 Thank you all for coming. I think it's time to get started. We still have some people working their way in, but we want to stay as close to the time as possible, and we have a great deal to do this morning. My name is George Lopez, and I serve as the vice president for the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peace Building here at the United States Institute of Peace. As many of you know, USIP is the congressionally funded part of the US government that's nonpartisan and quasi-independent and quasi-government at the same time, in which we work very hard, often with partners on the ground in conflict zones, to try to prevent, mitigate, and resolve conflict. We do that often by trying to bring resources in training, education, and research to parties on the ground and meet their needs in ways that they help define. We also try to be in conversations like this with lots of folks from various agencies in town and interested folks worldwide who will tune in on webcast to try to deal with very, very important topics that are threats to peace and security that are both very upfront in terms of news of the day, but also what you're cutting edge in places where people haven't thought a great deal. That's what makes this event this morning so exciting for many of us to be able to welcome Sarah Chase of the Carnegie Endowment for a kind of premier seminar for her report, Corruption, the Unrecognized Threat to International Security. And I think those of you who came in saw copies of the report out there. We made copies available with Sarah's help online. It's a seminal document, and we look forward to her presentation and our commentators this morning. Let me introduce our panel to you, and I'll do that one introduction in TOTO, and then permit them to go and make their comments and later we'll turn it over to you because you have some, I'm sure, people with so much experience and interesting perspectives in the room that that'll be part of the conversation that we seek. Our primary presenter, of course, is Sarah Chase, is a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law program and the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment. Formerly, as many of you know, she was a special advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff with an expertise in South Asia policy, kleptocracy and anti-corruption and civil military relations. She's been working on the correlates of acute public corruption and the rise of military extremism, and those dynamics are reflected, of course, in this report. Many of you know that she was a reporter for National Public Radio covering the fall of the Taliban and then left journalism to remain in Kandahar for the better part of a decade in order to contribute to the reconstruction of the country, living there beginning in December 2001. She ran both a non-governmental organization and then launched her own manufacturing cooperative to produce skincare products for export from legal local agriculture. The goals, of course, in her emulation, Gandhi once said, be the change you want to see in the world. Well, that was Sarah as she attempted to revive the region's historic role in exporting fruit and its derivatives to promote sustainable development and to expand alternatives to what clearly was an opium-based economy. In 2009, she was tapped to serve as special advisor to General David McKernan and Stanley McChrystal, commanders of the International Security Assistance Force. She contributed her unique understanding of the Afghan South to their decision-making processes. And in 2010, became special advisor to Chairman and Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. She's contributed a great deal to our cultural policy learning on Afghanistan and corruption, and we're delighted to have her willing to talk in detail about her report with us today. Our two respondents are good colleagues and friends here at USIP. The first is Fiona Mengen, a senior program officer in the US Institute of Peace, Governance, Law, and Society Center, and our Rule of Law Center. So we are dominated by rule of law people here in our strong presenters. Fiona's work focuses on prison reform, organized crime, justice, and security issues with some primary emphasis of late in Libya. You have a great report by her on illicit trafficking in Libya's transition out for your taking and really represents an interesting great convergence between Sarah's work and her own. Fiona previously worked at Stimson Center with her research involving multi-country studies, the impact of police justice and corrections reform, within a wider system of UN peace operations. Many people don't understand that peacekeeping is not only just about putting blue helmets on the ground, but also about the important dynamic of security form within the police and prison sector. And she's worked a great deal on that. She worked for the International Policy Division at the Irish Department of Justice for independent diplomat in New York and lawyers without borders in Liberia. Fiona has served as an international election observer for the Carter Center in South Suzanne and for Progresio in Somaliland. Originally from Ireland, she now resides here in DC and holds a master's degree from Columbia University, a master's degree in conflict, security, and development from King's College in London, and a law degree from University College Dublin in Ireland. Ambassador Johnny Carson is also with us and will provide commentary and comes to USIP as a special advisor to the president here after a distinguished 37-year career in the Foreign Service, which included ambassadorships to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda, and principal deputy assistant for the Bureau of African Affairs. He was sworn in as assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of African Affairs in May 2009 and also worked as an intelligence for Africa office at the National Intelligence Council and served as senior vice president of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. To say that Johnny had a career regarding issues about Africa is an understatement. In fact, he began it right after college becoming a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania in the mid-1960s. And I've had the privilege of hearing him talk about that with young graduate students and the importance of that as a formative experience for young people and how he's pushed it so well for them. Ambassador Carson is recipient of several special awards from the Department of State and a Meritorious Service Award from Secretary of State Madeline Albright. The Centers for Disease Control presented Ambassador Carson with its highest award, the Champion of Prevention Award, for his leadership in directing US government HIV AIDS prevention efforts in Kenya. We're delighted to have all three of these presenters. We'll begin with Sarah and followed by commentaries by Fiona and Ambassador Johnny Carson. Welcome to them and welcome to all of you for being part of this this morning. Sarah. And a big thanks to George and to USIP for gathering this group. And to all of you for coming, Washington is an unbelievably time deficit. It's a place of time deficit. And so all of us really appreciate you taking some time to think through some of these issues. That's the first thing I want to say is thank you. The second thing I want to say is that this paper isn't just mine. It evolved out of a really interesting workshop that was held last December among a very remarkable cross-section of, I would say, stakeholders in this issue, including the advocacy community, transparency, international global witness, global financial integrity, that kind of crowd. A lot of US government people, including military as well as civilian, and business actors. And so in a way, I'm just a spokesperson for this group. We then sort of iterated this document out of that effort. So it was quite an intensive and careful process. So I just want everyone to know that I'm not the only person representing it, or it doesn't just represent me. So I want to just pull out a couple of the main notions that it's trying to put on the table. First of all, it's about framing this problem of corruption a little bit differently than it's normally framed. So viewed as an economic concern, quite a bit of progress has been made in the last couple of decades on the issue of corruption, things like in the United States, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the expansion of anti-bribery legislation to a large part of the world, that sort of thing, when it's seen as an economic concern. When it's viewed as a values issue, which it often is, unfortunately, it's sometimes overshadowed by what seem to be more urgent values issues, like detentions, torture, religious freedoms, or gender preference in the formulation of policy. And so what this paper really focuses on is that what's been missing is the role of severe corruption in driving many of the security crises that the world's been facing today, or the world is facing today. So that's what this map is about. It's a rough and ready that our team at Carnegie has put together of really obvious sort of clear cut security crises in the last five or six years that have been driven or fueled by corruption. And if you can see it, the different colors represent different types of security event. And they include extremist insurgencies. And we can talk a little bit further, if you want to, later on, about why we think that there's a causal relationship between corruption and militant puritanical religion, that it's not just a correlation. You have revolutions ranging from Kyrgyzstan in 2010 to Ukraine this year, passing through the Arab Spring, driven by exasperation and indignation at corruption. And revolution, sudden regime change, it's not a controllable phenomenon. So you get this horrific spin-offs that you see in Syria today, that you see in Ukraine, where it has turned into a geopolitical issue, that you see in Libya, where what started out as a pretty muscular revolution has taken on other forms. Even Iraq, Maliki is best known for rigid sectarianism, but an analysis of how he has wired the key institutions in the government that he runs and how he is capturing the public revenue streams for what's probably a subset of the Shi'i