging both internal and international initiatives. There is enormous scope for international actions that close off opportunities for corruption. Equally, there is much that can be done to make behaviours that promote the public good more prestigious and satisfying than those that sacrifice the public interest for private gain. This is because corruption, like honesty, tends to persist. Corrupt behaviour is self-reinforcing, and breaking out of it is not easy.

A co-ordinated push for international action thus makes national initiatives more likely to succeed and more worthwhile to attempt. It can help those societies that are still struggling with the problems that Britain faced in the 19th century. Britain has already done much to make global corruption more difficult. The Government has led the way in dismantling this labyrinth of deceit: Britain has rapidly changed from being part of the problem to being a pioneer of the solution, but quite evidently following the money is subject to a weakest-link problem.

Corrupt money will hide wherever it can, so it is vital that all the major legal and financial centres close the loopholes. There is scope to extend transparency beyond bank deposits to other major assets such as property. There is also considerable scope for those governments that adopt effective measures for following the money to require all companies that wish to do business with them to comply with these standards, providing global reach for national efforts. A second contribution has been to increase transparency in key sectors.

In North America and Europe, what began as voluntary revenue transparency is now evolving into a legal requirement. Meanwhile the EITI is becoming the established international standard-setting entity for the sector, extending voluntarism beyond simple revenue reporting to matters such as contracts. There is now an equivalent voluntary initiative for the construction sector and it warrants similar co-ordinated propulsion.

A third contribution has been to increase accountability: Clamping down on bribery is a classic instance of the free-rider problem: The alternative to such co-operation is a race to the bottom that the businesses of no decently governed country can win. There is, equally, plenty of scope for contributing to the complementary approach of making public good more prestigious and satisfying than the private gains generated by abuse of office.

Take, for example, tax administration, which is fundamental to effective government. In many poor countries, tax administration is an epicentre of corruption. As a specific example, consider the administration of Value-Added Tax VAT , which is a means of revenue-raising encouraged globally by the International Monetary Fund IMF because it is less distorting than most other taxes.

Even before VAT, many tax inspectors were corrupt, using their power to tax firms as a means of extorting money for themselves: VAT has reduced revenue, because it expanded the options available to corrupt tax officials. It works by firms initially paying tax on their gross sales, but then getting a rebate on the inputs they have purchased, so that they end up only paying tax on the value they have added to those inputs. But in a country that introduces a VAT, a corrupt tax official can now sell a firm phoney tax receipts on inputs, in addition to the standard extortion racket.

As a result, the rebate system ends up paying out more than the sales tax component of VAT is paying in. Clearly at the core of this phenomenon are norms of behaviour among tax officials, such that seizing opportunities for private gain is seen as both more prestigious and more satisfying than contributing to the public good of generating tax revenue and the public services it can finance. How might Britain, and other countries in which VAT collection does not face such problems, help to change this perception?

Social prestige and personal satisfaction are largely set within peer groups: Hence a practical way of changing the behaviour of corrupt officials is to alter the group of people they regard as their peers. Currently, a corrupt tax official is likely to have two key networks in which they seek prestige: Their family will honour them for helping relatives who lack opportunities to earn a large income: Their fellow tax inspectors, subject to the same family pressures, may see corruption as reasonable. They may even regard honest behaviour as a threat to their own conduct and therefore disloyal.

A useful way of changing this state of affairs is to twin those tax administrations in which corruption is endemic with administrations in countries that are not corrupt. Twinning could involve regular secondments of staff in both directions and the potential for accreditation to international professional associations at various ranks. The purpose would not primarily be a transfer of technical skills, although that could clearly be a component, but rather a gradual transfer of attitudes and behaviours.

The new network exposes the official to the potential of a new identity as a member of a prestigious international peer group of modern tax officials, working to global, not local, standards. It exposes the official to a new narrative circulating in the network: Exposure to these new attitudes creates a tension between the behaviour that would generate prestige and self-worth in the old networks and the behaviour that would generate prestige and self-worth in the new network.

