Why does Joe Biden keep defending his son's associations with foreign kleptocrats?

Davids Graebar and Wengrow demonstrate that humans have been reinventing their social and political structures for tens of thousands of years. No need to stop now.

How do we suppose a ragtag militia lurking in the hills — as we’ve so often heard the Taliban described — managed to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international support?

A magnificent love song to the country of Colombia, told by way of its national river (Book review)

A splendid book about ... the excessive power of mega-corporations in our society, and how they are turning all of us into their serfs.

Trump’s pardons were shocking to some, but to me they were eerily familiar...

Moscow is using the type of tactics I first saw the Taliban master in Afghanistan.

Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire got in over his head on the Ukraine whistleblower complaint.

The US should not support a rigged presidential election. Such antics destroy the hopes of Honduran citizens -- and force them to flee a brutal regime.

Corruption Is Reshaping Governments Everywhere (Review of The Corruption Cure)

In some five dozen countries worldwide, corruption can no longer be understood as merely the iniquitous doings of individuals. Rather, it is the operating system of sophisticated networks that cross sectoral and national boundaries in their drive to maximize returns for their members. Such networks are of course configured differently in different countries. This report examines one country's experience in detail.

If you want a deeper understanding of what has been inaugurated in Washington, read Steve Coll's "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power."

Who we empower and how our allies treat the locals may determine the outcome of the US fight against violent extremism.

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Governments that ostensibly fight terror may actually generate more dire security crises than they curb as a result of corrupt governance practices.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari should make his anticorruption agenda central to his campaign against Boko Haram.

Acute, structured government corruption is a misunderstood scourge. And the role it plays in exacerbating international insecurity is widely overlooked.

Without the muscular involvement of a powerful union, it is unlikely Tunisia's bitterly divided political parties could have reached a settlement.

Gates's memoir reveals and inhibited, petulant man who ill-served both his president and the national interest.

The U.S. government’s focus on thwarting terrorists has not only eroded Americans’ privacy, it’s opened the door to other less obvious dangers.

What did the U.S. get for bags of cash delivered to Karzai?

Interagency word-smithing, not political machinations, produced misleading language that arguably cost lives.

Crisis can be a great corrective.

In a raucous session that brought lawmakers to blows this month, the Afghan parliament passed a no-confidence vote against the country’s top security officials: the ministers of defense and interior.

Religion is not what set off the Jasmine Revolution. But it is dominating the aftermath.

Who shapes perceptions of how the war is going?

Why is the US government asking the Pakistan to broker peace negotiations with the very insurgents that country fostered?

How to expand your skin-care business in the midst of a burgeoning insurgency -- in spite of America's aid industry.

Afghanistan has risen again and again from the ashes.

A guide for conducting a systematic analysis of residual or rising kleptocratic networks during a window of opportunity for reform.

With Afghanistan's new rulers finding governing more difficult than insurgency, now is the time to leverage any financial assistance to get them to abide by their own commitments.

Neither Biden nor the Attorney General should make this call. An independent task-force should determine whether there are grounds for criminal prosecution.

Biden ran on a promise to restore integrity... to Washington. Yet names of prospective nominees suggest he will be drawing from corporate networks that have served their members at the expense of the American public.

The Atlantic: As the country mobilizes to address the pandemic, watch for officials and corporate executives attempting to exploit the crisis to enrich themselves.

As good as fiction! In more ways than one. (Review of "My Life Undercover." Subscribe to Book Post for the unabridged version.)

Americans of both parties should stop leveraging their names for payoffs from shady politicians and businessmen -- and the rest of us should stop condoning that business model

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In the past half decade, uprisings against corruption has broken out worldwide. The frequency and significance of these events forces the question: What is going on? And does this international phenomenon hold lessons for others beset with systemic political corruption, not least in the United States? A look at countries as diverse in culture and political history as Brazil, Burkina Faso, Guatemala, Lebanon, Romania, South Africa, and South Korea suggests that it does.

The Trump Organization’s continued business dealings with foreign governments, both at home and abroad, challenge the core principles of U.S. democracy.

Honduras offers an example of how corruption devastates landscapes and the environment.

The Trump administration... resembles nothing so much as a kleptocratic network of the type seen in many developing countries and post-Soviet states.

In a country full of sophisticated lawyers and lobbyists and rationalizers, it is now urgent to ask whether Americans still understand what corruption is.

A prerequisite to building an effective anticorruption approach is an intimate—and unflinching—examination of the specifics of corrupt operations in the individual country of interest and its physical and electronic neighborhoods.

Saudi Arabia is no state at all. It could best be described as a political enterprise with a clever but ultimately unsustainable business model, or as so corrupt as to resemble a vertically and horizontally integrated criminal organization

In Muhammadu Buhari's upset election, Nigerians -- Christian and Muslim as well as those who follow the old religions -- may have been seeking a Thunder God.

Nigerians, in the north and the south, see the education system as a corrupt intake valve into a profoundly corrupt political system.

If anyone is surprised that with each passing day Afghan President Hamid Karzai seems to veer more sharply away from the U.S. and toward the Taliban, it might be time to remember some history.

Why does the Afghan leader thumb his nose at us? Because we let him.

Why does every major interagency debate on security policy focus on the use of force?

Underlying tensions between the largely Shi'ite population and Sunni ruling family, is anger not over religious ideology, but the kleptocratic capture of the island's most rare and precious substance: its land.

The scandal that toppled a CIA director damaged serving and former members of the military, standards of public service, and U.S. national security.

The film designed to provoke violent responses in the Muslim world arguably does not qualify.

Let's not reward a restoration of military dictatorship.

The governments of two religiously defined nations are playing a game of brinksmanship.

Report from the front lines in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Outrage is growing around the world at rampant public corruption.

The fall of Arghandab District provides an object lesson in asymmetric warfare.

Afghans suffer collective PTSD. "Courage" is a word that may not apply.