population. Again, I don't know Iraq myself in detail, but my suspicion is that he is not working on behalf of the entire Shi'i population, that there is a network in there that is being particularly, that has been benefiting from his rule. You get symbiotic relationship, almost fusions between governments and what one participant in our workshop last year called transnational criminal superpowers. And you see that a lot in Latin America. You see it in the Balkans. And you see it in some of the Sahel. And more that we can talk about. But a really important element of all of this is that we're not talking about phenomena that exist in a vacuum in these countries. Western governments and institutions, wittingly and unwittingly, are functioning as enablers for this phenomenon and are perceived as such by a lot of the populations of these countries. So we are held accountable by a lot of the people, of the victims of this phenomenon, for either enabling, supporting, or at best turning a blind eye on the depredations of these governments. So what is it that we're talking about precisely? That's sort of the next question. And as you can imagine, with a group of 30 people who are interested in this topic, we got into a lot of semantic arguments during this workshop. And I tried pretty hard to kind of like, let's not go down the rabbit hole of, is this kleptocracy? What's the precise definition of kleptocracy? So I'd like to stay away from that a little bit. But say that in general, you can think of more structured and vertically integrated and less structured and more competitive. And so more structured might fall into the sort of kleptocracy bucket and less structured. You could describe differently. I think it's fair to say that different types of security threats emanate from these two different categories. And what I'd like to do here is just show you a couple of slides. I'm going to go back to the top. This is a very schematic, just to give you a sense of what I'm talking about when I say structured. This is a very schematic. And I actually have to do a shout out to Chris Colenda, who's sitting right there, who dragged me over at ISAP headquarters in Kabul and said, Sarah, let's have a conversation about corruption, which he knew I was obsessed about. And he showed me these two slides. And I've evolved them a little bit since that initial whiteboard sketch. But I really do have to doff my hat to Chris here. This is a very schematic diagram of a happy government. And this can represent patronage systems, as well as the kind of government structure that we're used to. And schematically, we're looking at the peeps down at the bottom get taxed. The tax goes up to the center or the top and then is redistributed downwards largely in the form either of patronage that, when it's working properly, is a redistributive function, or infrastructure, good education, great salaries for civil servants, right, Ambassador Carson? And all of the public goods that a government is supposed to provide to its constituents. And of course, the people are wicked happy, right, at the bottom of the sun shines on the people. Anyway, schematic. Here's a picture of Afghanistan. The point is not, and this is where sort of my thinking originated from on this topic, the point is not how complicated things are. The point is the direction of the green arrows representing the money. The money is going fundamentally upward in this system. And it's going upward in the form of purchase of office, of gifts and kickbacks, and extortion from the population. The other really significant point, so another really significant point is donor money. Some of it bounces back to the donor country. We all know that. But the donor money represents a significant revenue stream for this system. But it's not the only one. So up on the top left, you see a listing of other revenue streams. And this is a pretty significant way of thinking about this, is these governments are really organized to capture revenue streams. They deploy their personnel against what are the most promising revenue streams. So that's just a picture of Afghanistan. What's interesting is you can, so right, here's a picture that shows you something about why does this help lead to insurgency. And we don't have to go through the details of this. But when you have an organization that's capitalizing on grievances and giving, and there is no nonviolent recourse to this, and that's part of how these systems function, is they capture the redress of grievance function so as to ensure impunity for members of the system. When people have no nonviolent means of addressing their grievance against a system, they often get violent. And one way they get violent is by joining insurgencies. There's another moral aspect to it that we can get into, but I won't now. Just a couple other countries I looked at. What's interesting here was the role, this is Ben Ali's Tunisia. Similarly, money is going up to the first family. The role of the financial sector was really important, including the finance ministry and tax collection. Whoops, sorry, went the wrong way. Egypt and Pakistan are very interesting in that there are two separate and not in really competing, there were, sorry, this is Mubarak's Egypt. You have the crony capitalist Mubarak network and then you have the military network. Similarly in Pakistan, there's a very significant military control over revenue streams. Uzbekistan cotton, a really interesting feature of the Uzbek system is basically forced labor in the cotton fields. So everyone, it's not just children. As there was more and more pressure on child labor by the human rights community, basically what's happened in the last two, three years is the use of forced labor has transferred to adults. Nigeria is a very interesting, slightly different model where you have much more downward distribution of oil rents to members of the elite, in particular at the state level. But that doesn't mean that there's not the same extraction that's taking place from the population. So anyway, I don't want to go into too many specific details, but that's the structured side. What I've looked less carefully at are some of the less structured versions of this. And you could include all of the Sahel countries, Somalia, certain Latin American countries, Balkan countries. Another way of looking at this system there is more like an Alex DeVal up at the World Peace Foundation has done a lot of work on this, looking at it as a political marketplace where there's more bargaining among political elites and less coercion on the part of the sort of top of the system. But that's no less, those present no less security challenges than this one, than this model does. It's just that the challenges tend to be a little bit different. So the critical point here is that this is the system, right? And I'd like to dwell on this for a second because corruption is often seen as system failure. Something broken in a system or individuals who are doing bad things within a system that's fundamentally operating on behalf of the people. Sometimes it's thought of as a necessary inconvenience. Oh, you know, corruption is just part of the culture in places like this and it's the only way to get things done. So it's inconvenient, but it's necessary. Even sometimes it's argued that corruption is a factor of stability because it splits up the pie amongst competing elites. And so what this paper really is saying is that corruption is the system in this subset of countries. And that the governments in countries like this can be seen as basically as criminal organizations. They are highly effective criminal organizations that are achieving their primary aim, which is the extraction of resources for personal benefit. And governing in a way is either a means to that end or is a kind of front operation. And I would argue that this can only be seen as a factor of stability if the only players with agency are the elites. But the past five years have really shown that the victims have a lot of agency and when they are driven to extremes, you know, they join terrorist movements, they have revolutions, they really change the dynamic. So seeing this as a functioning system has serious implications as to what our approach and that's a big R. That means people in the West, it means governments, it means advocacy groups, it means business. Currently, and let me talk about the public sector approaches for a moment first, currently it's usually delegated to aid agencies, right? That spend money to build anti-corruption programs, right? To do remedial efforts, technical capacity building and things like that, or at best support civil society. And I think we need to have a conversation about civil society and the degree to which civil society is necessary but insufficient to addressing this kind of a problem. And what the paper argues is that a much more comprehensive approach is needed, that it needs to be mainstreamed into the practice of foreign relations. And that's been happening to some extent, particularly around Ukraine. So we heard the President of the United States and the Vice President really putting corruption on the table as part of the transitional process in Ukraine. I guess my question and I haven't looked carefully enough at what's happened in the last couple of weeks is to what extent is the assistance that the United States is providing to the new government of Ukraine conditioned on movement in this area. To what extent is it baked into the types of support we're supplying such as by having civil society organizations independently auditing the use of U.S. funding. And then I just offer a contrast which is Nigeria. So we had this horrific kidnapping of nearly 300 young girls which has been just one in a string of really horrific actions that have been perpetrated by Boko Haram and quite rightly the U.S. government with the President in the lead got very upset about that. What I didn't hear from the President, what I heard from the President was we'll do whatever we can to help President Good Luck Jonathan. What I didn't hear from President Obama was that Good Luck Jonathan had stolen something like $20 billion from his country's revenue over the past 18 months. Now I'm being a little bit dramatic in how I'm phrasing that because we don't know that it's exactly 20 