Creating this tension is not the end of the story, but it is an essential step. The other key step is to tackle the co-ordination problem: For example, many governments have closed corrupt tax departments within their ministries of finance and replaced them with independent revenue authorities, a change that has usually been reasonably successful. An analogous way for international twinning to overcome the co-ordination problem is for all the staff in an entire unit to be exposed to the international network at the same time. Each official in the unit would then realise that their colleagues were facing the same tension between old and new networks and hence the same choice.

There are already a few examples of institutional twinning. Also, until a decade ago, governors of the Bank of England used to host an annual meeting for governors of African central banks. But the scope for twinning is vast, relative to what is, as yet, happening both in governments and in the wider society. Around the world, governments have similar structures.

For example, virtually all governments in low-income countries have a ministry of transport, a ministry of health and a ministry of finance. OECD governments have been liaising with these ministries for half a century, but the entities that are linked to them are their aid agencies not their counterpart ministries. Direct links with counterpart ministries have the potential for a very different form of relationship based on peer-group networks, rather than on money with conditions.

An important example is the regulation of utilities such as electricity. Many governments of low-income countries are now establishing regulatory agencies, which is a vital step in attracting private finance for infrastructure. But the regulation of utilities faces intense pressures for corruption: In the OECD, regulatory agencies have been operating for two or three decades. The OECD has also built peer group networks that have evolved peer standards of independence, transparency and impartiality. New regulatory agencies would benefit from becoming part of this distinctive culture.

Such specialised inter-government peer groups are indeed the core activity of the OECD. But membership of the OECD is confined to the governments of high-income countries. This is designed to embed tax inspectors for OECD governments in the tax authorities of poor countries on secondment for several months: An obvious extension would be to make this a two-way exchange of staff.

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More seriously, while the OECD initiative is excellent it is a drop in the ocean. The restricted membership of the OECD limits its scope to forge global links and there is no other international institution with the remit to build peer- group links across government departments between rich countries and poor ones. Perhaps this role should become a core function of national aid agencies such as DFID, but it would benefit from a co-ordinated kick-start by several heads of government.

Twinning has the potential to be extended well beyond government: Again, historically such links have largely been confined to development non-governmental organisations NGOs such as Oxfam, which channel donations to needs. But an important part of tackling corruption is resetting the cultures of professions, including accountancy, law, medicine and teaching. For example, in many poor countries, it is socially acceptable for teachers not to show up for lessons. Twinning involving things like teacher exchanges between schools could help to shift these dysfunctional values.

The global explosion of social media has made this far more feasible. The two approaches of closing off opportunities for corruption and reducing the prestige and satisfaction generated by corrupt behaviour reinforce each other. As the difficulties and risks of corrupt behaviour rise, fewer people will behave corruptly. This directly reduces the esteem from being corrupt because it is no longer so normal.

Similarly, as more people start to get their esteem from being honest, those who remain corrupt are easier to spot and so find themselves running bigger risks. National actions against corruption complement international actions. One major way of squeezing out corruption is to remove obvious sources of rent-seeking such as rationed access to foreign exchange and the award of government contracts through secret negotiation rather than open bidding.

Competition within rule-based markets is an important part of the system of checks and balances that constrain public officials from the abuse of office. Another is to prosecute some prominent senior officials. For example, in Ghana, 20 judges were sacked in late for accepting bribes based on video evidence gathered by an investigative journalist BBC News Being based on independent evidence, such sackings cannot be misinterpreted as government attempts to crush political opposition.

Further, as high-profile events, they generate common knowledge among officials that all other officials are reflecting on whether they should change their behaviour. Not all corruption is directly financial. Electoral corruption is highly damaging. New research finds that, under normal conditions, governments that deliver good economic performance enhance their prospects of retaining office, but that the discipline of accountability breaks down when elections are not free and fair Collier and Hoeffler Twinning national electoral commissions with their international peers, along with twinning local and international election monitors, can help to raise standards of electoral conduct.