billion and we don't know that all of it went to Good Luck Jonathan. What I'm saying is we didn't hear from the President of the United States the role of corruption potentially in helping fuel the extremism that he was so worried about. Implications for action. Sorry, one other point before I get there is context. I wanna make really clear that this paper is not arguing that corruption is the cause of every international security crisis that we've seen in the last 10 years. What it's arguing is that it is an exacerbator, it is a fuel, it is a factor in just about all of them and what the paper tries to do is say as we're thinking about risk and as we're looking at what countries need focus we should look at how corruption conjugates with other risk factors. They include a deep identity divide within the country. The advanced age of a ruler. Look at the governments that fell in the Arab Spring and the ones that didn't fall. They include the prior existence of a terrorist separatist or transnational criminal network and there are various other ones that we could go through. So let me quickly just try to talk about some of the implications. A significant one is we're not talking all or nothing here and again speaking particularly from a US policy perspective the US government has a real tendency to say either write somebody a blind check or cut off relations. And although we don't get into specific remedies for specific countries in the paper there is a list of leverage and part of the point of having that list in the back of the paper is to say hey there is a huge range of ways to change the incentive structures that are operating on these governments or to affect to modify the incentive structures that lie between writing the government a blind check and cutting off relations with them. And so let's get a little bit nuanced here. The next implication is a nuanced approach requires knowledge and that means you have to start asking questions that we haven't really been asking of these environments. What are the specific levers of power that are being captured by a kleptocratic or acutely corrupt governing network in a given country? In Egypt they didn't really capture the judiciary they didn't have to, Mubarak's government didn't have to they could work around it. But they did capture the police and that's what allowed them to work around the judiciary. So this gets very specific in different countries and it's worth mapping that out because that should then influence how the US government or other Western governments interact with those levers of power. Should we be giving capacity building to a judicial function if it literally is the judiciary of the kleptocratic elite? Maybe not. Maybe you work your rule of law reform in different parts of that environment. What are the revenue streams? What particular revenue streams are captured by this kleptocratic elite? That might have implications for where businesses ought to be investing because in the short run they may say oh I want to get involved in the revenue stream that's part of the kleptocratic network because I'll get the protection of the kleptocratic government but that's a pretty short-sighted approach to business investment and those folks in governments that are involved in trade promotion could be taking some of these factors into consideration. What are the internal and external enablers that are critical to allowing this kind of a system to work because those are vulnerabilities that can be acted on by civil society both in the country and outside the country and that means banks, it means law firms, it means photo ops with high ranking Western officials. What are local attitudes toward corruption and this is a really important one because I've heard it often told to me by Westerners that corruption is part of the culture in Afghanistan and why are you so hyped up about it Sarah and this is you're imposing your Western idea of law and order on Afghans who just don't work this way and I'm like how come it's only Westerners who say that? How come I've never had a single Afghan come up to me and say Sarah would you shut up about this corruption thing? It's just part of how we do business. I had Afghans pulling their hair out in my home. I mean just begging. Why don't the Americans understand that they are empowering a criminal organization over us? We thought you were gonna bring the rule of law to this country and you brought a mafia. But there are variations and I think those variations are important when I started asking Afghans, well what do you mean? After I got the question so often from Westerners it seems so self evident to me that I had never actually asked a question of Afghans and then I did and I got some really interesting answers. One was a narrative, one was well when the district chief gets all the development assistance for himself and he surrounds himself with armed thugs so the ordinary people can't lodge their complaints with him that's corruption. I thought that's really interesting. But what I did get is that you might give a cash gift to someone when they've done something above and beyond for you in ways that you wouldn't in the West. Like we wouldn't give $5 to a cop who went out of his way to show you directions to get to the Lincoln Memorial, right? That's not, so there are some cultural variations but let's not mistake the variations for the substance. Anyhow, diplomacy, let's stop seeing good relations with any government that hasn't been labeled as an enemy as a beal and end all of diplomatic action, right? The objective is not necessarily to have good relations with everyone and good relations aren't really a bank account. I feel like sometimes American diplomats think that every time we're nice to a counterpart that's like money in the bank that we can then call on when we need them to do something. And I don't think it really works that way. I think that sometimes it can even work the opposite way that when you keep putting money in that bank the banker thinks you need them and therefore they're less likely to respond to requests. I just feel like the whole concept of what diplomacy is all about and what its objectives are may need to get modified in light of this. Foreign assistance, military and civilian is a revenue stream that's most likely to be captured by these governments for their own benefit and not the benefit of their people. And that implies a lot of rethinking in terms of how and why you use foreign assistance. There's another thing I heard often in Afghanistan which was gosh, you know, okay, fine. So 80% of what we get, 80 cents on the dollar is stolen by the Afghan government. That's okay. The people still get 20 cents. They're getting more than they would get if we weren't there. And I heard that often and then I started reading about the ultimatum game which is George gives me $100 and I get to give some portion of that money to Fiona. Fiona gets to choose whether she accepts it or not. And if she says no, we both get nothing. So rationally and according to the thinking of these folks who are telling me about this about development, Fiona would accept a dollar, right? I get 99, she gets a dollar, she's better off than if this had never happened. It turns out that in these experiments including sums that are as high as a month salary, the person on the bad end of a manifestly unjust bargain says no. Up to 20, at 20%, half of the people in Fiona's position will say no. So that tells you something about why development projects sometimes get destroyed because if they're placed in such a way as to disproportionately benefit the people who are already making out, some people would rather everybody get zero than that they be on the losing end of that kind of a bargain. Military units are either strong arms, revenue streams or being hollowed out. So look at Nigeria and Ukraine for example. And I don't know if they're military folks in the room but sometimes I know there's one former. Often the military, folks in uniform will say this is political, this doesn't affect us, this isn't our lane, it's not our mission. But the fact is military officers who are deployed in these areas are spending money and they're interacting with civilian officials. And military officials and that means they are influencing this environment. And that means that at least in their action they need to take similar things into account. Use international bodies, I know I'm spending way more time than I had intended to initially but there's something going on very interesting right now with respect to Afghanistan. There's something called the foreign, sorry, the financial action task force which is an international body that basically establishes rules of the road for financial institutions. It is meeting this week and debating whether to blacklist Afghanistan. And if it blacklists Afghanistan that means that corresponding banks will no longer, so for example, my cooperative's money is in a bank that is a correspondent with Deutsche Bank and that's why I can wire money to my cooperative in Kandahar. Deutsche Bank will cut off that relationship if that of blacklist Afghanistan. Now what's interesting is way back when and this is because anti-money laundering laws have not been passed, no one's been prosecuted for the Kabul Bank crisis back in 2010. Back then the IMF was taking a very tough line on Afghanistan and saying we need to see the following nine things happen before we will renew Afghanistan's bilateral program. And a lot of bilateral assistance was attached to the IMF program and so guess what? The United States and the lead put pressure on the IMF to soften its stance rather than using the IMF as a kind of bulwark and saying hey, you know, it ain't us and we're not picking on Afghanistan, this is an international institution that has standards for all grown up members of the international community. So that, you know, international bodies can be incredibly helpful in depoliticizing some of these actions. Enablers I mentioned and just back to civil society for a moment, civil society in these countries is absolutely critical and we've got the author of the book on that sitting back against the wall there. Civil society makes change happen without a demand for change on the part of the population it's irrelevant to even think about it. That being said, I get a little bit of a feeling that Western governments as they come to understand this more and more are increasingly offloading their responsibilities in this regard onto the fragile and insecure, meaning threatened shoulders of local civil society organizations and are not trying to understand how other than by financing them, other actions by Western governments can provide really critical supporting fires to local civil society organizations. And the final thing I want to say is that all of this requires a kind of depth combination of bureaucratic changes like what I was saying about the IMF where this is just new standard operating procedures that are across the board and depoliticized. But at the same time, a certain degree of careful tailoring of approaches to specific countries based on the real specificities that I mentioned before of how the system is structured, what the precise revenue streams are, what the vulnerabilities are, and what the political trade-offs are. And that's another thing that as we've been studying specific countries, we've really tried to tease out what are the political trade-offs that constrain Western governmental public sector actors? And what is the real cost-benefit analysis? And part of the point of this paper is that we've been talking cost-benefit, but without accurately weighing some of the costs of not addressing this. But even if you do understand the cost, there still are political trade-offs that need to be carefully weighed and understood in a given country's context. And windows of opportunity need to be really quickly exploited. So it's almost as though you need to start thinking against specific countries and coming up with approaches that can then be quickly pulled off the shelf when a window of opportunity, and tailored to a specific calendar that's linked to a window of opportunity. So with that, I would love to hear some of the thoughts that you two have and then everyone around the room about how we sort of get from theory to practice. Well, first, a big thank you to George for putting this together and Sarah for being interested enough about what I might say. It's only when I'm sitting up here that I realize that I am following this and preceding this. So hopefully the two areas and the two sort of universes of corruption that I wanted to think about in reference to Sarah's paper might be of interest. And one of them so perfectly fits Sarah's analysis and the framework that she sets out for these severely corrupt states that I kind of feel like we must have been telepathically communicating for many, many months. But just to begin, Sarah's piece is important because it not only highlights the component parts of corruption, which in many ways are the pieces that we seek to treat and address with remedial international programming. But actually addresses the potential universe of harm, that is corruption, which can spin from violence, civil unrest, structured inequality, right to regime change, international armed conflict and becoming a threat to international security. Acute and chronic corruption influence international engagement. And as Sarah said, often, they are central talking points. When you get down to the business of bilateral engagement and dealing with acute security concerns, unfortunately, they often sort of fall off the table and get ignored as something we'll deal with later. When we, you know, we'll make this deal about military assistance and then we'll insert lehi vetting or some such later. And what I'm gonna do is sort of talk about the universes that I know, which is rule of law. And I think the field of rule of law, when corruption exists in the field of rule of law, it is particularly corrosive. Because what we're talking about is that the very institutions that safeguard the state and citizens against such ills are tainted by abusive power and lack of integrity. And when you can fight corruption, increase transparency, accountability and build integrity through the rule of law and justice system, they in turn can kind of act as a lever for increasing integrity and lowering abuses in the rest of society. And at least they sort of give you some workable tools because when the justice system is corrupt, you literally don't have a place to take these matters. But the first area that I thought I might look at is one of the, is a mini universe of corruption within a state prisons. I'm not just talking about some of the prisons I've seen in DRC and this photo is from Yemen, but Baltimore and Dublin and Belfast. And there are so many different kinds of corruption that you see in prison systems. Everything from a fully corrupted criminal justice process where prosecutors, courts, judges, guards are negotiating and gaining from the release or preferential treatment of prisoners. To prison directors and penitentiary authorities taking a cut of what should be going for prisoner well-being. Prison guards in positions of abuse, prisoners evicting abuse on each other, prison gangs and some of the abuses, unfortunately we see also in prison health services. Recently in Yemeni prisons, almost all prison clinics I visited had expired medication in them. Sort of a mini-corruption between the penitentiary authority and the ministry of health. Where is the money that's assigned for non-expired medication going? And these are just sort of small things, but one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about this was actually the simplest form of corruption that I saw in a prison and this is actually when I very, very first started getting involved in rule of law work. And it was the prison in Monrovia in Liberia where they had to paint on the wall, pay no toilet fees because guards were charging female detainees to go to the toilet, charging them to have visitors, charging them to talk on the phone. And it's sort of like what Sarah mentioned, in some ways when you talk to people about this, you know, you reason on this. This is sort of understandable, this is petty corruption. And at times you don't even chastise that the guards themselves make so little, they're just trying to exact some money from the system. You know, often they're the lowest of the low in terms of professions in the country. The discards of the security sector, it's often a punishment to go get sent to be a prison director. But it is the combination of this whole sort of universe of corruption that exists in these detention centres and the systematic way in which they're exacted that is so corrosive and so dangerous because it is systematically weakening what is already weak. And the second sort of universe of corruption that I wanted to talk about is this recent work and it fits so incredibly with the framework that Sarah has provided in the paper that I thought I might sort of riff on some of the ideas and how the two models that she presents so squarely fit actually with pre-revolution and then post-revolution Libya. The Gaddafi or Olivia fills rather neatly into the first category. You've got an acutely corrupt kleptocracy and I agree defining kleptocracy is a tricky one but I always actually go back to my secondary school history teacher who described it I think rather accurately and simply for us as ruled by a thief or by thieves. And in Sarah's paper she sort of uses this model to look at the former regime in Egypt and describes it as crony capitalism and I would posit that in many ways Libya was crony corruption, crony trafficking or one dynamic of the way that Gaddafi stole from his people. One of the most illustrative quotes that we came across when we were doing this study about trafficking was this one, you may think that black markets are negative on the contrary, what are black markets? They are the people's markets. And this actually is a Gaddafi quote. And while it indicates this sort of freewheeling purist democracy that he set out in the green book in reality trafficking was confined to a very select and preferred few to certain tribes and to certain persons. And as Sarah also sets out Gaddafi went for a dictator classic of setting up legislation and regulations and conditions that supported this and allowed for it. So subtle things, really interesting when we were researching we found out that only certain people and only a certain amount of four by four and lorry licenses were issued. This is why four by four is our massive in Libya right now because now anyone can have them. You need a four by four to get through the desert. You need a four by four in order to smuggle and only certain families were allowed to have them. There was a parallel judiciary which any of these cases were diverted towards if they actually even got that far. And in interviewing border guards, we asked sort of what was it like to work as a border guard into the previous system and one of them neatly pointed out he was like if you were good you were transferred. You went to a different part of the security sector. In looking at post-revolution Libya, again it fits almost incredibly within this second paradigm that Sarah sets out of a severely corrupt state. It has moved to being pervasively corrupt but without that top pyramid element to it, without full consolidation where the monopoly on force is incomplete, where elites and networks engage in frequent bursts of violent competition. And what's interesting here is that so many more parties have entered the smuggling scene. And you see, I mean, I just sort of picked out one of the slides and one of the maps that we drew for this research as illustrative of this. Along the western border you see the displacement of the Torek by Zintani. The Zintanis rose significantly during the revolution playing an important part and are now providing security and also the major new player on the smuggling scene along the western border. They majorly initially displaced the Torek who were one of the big losers in the revolution but now gradually they realize that the Torek are significantly there for many years. They know the desert and so now are actually starting to work with them. And then on the eastern side of the southwest and actually flowing right across to the southeastern corner of Libya, you have the Tebu. And both of these tribes who were traditionally smuggled normally transacted with a small number of families in that