An international initiative against corruption provides an opportunity for national actions and international actions to cohere. As people recognise that the calculus of risks and rewards and the sources of prestige and satisfaction are changing both for themselves and their colleagues, previously entrenched patterns of behaviour could become unstable. Mass shifts in cultures of corruption do happen and it is possible to make them happen. His latest book is Exodus: Someone who is corrupt is described as being bobolu and people have deep disdain for such a person. In most of Africa though, there are few similar words of such powerful home-grown cultural resonance.

The idea of stealing communal goods was literally taboo. Generosity of heart, even to strangers, but especially to relatives no matter how distant , is a quality much admired by Africans generally. And in 18 of the 28 countries, the feeling was that their governments were doing badly in the fight against corruption. The report said that, despite these disappointing findings, the bright spots across the continent were in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Lesotho and Senegal. Citizens in these countries were some of the most positive in the region when discussing corruption Transparency International and Afrobarometer In environments where corruption is systemic but lacks cultural resonance, creating a climate where social sanction can be applied against corrupt practices has been challenging.

The task therefore is two-fold: The war against graft political corruption has reached the point where the shame and social sanctions directed against this kind of theft and thief need to be given greater prominence in the arsenal used to fight corruption. This applies especially in developing countries where its consequences can be — and often are — deadly. As such, the whole approach to corruption needs to be re-examined: Integral to this are the principles of legal authority and equality before the law. The equality component is essential: The following complementary but separate factors in a society are critical: Each derives its legitimacy from history and the traditional ways in which meaning is made.

By their very nature, they are far more negotiable — existing as they do in a constant state of flux in a dynamic world. Our success depends on how effectively we bring and use them together in the fight against corruption. We do this cognisant of the fact that grand corruption, when compared to the drug trade, human trafficking, terrorism finance and other global evils, is the most easily rationalisable major felonious activity on the planet.

During the years to , corruption was at the centre of the global development agenda. In , Transparency International was founded. In the mid-to-late s, corruption was adopted as a key development issue by the multilateral and bilateral development institutions.

The following decade saw the rise of the BRIC nations2 and rapid economic growth across much of the developing world, as well as globalisation and its associated technologies assisting the expansion of trade and commerce. At the same time, the struggle against Islamic extremism captured the attention of policy makers in the international community. Alongside it, unfortunately, has also come a rapid growth in the scale and complexity of corruption. So much so, that anti-corruption work needs to be returned urgently to the heart of the global development agenda.

It needs to be part of the DNA of modern nation-states, multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations NGOs and even religious organisations and how they interact on the global stage. This urgency comes from the fact that graft has served to hollow out key governance institutions in some countries. This includes the defence and security sector and areas of social policy such as health and education, with dire consequences for the public services they are supposed to offer the poor, in particular.

The crippling impact of corruption on the delivery of these essential services has deepened economic inequalities, undermining faith in political processes, parties and politicians. In turn, this increases political volatility as politicians retreat to identity and personality politics with its complex web of non-negotiable irrationalities.

It also feeds fundamentalism of all kinds — for example, ethnic, religious and sectarian. This also does serious damage to the independence, legitimacy and integrity of the service sector — in particular, banks, law firms and auditing firms — and deepens the challenges corruption poses. The growth of the latter has been buoyed by the dramatic expansion and sophistication of the internet and an increasing variety of communication platforms.

Although it can involve an individual or group of individuals, this sector forms itself into sophisticated entities. As I pointed out previously, businesses find corruption the easiest felonious activity to rationalise, especially in cross-cultural contexts. For them, relationships are tradable products that can be leveraged for a profit and not a social currency that helps make trade and commerce flow more smoothly within the law.