area. As the revolution progressed in the post-revolution period those sort of structures of power, those influential families have sort of tipped. And so you see these violent outbursts in Seba. What's interesting is even in the Libyan press and in the international press, a lot of it is played out as sort of continuing clashes emerging from the conflict between pro and antique Adafi. And actually when you dig a little bit deeper you have a whole lot more to do with the trafficking networks and consolidation of roots of markets. But what I think is really interesting about post-revolution Libya is sort of as I was describing this ability to enter. It's actually sort of like a democratization of corruption. One of my favorite interviewees is sort of a reform smuggler. He's almost like a Disney character. I think they should make a movie about him. But as he describes it, Libya is now free for all and a free for all. The borders are open, there is very little ability for the state to provide protection. And the mass availability of weapons and the weakening of certain tribes and families has drastically altered the smuggling scene. It's allowed many, many more parties to seek entry to the markets and to the roots. But it has also developed an evolving market for protection. And as that market for protection evolves, so does it weaken the state's ability to address and to be the sole provider of protection. The fragile government structure has no ability to compete with two interconnected criminal economies, urban markets and staging grounds and the struggle for the control and roots in the periphery. And this is another dynamic that Sarah described of this second model, the importance of border communities and the importance and the fragility of those border areas. And so finally, what are the implications? What are the implications for state consolidation and on international security? Well, illicit resources and corruption serve as a centrifugal force from the central state building process. As we've seen in so many countries, many of which are addressed in Sarah's study, chaos and security, unregulated, uncontrolled births of violence become the norm and become positive for these players. The sustaining this chaos and gradually sections of the state become infiltrated. The other piece of the Zintani puzzle is that they're also run the deputy minister of gates and borders, so they have the ultimate trifecta. And instability in Libya leads to instability in the region, contributes to what is enormous instability in the region and affects international security. So finally, and I'll kind of stop everything on the points here, but I think what is so important about this paper is the points that Sarah raised in order to address some of these implications. It doesn't just suggest elite bargains and it doesn't just suggest addressing petty corruption strategies. Using petty corruption strategies, it provides a whole spectrum of approaches addressing all levels of society from chief of state in her approaches to the citizen. As noted in these different universes that I described, the reason this is so important is because the reality is the corruption happens at all levels. Corruption happens in many shapes, sizes, and categories. And as Sarah said, it needs then to be baked into the solution and baked into broader strategies. Too often I think what we want to do as the international community is to sell and to sort of skip to a technical solution. When in reality, these are socioeconomic problems, problems with enormous cultural roots and huge political implications. George, thank you very, very much for organizing this program today. And I too want to take this opportunity to thank Sarah for an enormously beneficial and useful paper on corruption and insecurity. I think that it will be very useful as we move forward and we try all to address this problem. I also want to thank Fiona as well for her comments. I am going to do two things that will break with where the other speakers have been. One is not to use any slides, so you'll have to bear with me as I talk. And the second is to not have a global focus on corruption, but to talk in particular about, and I think that nowhere is the link between corruption and insecurity greater than in Nigeria today, Africa's most populous country and a country that is dealing with multiple security problems and one of the worst insurgencies on the continent. Corruption clearly has been endemic in Nigeria since its independence. The country has lost billions and billions of dollars in oil revenues through illegal bunkering and through very complex schemes in which local companies and influential Nigerian leaders are given raw crude to sell overseas in exchange for bringing back refined products into the country, sometimes short changing the government and the people in doing so. Although Nigeria has a democratic government today, corruption flourished, and I really mean flourished when the country was under military rule. In the 1990s, when General Sani Abacha was the head of state, he reputedly stole some $1.1 billion worth of Nigeria's national wealth. Although the military is no longer in power in Nigeria today, it has not abandoned or lost its corrupt and kleptocratic ways. Security officers continue to have a hand in the theft of oil in the Niger Delta, stealing oil directly or colluding with criminal elements and smugglers who take oil. But today, there is growing evidence that widespread corruption and financial malfeasance among Nigeria's security forces have degraded the professional capacity and ability of Africa's largest military and also effectively impeded and undermined the fight against Boko Haram across Northern Nigeria. Boko Haram has gained in both strength and sophistication in the past five years, assassinating government officials, attacking government buildings, and raiding not only military facilities, but also schools and universities. Boko Haram since 2005 has killed over 5,000 people, and as Sarah mentioned earlier, have been responsible for kidnapping nearly 300 young schoolgirls some six weeks ago. As Boko Haram has gotten stronger and more sophisticated, Nigeria's military has appeared to grow more ineffective and even sometimes inept in going after Boko Haram. The Nigerian government spends one quarter of the year of its entire federal budget in support of the Nigerian military. That figure is approximately $5.8 billion in security assistance last year. And a U.S. government official recently noted that corruption prevents supplies as basic as bullets and transport vehicles from reaching the front lines of the struggle against Boko Haram. One looks at the Nigerian media and you can see reports that say soldiers go without food, water, basic medical supplies, and sufficient arms and ammunition. One Nigerian soldier recently told a journalist that he had to pay bribes to his superior officers in order to obtain sufficient ammunition to go out on missions against Boko Haram. Others report inadequate amounts of gasoline to run their vehicles and no spare parts to repair them once they are broken down. And certainly there are credible reports that frontline soldiers are not being paid in a regular fashion and that some of them are in fact not being paid at all. Morale across the military has fallen because of these conditions. And some rank and file soldiers believe that officers are using the war against Boko Haram to enrich themselves. They find that continuing the conflict also helps to personally enrich them. They believe that these officers are diverting funds intended for the soldiers that these funds are going into the pockets in the bank accounts of officers that they're selling military supplies and again making enormous profit off of this. If this is the case then it does become justification for continuing the struggle. High level and costly corruption and the procurement of sophisticated weapon systems can also be a problem. It was reported that drones purchased several years ago by Nigerian officials have never been operational and serviced and there is widespread speculation that the acquisition was part of an opaque international corrupt procurement in which some officials took a substantial kickback for possibly acquiring outdated equipment. But what is true is that these sophisticated systems have not been used. Some soldiers have gotten angry and some have turned against their officers. In early May there was a report that soldiers in the northwestern state of Borno shot their weapons at the car carrying one of their generals. This was because of grievances that they had suffered. Those who have sought to expose military corruption have been intimidated. Some three weeks ago the military rated a very prominent Nigerian newspaper after it was reported that a number of generals had been able to illegally acquire some very high-valued property in the capital city of Abuja. This was an indication of clear intimidation by the military against those who would seek to expose some of the things that they are doing. Given this sort of state of affairs it's not surprising that people across Nigeria hold their security forces in very low regard. It is reported that nine out of 10 Nigerians believe that the police are corrupt and these are federal police. And some 45% of those surveyed said that the military is corrupt. As long as high-level corruption persists in the military it will almost certainly impede the ability of the Nigerian authorities to get its hands around what is in fact becoming a very prolonged, high-intensity security situation in the northern part of that country. Let me say a little bit about some of the remedies. And I think Sarah has pointed out a number of things. The US government has been one of the leaders in the fight against corruption both in the US and globally and around the world. I think the challenge is to lift this and intensify it. The United States was in fact the first major industrialized country to pass a foreign corrupt practices act. It was only after the US passed its law that the European community and a number of our major European partners followed suit. So we have had corruption as an issue on the agenda, maybe not pursued as vigorously and aggressively as is required given the problems that corruption can have. The US also has a kingpin statute on the book as well which allows the US government and its agencies to identify foreigners overseas who are engaged in corrupt activities. Mostly I might add in drug smuggling and money laundering to be able to seize their assets and also to prohibit their travel to the US. And it has been done most notably against the family members of the president of Equatorial Guinea where millions of dollars in US real estate and aircraft here in this country were seized. And so the real thing is to look for ways to expand this out. I'm going to be a little bit simplistic in saying that building stronger, building stronger democracies is one of the answers. Building stronger democracies is one of the answers. Having a strong democracy does not eliminate corruption. We too have our Bernie Madoffs, but strong democracies substantially reduce it because strong democracies create vibrant institutions. It creates a norm for rule of law and good governance. It creates strong legislatures and strong and independent judiciaries. It creates and provides public space for civil society to be able to speak out freely against corruption. It allows investigative reporters to probe into areas in which corruption takes place, whether it is in a DOD procurement, whether it is in a federal penitentiary in upstate New York or California, or whether it's a state house in Baltimore or state house in Illinois where we've seen multiple governors go to jail. So democratic institutions and not just the superficiality of democracy, not the superficiality of simply an election which is essential but insufficient to determine a democracy, but the strength of democracy allows that civil society, that investigative reporter, that legislature and that judiciary to probe and push. So as we look for ways to curb this, it does mean that we need to push a lot harder to achieve those things that are there and that can be achieved. The nature of how you combat corruption is going to be different from country to country. I wish there were a universal model that might be applied, but I think one would find that there is probably going to be some difference. Let me conclude by noting again the link between, and I think the link between corruption and instability and conflict. Today, Northern Nigeria with Boko Haram, and it's not just Boko Haram, it's the Middle Belt problem there. It's the Niger Delta problem. So they've got three insurgencies, two are intense, one less so. Whether it is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Eastern part of the Congo, whether it is in Mali, which has been a focus of our attention and whether it's been in South Sudan or in Sudan. If you look at the transparency indicators and index for each of these crisis-prone countries, you will find that they all fall way, way, way down on the scale. Nigeria, 144 out of 177, DRC 154, South Sudan 173, and Sudan 174 out of 177. So there is an inverse relationship. Clear in your document, the greater, the lower you are on the corruption scale, the higher the prospects of instability, conflict and violence. And it's out there. Mali, which has been the center of attention since the coup there in March of 2012 by Captain Sonogo, was precipitated by the death of a number of military officers in the north, but the military officers complained bitterly that they had not received the kind of equipment and material that they needed to go after the insurgents, AQIM and TORREG, and that their officers were in fact stealing the money that was going to be given to them or had been allocated and authorized for them to carry out their military operations. Same thing in the DRC over and over and over again. The military there lacks his lack morale, but it's also lack munitions and weapons in large part because troops weren't getting it. Officers were getting it and pocketing the money. So there is a link. The challenge for us is to continue to push forward and to expose these situations and maybe look at perhaps having a kind of lehi amendment for corruption like we have for human rights violations. I'll stop there. My thanks to each of our three speakers. We very much want to now open the discussion. I'm going to ask you to do two things. First is to identify yourself and if you have an organization, your organization. And the second is to keep your question to a question. And if it's aimed at a particular panelist, do so. But we'd like to get in a number of questions at once and then ask our folks to respond, but not to have speeches if we can avoid them. Thank you. We'll start here and here. Please. Thank you so much. My name is Alicia Shaveen. I work at Public International Law and Policy Group. And it actually is something you mentioned earlier, rule of law and the correlation between increasing transparency and building institutions and stronger democracies in countries like Egypt and Nigeria to combat corruption. However, when there's a troubled economy and you're trying to establish legislations like freedom of information that actually is costly in the short term, you have to establish a ministry and staff to pay to actually access this information. How can you argue in the long term and convince these countries to engage in actually implementing freedom of legislation or foreign corruption act and implement stronger penalties? Like when the military is stronger, the police is corrupt. How can you convince them to actually get through that and establish that? Thank you. Patricia Fagan, Georgetown University. Thank you so much for putting in our face realities that so many would like to avoid coming to grips with policymakers and business people alike. I wanna put a conundrum before you and ask how you would recommend addressing it in the interest of the nuance responses that Sarah mentioned. Services, public services to poor people, health, education, social infrastructure, the sorts of things that every government wants to do or says they want to do whether the government is corrupt or not so corrupt. It's also the sort of thing that insurgents want to do in order to win the hearts and minds of people in their particular areas. And this is obviously, it obviously, therefore puts this kind of social service in the realm of security, security interest for, over for US and other countries. Supporting the, if then in the scenario, the obvious answer is well, support the Ministry of Health, support the Ministry of Education, blah, blah, blah. But if those industries are so subject to corruption, then that may not be the very best solution. And on the other hand, NGOs, as you've described them, are not always effective antidotes to that. So how would you, what would be your recommendation for that sort of situation? Thank you. Hi, Richard America. I'm also Georgetown University in the business school and a member of the Board of Trustees of something we call the West African Society on Business Ethics, which is a network of business ethics programs at business schools in all of ECOWAS. And we believe that the strong business ethics education note in the full-time programs, but also short courses for middle and senior managers in the public and private sector will over a generation or so, inculcate modern professional management values, which will go against bad practice. So I'm hoping that if there are any corporate folks in the room, we can meet after the meeting. We're looking for corporate partners one country at a time to sponsor a business ethics center. We think this is a significant part of the long-term solution. Thank you. Last question here for this first round right here in the corner. Hi, my name is Nathan Samuels. I'm the founder of an organization called Not In My Country. And what we do, we were working in Uganda and Kenya for the last four years, and we've created a web application that will allow people to upload databases of public officials so the public can rate their performance and report them for acts of corruption as a mechanism and means to hold them accountable because the governments of these countries don't seem to be doing so. My question is to Ambassador Carson, specifically regarding Nigeria. Is it hypocritical that the world community would consider a, let's say a rebel in the North Kiva region of the Congo goes into a group of villages and takes their livestock, their food, and whatever possessions they have, we consider that they have committed the crime of pillage. If they don't kill anyone, they've simply taken their property. They've committed the crime of pillage which is judged by the Rome statutes to be a crime against humanity. But if an American businessman goes to Nigeria, colludes with their leadership, and removes percentages of the country's GDP, we consider that to be business as usual. Perhaps we should start applying different words like pillage to these actions so that people start taking it slightly more seriously. Well thank you, a challenging first group of questions. Sarah, do you wanna start? Sure, on the troubled economy, how do you get governments to spend money on transparency? I actually think that's the least of the problem. The least of the problem is that they don't have the money to spend on transparency. The real problem is they have absolutely no intention of doing that because they are, as I said before, functioning precisely how they intend to be functioning, which is as a very effective revenue extraction organization, so I just again urge all of us not to think beyond a slightly technical approach. The issue that you raise really applies to a country that's in genuine transition, for example, a Tunisia or a Ukraine, when here are countries whose populations have really put this issue on the table and are demanding a new way of functioning on the part of that government, then you might have economic factors, I mean Ukraine is in a colossal economic problem, do they have the money to spend on transparency issues? But a much, as I say, I think the much larger problem is we're focused on transparency almost mechanisms as though the problem is just that the country isn't transparent enough, whereas in fact it's a much more structural problem. Public services, again, I'd argue similarly, most of these countries do not wish to provide public services to their populations. The provision of public