So how do we fight these piratical shadows? Corruption is defined as the abuse of vested authority for private gain. Leading global advocacy organisations such as ONE have even made efforts to quantify the cost of graft in lives McNair et al. As the recent FIFA scandal has demonstrated, unconstrained corruption also threatens valued cultural institutions and traditions that we all hold dear. This means we are at a critical juncture. It calls for a renewed global partnership against corruption to match, and even exceed, the concentrated and successful advocacy that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The new push needs to identify, disrupt and delegitimise the global networks of corruption in money laundering; terrorism finance; drug, people and environmental trafficking; and other illicit activities. This requires new global partnerships that target the information-era entities and domiciles that these networks rely on. They may be offshore tax havens or low-compliance jurisdictions where the ever-expanding raft of international regulations aimed at dealing with graft and illicit flows have limited currency. To be fully effective, however, this reinvigoration of the rule of law must go hand in hand with action to create a cultural climate in which the corrupt — the thieves — are shamed for what they do.

Indeed, effecting change in the culture and traditions — which inform what is acceptable behaviour — is perhaps even more important in societies where legal institutions based on the Western model are nascent, or where their existence is being energetically contested, as it is in important parts of the developing world. The release by WikiLeaks of US diplomatic cables in was a controversial episode of unofficial transparency and a powerful interrupter to the global status quo regarding corruption in relations between nation-states.

It revealed the corrupt practices that ruling elites are capable of to the growing youth populations of regions such as the Middle East. The reverberations of this are still being felt. Across Latin America and in the developed world, revelations of inappropriate, corrupt and unethical behaviour by leaders — in both the private and corporate sectors — have created a level of criticism from the public that is unprecedented in some countries.

Presidents have been forced to step down and others turned into lame ducks while still in office by dramatic mass expressions of discontent boosted by social media. In this sense the change has already begun — untidily, noisily, chaotically and even bloodily — in many places. The outcome is uncertain. But, in the long term, it will be dramatically different from the status quo. In addition to institutions such as an International Anti- Corruption Court as a further step towards increasing transparency, strengthening enforcement and securing restitution, the tools of visa revocations, personalised financial sanctions and more harmonised extradition mechanisms could actually be cheaper and more effective in tackling corruption than prosecutions — which are always tortuous.

However, for these measures to enjoy legitimacy around the world, they must be applied, and be seen to apply, with equal force across the different regions of both the developed and developing world. To conclude, a successful international anti-corruption campaign requires co-operation on a global scale and specific legal measures that help transform attitudes towards corruption and the ability to prosecute the corrupt.

Although it may take longer, embedding a culture of social sanction and censure for anyone found guilty of engaging in, facilitating or condoning corrupt activity, even to the extent that those holding office lose public trust, would support these measures. They need to be seen as bobolu. They need to feel the social stigma when they attend family gatherings, visit the golf club or step into the supermarket — as much to set an example to others as to punish the individual, impressing on the whole community that corruption will not be tolerated.

John has been involved in anti-corruption research, advisory work and activism in Kenya, Africa and the wider international community for 19 years. This includes work in civil society, media, government and the private sector. Risk Advisory Group Report: Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: The Trillion Dollar Scandal Study. The Risk Advisory Group. The Compliance Horizon Survey. Corruption Perceptions Index — Lesotho. Transparency International and Afrobarometer. Africa Survey — Global Corruption Barometer. United Nations Convention against Corruption: Signature and Ratification Status as of 1 December The early spring of saw thousands of angry people on the streets of Chisinau, capital of the tiny Republic of Moldova.

We believe that the citizens of Moldova were victims of a transnational web of corruption, benefiting politicians and criminals who used complex multi-layered company structures to conceal both their identities and their activities. Regrettably, this story is not unique. The power of these crime groups stems primarily from their ability to operate with ease across national frontiers.

They complete a detailed risk assessment at the country level and then choose the least vulnerable approach to conduct their illicit activities, whether in narcotics, refugee trafficking or the massive money laundering exercises that follow such crimes. The problem for national law enforcement is that, by definition, it cannot follow this type of crime easily or quickly across borders. Data exchanges between states and law enforcement agencies take time. Modern crime schemes are designed to have very short lives to avoid detection, lasting sometimes just months before the associated companies and bank accounts are wound up and replaced by new ones.