services is again a revenue stream, so interestingly in Afghanistan, education and health, where the ministries, we were focused on, the international community was focused on the ministries and all kinds of sort of good practices were developed inside the ministry in Kabul, but when you got to the hospitals and schools out in the towns and villages, medicine is being sold on the black market, teachers aren't in the schools and things like that, so how you then reshape assistance efforts is I think one of the deepest implications of this, and so clearly any help to ministries has to be very closely tied to performance indicators, not expenditure indicators, but outcome indicators. Norway is extremely strict about its provision of financial aid so that they build clauses into all of the, payback clauses into all of their contracts. Their standard operating procedures are if financial irregularity is suspect, seriously suspected, aid is suspended, if it's substantiated, aid is cut off to that program and countries payback, and they get countries to payback like Uganda, I mean they've actually made this work and then there's a remedial issue, so if you take serious remedial steps then you get the money, so it's really about, or you get the program we started, it's about changing the incentive structure as much as it is who do we work through because I think your question is a very good one in terms of if international organizations or donors are working through non-government bodies very often you get what are called gongos, government-organized non-government organizations that become a cut out, a kind of beneficial owner for the government in capturing that stream. On pillage, right, I mean that's part of what, and you're talking Nigeria in particular and Western involvement with the resource companies, but that's kind of what this is all about is we need to change the vocabulary here a little bit and we need to, I mean this paper focuses on corruption as a driver of insecurity, a whole other way of looking at it is corruption as a gross violation of human rights and when you talk to human rights advocates in a lot of these countries and you say what, how do you think about, I mean, what would you think about labeling corruption as a gross violation and I've had people practically put their arms around my neck and say oh my god, Americans always come here and talk about child labor or talk about detentions but all of that is in support of this corrupt network. So Tunisia's transitional justice law is actually has jurisdiction over economic crime, it's I think the first one passed to do that. Sorry, that was very long answers. Just sad, one really small thing mostly on this first point is that I completely agree with Sarah in that most, the biggest problem that you face is that in most cases there is not the will or the interest and like I say, for example, the Zhantani at the head of the deputy ministry position in gates and borders is really not incentivized to do anything to actually seal those borders but where you're talking about those rare cases where the will does exist, those sort of better transition stories for one to a better phrase, I think actually providing the technical information and the technical analysis that's needed to properly address the problems is a big part of it. I mean, when we went into Libya, one of the things that they said particularly when we were looking at prisons is we literally don't know how many are open, we don't have anyone who is independent enough to go around and address whether the prisons are under militia control or not because each of our staff members would have some sort of tribal allegiance to one or other or regional allegiance in going around. So having somebody who's independent enough that can go and collect that information and present it in a useful fashion to the array of ministries that should be involved I think is important. Interestingly, when we went into Libya first to do this trafficking study was one of sort a collection of projects that we were doing immediately after the revolution and when we first, you know, the prison's peace they wanted it and we first could approach it and we said, you know, often in these ungoverned spaces organized crime really surges and they were like, no, we got smuggling, sure it's always been there we're in the middle of Trans-Sahalian trafficking routes but like, I mean, organized crime, that's not Libya that's not a thing here, we don't need this study and we sort of encouraged them to include it and we were in a very privileged position in that we were dealing with the government and six months later, because it was a lag between getting funding and then actually carrying this out and we went back in and they were like, it's huge it's everywhere, we don't understand where did this come from, what are we supposed to do which the routes and control of the routes has shifted but et cetera, et cetera. I really feel like demonstrating where, what the issues are very, very clearly is an important factor but also demonstrating what the long-term negatives are and even sort of trying to create some framework for what the financial losses potentially can be is a major incentive as well, like, I mean, we were we've been trying to push and a lot of people have for the end of commodities subsidies in Libya, they literally are throwing their economy over the borders each day in fuel, smuggling, flour and sugar alone and much more dangerous things are coming back in when you deal with it. So I think explaining some of those factors but anyway. Just I won't try and go through, I think Nathan raises an interesting point, I have a slight disagreement with Sarah on how to approach it. I don't think that we do ourselves any good by trying to lump all the evils of the world under the most egregious evil as defined that day I think that there is a difference between the economic pillaging that goes on in the Eastern Congo and it should indeed be punished under some kind of a statue most appropriately if there were sufficient government authority in the East it wouldn't come under the jurisdiction of the international community but under the justice system of the DRC Congo and that would be ideal. But in the case of American businessmen who may be involved in what are questionable or illegal transactions in a place like Nigeria, I think that there is a statutory responsibility for any state department officer who has creditable information or evidence that an illegal wrongdoing is occurring to report that to our FBI and federal law enforcement so that they can in fact be investigated and potentially prosecuted and potentially jailed under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And I think that statute has proven effective in deterring many of the most egregious and overt sorts of things that have gone on in the past. And again, I would say that if in fact these sorts of things are going on there should be more investigation and more effort to find them and punish them under that statute rather than trying to enlarge what they might be doing under an ICC statute for which we are not internationally or domestically bound. Let's go to a second round. Mike, you were first, then we're in, then we'll come around here. So it's those two to start with. Mike. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, George. George and I are working on a book called Overlooked Enemies of Peace and it's about strategies for subduing illicit power structures. So Sarah, you've done us all a great service by putting this issue on the agenda and calling to attention the fact that this menace is a real security challenge. Mike, I'd like to pick up where you left off, turning theory into practice and not intentionally being provocative, but maybe part of the challenge in getting a response to the issues that you've put on the table is the word the term corruption itself because corruption exists everywhere. So my question essentially is when does it cross the threshold to become a security challenge? And I know you didn't want to get into definitions, but you talked about being two types. One was more structured and one was less structured. I don't really want you to have to get into the distinction between the two, but it seems that it's in, you said is the system. And so it seems that the essence of the problem is that when it becomes a criminalized political economy, so how would you then distinguish between run-of-the-mill corruption and corruption? We, the policy community, the military, et cetera, must attend to, must address. And in Esports, they didn't call it corruption, they called it criminal patronage networks. So how can we compel action by giving it a term that requires us to pay attention to it? Maria Steffen here, I'm with the US Institute of Peace and the Atlantic Council. And thank you, Sarah and team, for pulling together a really important report, which hopefully will be read widely. I guess just to comment a little bit, your point about civil society is very well taken. And obviously donors should not offload responsibility for dealing with corruption to fragile civil societies. But at the same time, I think it's important to distinguish what you mean about civil society's support. And I think there's a big difference between the traditional models of throwing a lot of money at the same 10 English-speaking NGOs in a particular country who exist to survive on Western funding and actually providing assistance to civic groups to do mobilization, to put pressure on corrupt power holders and to educate populations and mobilize to build coalitions for change. And I think part of the solution and part of the toolkit as you're thinking about developing has to be how to do this type of support better. And I think why this is important is for ordinary people in these countries, they have to be able to see an alternative between doing nothing and suffering and taking up arms. And I think the more people are aware of how they themselves can organize, mobilize, devise, creative nonviolent tactics to put pressure on nodes of corruption, this at the end of the day is a sustainable I think remedy and one that's not as reliant upon fickle donors as it is on the skills, knowledge and know-how of local population. So I would just implore a bit