Yet alongside the advantages available for criminals of operating on this global scale, making it inherently harder to track them down, there are also disadvantages that the clever journalist or law enforcement official can exploit to expose them. So how do we do this? How do we stop criminal gangs and the corrupt politicians they rely on — conducting business as usual?

Firstly, I will argue, through data: Secondly, by journalists using advanced investigative techniques, including the emerging discipline of data journalism, to identify the patterns and practices inherent in corrupt activity. Opaque systems allow them to thrive. And some of them go to great lengths to disguise their wrongdoing, using financial and company structures that span the world. Such criminal schemes are designed by creative and intelligent, if misguided, people.

Some of them could have been the next Steve Jobs, but found crime more appealing. For years, from the early s, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and many other Eastern European mobsters and politicians were using Cyprus as a place to hide their activities behind labyrinthine corporate structures. It reached the point where Cyprus, with a population of little more than one million, became one of the main investors in Eastern and Central Europe.

Not all of these investors were criminal enterprises as many used Cyprus for tax optimisation purposes. But there is hardly a country in the region — from the former Yugoslavia to Russia and beyond — where Cyprus-based companies were not involved in huge, rigged privatisation scandals. In , when Cyprus joined the European Union EU and started opening databases, including a registry of locally based companies, things began to change.

Investigative reporters began combing through millions of records and, in many instances, came across the names of beneficial owners the real owners of the company — who thought they were sheltered from public scrutiny. Politicians and criminals were caught off guard and exposed in press articles that led to arrests and resignations. Their past misdemeanours made future involvement in business problematic. However, they started fighting back almost immediately, substituting their names in company documents with those of professional proxies — usually Cypriot lawyers who would lend their name to just about anyone who wanted to conceal their identity.

In addition to this, the Cyprus registry is relatively expensive to use and searchable only by company name. As a result, Cyprus still offers only partial transparency. Yet even in countries with a stronger record, you can hit barriers. And in the past few years, OCCRP investigations have revealed the involvement of an Auckland-based company that was run by a nominee in obscuring the ownership of companies across Eastern Europe. Secretive media ownership is a huge problem across the region where, in many instances, the general public has no idea who is delivering the news.

Once OCCRP exposed this non-transparent structure, its ownership was just moved to British companies that were again meant to obscure the identity of the real owners of the television station Media Ownership Project It matters because well-structured and accessible databases can be goldmines for investigators and members of the public. This was the catalyst for investigative articles that exposed corrupt dictators, criminals and their close associates all over the world.

This simple technical adjustment opened their activities up to public scrutiny, costing them untold millions of dollars. The same principle applies to other official databases. For example, court records, government spending and tenders databases vary greatly in their organisation, accessibility and quality of data. In many jurisdictions, it takes investigators a lot of navigating, mining and shopping for data to find the evidence they are looking for.

The opening up of company information and databases has to be accompanied by effective policies that ensure their accessibility, integrity, security and usefulness. Civic hacker collectives, journalists and civil society groups should be consulted to help determine the most useful access to data that also mitigates any privacy concerns. Governments requiring offshore companies operating in a country to identify their true beneficial ownership would also greatly reduce the space in which criminals can work and increase the costs they incur.

Law enforcement must also jump on board the open data train and take advantage of advances in technology in order to keep pace with the criminals. Just like journalists, police officers and intelligence analysts need to master cross-border, multi-language, open-source intelligence to fight sophisticated serious crime. While it is true that data obtained in informal ways cannot always be used to build strong court cases, it can greatly shorten the time required for the investigative process.

Obtaining documents sequentially through official channels from other countries can take months or even years. Say, for example, that the police in the UK need information on a company based in Russia. They have to file requests and wait, sometimes for a year, only to find out that the Russian company is owned by a Cyprus limited firm.

It might take another year to identify the next owner in a nested structure. Finally, the trail might end with bearer shares: Compare this with the adaptability of organised crime, which — albeit operating under no formal constraint — broke free from the nation-state mindset long ago. In the international space governed by weak international protocols and bilateral agreements, organised crime at present has no natural enemy.

While criminals recognise no borders and are not bound by strict local rules, national and legal boundaries, a lack of resources continues to hamper law enforcement. Geopolitics can also deter cross-border collaborative initiatives between nation-states, which may find themselves at odds with their neighbours or dealing with governments that are themselves riddled with corruption.

There are, to be sure, examples of criminal networks being disbanded in a number of countries as a result of co- operation between law enforcement agencies. This did not necessarily prevent the mobsters from re-forming elsewhere outside those jurisdictions. Nevertheless, increased access to open data could help to boost cross-border co-operation and journalists can play an increasingly important role in it. Investigative reporting is — and can be even more — the natural enemy of criminal networks and, when practised collaboratively, it acts as an effective watchdog. It can change the status quo in innovative ways that are not immediately obvious.

Owing to limited human resources and a lack of skills, interest or even competence, this expectation is not always realised. However, regardless of law enforcement action or inaction, public exposure can adversely affect, and even stop, criminal businesses operating in other jurisdictions. Such exposure can also influence long-term changes in public attitudes, which can lead, in turn, to protests against, and even election defeats for, discredited parties or politicians.

With the stakes so high, it is essential that the journalism itself is rigorous, credible and transparent. Governments, banks and financial institutions in general rely on open source information when deciding whether to give loans, enter business deals or accept money transactions. Effective data journalism can also help expose financial irregularity or illegality and prevent crime figures or oligarchs securing loans, opening accounts or making other transactions.

Using advanced investigative techniques, journalism can degrade international organised crime and corrupt networks even before they are firmly established within a jurisdiction. Corrupt politicians, officials and criminals view the proceeds of their illicit schemes as commodities to be repeatedly imported and exported and are always looking for new territories in which to generate profit. When journalists work collaboratively across frontiers, sharing data, this practice can be identified and compromised.

It takes a network to monitor a network. However, such is the scale of the problem and the ubiquity of organised crime that these efforts can seem to be only scratching the surface. What journalists can do is share with colleagues in other countries details of the patterns of crime they have already detected in their own. This would enable wider cross-border investigations to determine whether the same criminal groups are setting up shop in other jurisdictions.

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For example, a criminal group sets up Limited Liability Partnerships LLPs that are all owned by a set of companies with their headquarters on a particular street in Belize City, Belize. In future, with the proper resources, this kind of pattern recognition could be facilitated and automated through the development of specific algorithms. Crime groups will inevitably react by altering their activities to avoid detection.

But, crucially, this will hamper their operations and cost them more in money and time. Automated searches of ever-larger, global, transparent datasets can feed real-time alerts to journalists all over the world. To conclude, a key component to fighting future crime is increased cross-border co-operation between journalists and programmers, who need to employ and create new advanced investigative techniques on top of massive amounts of data.

At the same time, activists and governments need to push for more transparency, quality and common standards in open data. He is also a board member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network http: Spring again in the Republic of Moldova — mass protest against corruption.

A Guide for Judges. Panama Registry of Companies. Taylor Network Back in Business. Not three months back, in the midst of Friday prayers, Boko Haram struck the Grand Mosque in the old fortress-like centre of town. The dead and the bloodied lay strewn in their hundreds across the public square. I imagine the girl. She may be 14 or She returns home from school each day with her friends, the white veils of their school uniforms fluttering like matched plumage. I picture the glistening eyes of some overfed judge as he reaches for her. Abruptly another image comes to mind: Already disillusioned, he is pushed right over the edge.

He would kill that judge if he could. And Boko Haram, all around this town, would like nothing more than to help him do it. I could suddenly understand how it happens. I could see how the corruption perpetrated by officials of the then Nigerian administration — like that of many governments around the world — was itself helping to generate the terrorist threat.

The problem, I realised, is far more severe than white elephants or poor service delivery. It is these connections — between government corruption and terrorism or other violence — that this essay explores. Corruption is one of those consensual topics. International charities and multilateral organisations have worked hard to combat it, racking up impressive achievements in recent years. Anti- bribery laws, once unheard of, have spread well beyond their initial US—UK beachhead. Major arrests and asset seizures are increasingly common, as are citizen-led anti-corruption protests. Such protests have resulted in the resignation of senior officials or their ousting through the ballot box.