of a more nuance when it comes to civil society approaches. Thanks. Array of hands here. One, two, three to that. My name is Edie Poussif from George Mason University. PhD student. George, I still recalled and remember your wisdoms. You're talking to the mic for time. Your wisdom, you said that the corruption is the real enemy for pieces, corruption and crimes. With Sarah's presentation, I really like it and it resonates with what you said the other day. So this is the people that they corrupt the money from Africa from different parts. The money end up either in the Western countries or in other donor countries. My question is how the Western countries accept the money first and then how we deal about it. Thank you. My name is Shaska Bayerli. I'm a senior advisor at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SICE. Sarah, thank you for referring to my research in book and which was funded in part by USIP and on organized citizen campaigns and movements that are effectively targeting corruption. I have a question about misconceptions and I'm very curious to know in your experience, what did you encounter any prevalent misconceptions about the way corruption functions in kleptocracies amongst the international actors that you dealt with. Thank you. Nancy Boswell, formerly with Transparency International and now at the American University Washington College of Law. We have a program, a training program for legal professionals, judges and prosecutors, et cetera, who are in countries around the world trying to make a difference. So there is some light in this. Otherwise, I think very bleak picture. I wanted to thank Sarah. I was privileged to participate to some small extent in her effort and I think what she's done is simply terrific. It will make a great contribution to those of us who are trying to make progress in this area. And I'd also like to recognize Ambassador Carson's comment about U.S. leadership. To the extent progress has been made, it has been to a great extent due to American leadership and despite the huge mistakes and shortcomings that Sarah's pointed out, I don't think we should overlook that. So I very much welcome your comment about elevating this and adding because my concern is that it is unfortunately still too much U.S. leadership and not enough multilateral leadership. And I can say from the money flow issue, this is not just about American banks, it's about banks in Europe as well as in Asia. When it comes to donors, this is about a coherent, consistent approach among donors because if one is trying to curry favor, it puts us in a very difficult position. Similarly with international bodies, the World Bank has been moving toward putting more conditions on lending, but on the other hand, as those conditions seem to interfere with doing business in their words, there's a move towards just putting money in through the treasury. It was called budget support at one point, I don't know what it's called now. But in other words, having money flow into countries without the same kinds of accountability and controls that we would like to see there. So I'm not sure if it's a question or a comment, but I think the challenge is to get much more multilateral buy-in for a serious muscular anti-corruption approach. I'm gonna have to shut off the questions there so that our panel has time to respond before we have to vacate the room. Why don't we start on the other end since I tend to wax prolific? You have a right to, it's your document. Let me start with the last question. I think you're absolutely right. As I say, we have done a lot, but obviously it's insufficient to deal with the growing nature of the problem and we have to do a lot more. Sarah's document points in the direction of some of the things that can and should be done. I think it's important, as you say, to follow the money, and probably there needs to be an expanded and enhanced effort at finding out and being able to capture or to freeze money coming out of countries where there are kleptocracies and illegal activities going on by government officials in those countries where they are actively stealing national assets from their people, and perhaps the lever is, is where we're in turn providing them with assistance. So it is indeed sort of following the money. Clearly more needs to be done, needs to be on a multinational basis, and there should be enormous accountability by governments when it is demonstrated that their ministries or government officials are engaged in stealing money. Let me also make just one other quick point and I'll stop here. Civil society organizations are under assault in many places around the world, and I've seen that in Africa. Anyone who follows what has happened in Ethiopia over the last five or six years knows that the civil society laws there have put sharp limitations on the kind of financial assistance that they can receive from abroad and the kind of technical support that they can do it. This is because those in power don't want the voice of the people to be heard and empowered. There's also civil society legislation that is under scrutiny in a place like Kenya. Again, a collapse of civil society regulations and in places like Rwanda. So these things have to be monitored as well when people's voices start to ask for accountability, start to look at government actions, more directly, governments which don't wanna hear the voices of the people have a way to manipulate and crack down on them. One quick one back on pillage. I do agree with you actually in terms of the technical legal approach, the ICC, but notionally, and this touches on the vocabulary question. There is clearly a vocabulary problem here that the word corruption somehow it's odorless, it's boring, it's everywhere, and how do you rephrase it or focus on a threshold? And I have to say that that was also a topic of debate among our group where some people actually resisted the effort to focus down on a subset of corrupt countries. They wanted this to be about corruption everywhere, and I'm like US decision makers cannot take this on globally. I mean you can to some extent with some of the across the board legal changes and bureaucratic changes, but that sort of goes back to the map that I showed at the beginning. Those are countries that have had security incidents in the last five years. We're adding another category of countries to that map which are again sort of notionally Tunisia in 2009. So this is not identical to failed or failing states. This is often states that are seen as strong or strong man states are in this category. It's just that we're not aware of the fractures, the potential fractures beneath the surface. So we're nowhere near the gray area. The countries we're looking at nowhere near the gray area and the types of practices are nowhere near the gray area. But what do you call it? I happen to disagree when it evolved in Afghanistan with criminal patronage networks because of this issue of patronage. That actually patronage when it's a broad healthy form of patronage which does exist in a lot of societies where those who are higher up on the food chain owe things to people lower down in the food chain and that's a cultural expectation that can function in a non abusive way. So anyway, without getting into the vocabulary debate there is definitely something about the word corruption that turns on the snooze button that we need to address. How money ends up in the West? I mean, that's one of the big things that we're really talking about. What are the enablers? And the enablers in large part are banks, real estate, and so this gets back to what can civil society do including in the West. And it's about time just as ordinary citizens put pressure on Nike or clothing manufacturers where their products are produced in countries where the labor standards are unacceptable. It's not okay for banks or for big law firms on the Equatorial Guinea I think case. There was some gigantic New York law firm that was essentially thumbing its nose at the Justice Department, almost taunting the Justice Department at how much better resource this defense council was and things like that. So that's gotta be part of reputational risk for companies in this country and the ability to bring cases needs to be a little bit easier. At the moment, beneficial ownership and banking secrecy still that more work is needed in that regard. On Maria's point, absolutely, absolutely. And I actually think that that's a modification that's needed to spell out that there are other types of civil society approaches that are broader and more mobilizing that also need I think to work on the issue of converting dramatic change into a new, how do you get from the kind of mobilization that brings down governments to the kind of mobilization that builds a more responsive structure afterwards. And also as I say, what are the other supporting actions other than providing material resources to groups like this, providing strategy or helping them develop strategies, helping them expand their views of what they can do to interact with this situation but also what are the other types of leverage that foreign governments can apply in support of these types of movements. And have I missed anything significant? Misconceptions about the way corruption functions. The big one on that is the misunderstanding of how vertically integrated it is. So what I, I mean, the biggest problem I saw I have seen so far in US government approach to this issue is a division between petty corruption, grand corruption and quote predatory corruption or something like that, as though these are separate things going on, whereas they're all wired in to one system. And you can't separate out petty corruption and say, well, that's okay, it keeps the wheels greased and grand corruption, you can't touch that because it's too political. So let's, you know, carve out some sub flavor of corruption that is somehow separate. We've got to understand that these are systemic and that's to me the biggest, that the cop on the street is paying a kickback to his superior and on up to the minister of interior. Well, I'm sure I share with the audience how stunningly quickly two hours has gone in this conversation. And thank you for your participation. Please join me in thanking our panelists for really a stimulating session.