And yet, when push comes to shove in bilateral relations, Western governments, businesses and charities are still most likely to prioritise other imperatives ahead of corruption. If an international aid agency or philanthropic organisation has set its sights on delivering health programming to rural villages, its government may be reticent to act against corruption in the host country for fear the precious permissions to operate will be cancelled.

Corruption helps facilitate economic activity and growth, some maintain. Who are we to impose our norms? Upon closer inspection, it thus appears that corruption is not so consensual after all.

A remarkable number of Westerners actually argue in favour of it. Of all the competing priorities, the one that most swiftly trumps anti-corruption is security. Co-operating with this or that corrupt leader is seen as critical, because he is our partner in the war against terrorism.

Suicide attack

His is the only military worth its salt in the region, troops that actually go on the attack against militants. He provides us with intelligence or bases or overflight rights. And so the kleptocratic practices of his network of cronies are overlooked. The purported trade-off between security and corruption is a false dichotomy. Take southern Afghanistan, the former Taliban heartland, where I lived for nearly a decade. Because it had survived, the center became a point of pride for U. This blaze of originality found fulfillment through two much duller men: He had traveled widely and conceived of the rejection of modernity as a calamity of the sky.

Planes, like skyscrapers, were miraculous, inhuman, unnatural, and an affront to tradition itself and to the traditions of any people or creed—both tool of and symbol for the radical decentering of modern life. Sometime in the middle of , Mohammed met with bin Laden at Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan, and brought a portfolio of schemes, most of which involved a combination of planes and U. For two years, Mohammed and bin Laden worked through the conspiracy in all its grand detail. These negotiations were similar in scope to those between a director and a producer: The audiences needed a supervillain, an evil genius.

A face had to be on the urinal cakes. His face suited the blankness of the act, though. His roommates in Hamburg recalled that he found the ordinary conversation of crowds unbearable: For his meals, he would take whole boiled potatoes, skin them, smash the potatoes into a mound, and then for a week consume the cold potatoes, leaving the fork in the mound when he put the mess back in the refrigerator.

The only trait that anyone recalled about Atta was that he was organized and punctual. Yet he left the Comfort Inn in Portland at 5: He nearly missed the appointment for his own death. Those closest to the event itself were, in a sense, those most removed from its meaning—distance being one of the defining attributes of informational guerrilla war.

Bin Laden, in the mountains of Afghanistan, wanted to watch the scenario unfolding live. The heroism of the first responders was that they went into the catastrophe with all that they did not understand. The people inside, escaping, look annoyed. For everyone else, the world had changed. For them, it was still an ordinary day full of ordinary bullshit, such as being stuck in elevators.

Stephen Tompsett, a computer scientist attending the Risk Waters conference at the Windows on the World restaurant, emailed his wife, Dorry, from his Blackberry: Greg Trevor, in the public relations office on the 68th floor, saw fire and glass tumbling outside the window. When his phone rang, he picked it up. This was no affiliate. That day, cable news achieved its fulfillment as a format, mimicking traumatic memory. The clip rolled over and over. A plane flying into a tower. The clip rolled over and over, with new clips added, fantasies spiraling from fantasies, commentaries piling up, voices crashing into voices.

Television lurched into collective mind, creating the event by playing and replaying, working and reworking, the moving image. The manager of a Duane Reade drugstore just north of the World Trade Center said on the day of the attack: Within an hour of the first initial hit, we sold 60 to cameras. A terrorist act without spectators is meaningless. Its triumph is in its recognition, and, even more, the size of its triumph is the size of its recognition.

Recognition requires a slight distance. The view was worth more than any public statement: Then, from the top of the tower, in imperfect focus because of the range, the grainy image of a man tumbling through the air, leaping into death, discontinuous, twisted, senseless, angelic, tormented. No one could fathom him. The towers fell, and a great white spume poured through the city, swallowing the faces, covering all the cameras in an omnivorous white fade. The screens went blank. A paratrooper in the U.

The first anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks in history was a normal working day for the troops. Diathetical warfare is a struggle for meaning. The terrorists manufactured, as they intended, a spectacle of interrelated images. These were created not just by traditional media but also by individuals sharing media over the internet. Most press organizations had just opened digital venues. Its passengers were the first Americans to grasp that terrorism itself had changed, that the strategy of simply waiting quietly for others to negotiate was no longer available.

Bush, informed of the catastrophe, continued to read The Pet Goat like a boy waiting to be told what to do. Then he turned bin Laden into an outlaw from the movies: What could be better for him than to be as beautiful and free as an Old West outlaw wanted dead or alive? Did he not dream of being an untamable thing? Diathetical warfare uses the collective storytelling system against its creators.

The goals of diathetics remain the goals of guerrilla warfare. The first aim is to provoke a massive overreaction. The larger goal is to reorient the behavior of the enemy, to alter the mindset to a state of despair and counterproductive reaction. The massive overreaction was inevitable given the brute size and scope of the media and the collective unfamiliarity with its effects. Simpson trial could be just another case. Distortion is at the heart of the disaster. In , heart disease killed , Americans, accidents killed ,, and influenza killed 62, Sugar is vastly more dangerous to public safety than terrorism.

That size of meaning is the core victory of the diathetic effect. A victory for the United States would have been for nothing to have changed.

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More importantly, they changed the way America thought of itself and the way the world thought of America. They made powerful people believe that the war against Islamist terrorism, a technologically incompetent fringe hiding in caves in the most remote locations in the world, presented a threat comparable to the fascist war machines of World War II. They convinced America that the only way to protect itself from this threat was to suspend civil liberties.

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Seventeen years later, America is stumbling back from the Middle East, believed by its own people and by the rest of the world to be a defeated occupier. The Taliban is still a force in Afghanistan.

The consequences of these changes in mindset were vast, elaborating themselves in ways that would have been inconceivable to bin Laden or to anyone else. At the core of the failure was American exceptionalism, the assumption, which in my experience no American escapes entirely, that what happens in the United States matters more than what happens elsewhere. American exceptionalism is a form of political myopia, making perspective nearly impossible, even among the most educated. The legacy of World War II was also decisive. The Bush administration dreamed of a war of liberation, a war against fascism, a war to build liberal democracy, just the kind of war their fathers had waged.

The neoconservative fantasies were plugged into images borrowed from documentaries of Europe from their childhoods. From that fantasy, they were able to conjure whatever arguments were needed, even though the struggle against al Qaeda was not even against a state, never mind a system of government. Notice that some of these narratives are shallow and ignorant and some of them are real and substantial. Some belong to the educated elite. Some are lowest common denominators.

None of those distinctions matter—diathetical warfare preys on the whole of a collective mythology, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. It looks like a Holocaust memorial, which is exactly what Ramzi Yousef intended. The face of Mohammad Atta is nowhere; therefore it is everywhere. The dreams of the terrorists are fulfilled: Their victims have given them entry into history. To this day, the border guards at John F. Nothing could define U. In Iraq, key chains appeared with pictures of the Twin Towers crumbling soon after.

A friend of mine returned from Iraq with a poster of bin Laden riding a unicorn with a Kalashnikov rifle in each hand. That poster, not the position U. The vulnerability lies within the greatest glory of American life, its explosive variety of expression, its sanctity for the freedom of the press, its movies and debates and sermons and songs and advertising, its bottomless need for drama, its constant invention and reinvention of itself.

The conditions that made that vulnerability possible have only intensified over the past 17 years. The fracturing of media, the expansion of the scope of information, the role of screens in our lives—these have all increased exponentially. The rise of social media and the smartphone means that the diathetical battlefield is more dominant than ever. The biggest vulnerability the United States faces in the diathetical struggle is that it refuses to recognize its vulnerability.

The effects of social media have become apparent, but the U.

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