Chapter 4 explores Zambia’s transition to multiparty democracy and the consequent rise in political competition and regional favoritism, revealing a trend of diminishing accountability. Initially, under the United National Independence Party’s one-party rule led by Kaunda, favoritism was constrained by balanced leadership. However, the emergence of ethnic-based opposition post-1991 heightened pressures for patronage, leading to increased favoritism under subsequent regimes. Regional favoritism escalated under President Banda and peaked during the populist Patriotic Front (PF) government (2011–2021), which eroded checks and balances, appointed an ethnically imbalanced cabinet favoring Bembas and Nyanjas, and concentrated borrowed funds in strongholds. Legislative and judiciary institutions were also weakened, along with civil society organizations. Traditional financiers provided some constraints through conditionalities, while Chinese lenders aligned with elite interests, exacerbating the situation. Zambia demonstrates a case of democratization exacerbating ethnic patronage without sufficient accountability mechanisms.

Corruption remains a pervasive global challenge, undermining trust, governance, and economic stability. Despite increased regulation, arbitral tribunals have struggled to address corruption effectively, often due to the high evidentiary threshold and associated procedural complexities. Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity to enhance efficiency and accuracy in detecting corruption by analysing evidence supplied by the parties to a dispute or amici curiae for red flags of illicit activities, similarly to other fields like anti-money laundering. The chapter examines the procedural implications of using artificial intelligence in arbitration, including data acquisition, party consent, and the potential impact on due process. It underscores the need for arbitrators to collaborate with parties to design protocols that ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability. By carefully addressing these challenges, artificial intelligence has the potential to become a transformative tool, balancing innovation with procedural integrity.

This chapter explores the written and material evidence for civilian quartering of Roman troops in late antiquity. The civic duties to extend hospitium or hospitalitas are reconstructed from the Republic until the late Roman Empire, focusing on the period between the fourth century ce and mid-sixth century ce. By looking at the literary evidence for housing troops in civilian homes penned in the Republic and early Principate, the convention of using moralizing rhetoric to describe soldiers quartered in cities is established. This classicizing rhetoric is then used to reframe later allegations concerning the effects of Constantine’s alleged movement of frontier troops into cities. This reconsideration of the extant evidence for Roman troop quartering questions and amends how we should write the lived experiences of civilians living in late Roman cities.

This chapter shows that the use of bribery and corruption was a well-established multinational strategy over a long period. A striking number of ostensibly respectable industry leaders have engaged in grand corruption. Armaments and commodity trading were particularly prone to corruption, and the practice appears to be particularly prevalent in Africa. Grand corruption arose especially when business involved large contracts with governments. Bribery was fueled by the pervasiveness of corruption in the host economies in which multinationals operated, but the multinationals were active agents in facilitating corruption. The practice of bribery and corruption by multinationals was often the result of miscreant corporate cultures rather than rogue individuals. Governments were often permissive of corrupt practices by their multinationals, especially in Europe where bribes were tax deductible until recent years.

This chapter examines early decisions made by the Trump Administration that could have an impact on the financing of terrorism. The chapter also ties together the previous chapters – specifically looking at overlaps, regulatory, technological, or other in the area of terrorist financing and the countering of it.

How has the CPC maintained its organizational strength over time, especially during the period of economic reform? This chapter argues that the several important measures taken since the 1990s have reinforced the party as a strong organization. The personnel management reform since the 1990s has standardized the elite recruitment and provided a relatively fair channel of social mobility within the regime. The CPC has monopolized both the allocation of critical economic resources and appointments of key political, economic, and other societal offices through the Nomenklatura system, so that the party can distribute spoils of China’s economic growths to its key members and supporters in exchange of their loyalty. Since the beginning of Xi’s rule in 2012, the party has expanded the anticorruption and disciplinary body, committed more resources to campaigns of ideological indoctrination, increased the party’s involvement in daily policymaking and the private sector, and diversified channels of elite recruitment. These measures appear to have reinforced the party’s organizational capacity, but their long-term effects are yet to be assessed.

This chapter traces the changing contours of police corruption in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the short lifespan of the Metropolitan Police force (2008–2016) and, in doing so, illustrates the utility of a comparative historical, embedded approach. Based on in-depth interviews with dozens of police officers, public officials, technical experts, and activists, I argue that seemingly contradictory accounts of the Metropolitan Police as “surprisingly clean” and “deeply corrupt” were, to some degree, both true. On the one hand, rank-and-file officers rarely engaged in bribery, extortion, or irregular patrols, all of which remained ubiquitous in other police forces. This outcome was driven by the unique organizational characteristics of the new force but also by the structural configuration of the field, in which the nationally controlled Argentine Federal Police (PFA) remained the dominant player. At the same time, there were credible allegations of illicit revenue extraction, illegal surveillance, and ties to organized crime among Metropolitan Police leaders who – unlike PFA bosses – were tied to the Buenos Aires city government. Given this structural configuration, corruption generated novel political effects, contributing to the Buenos Aires mayor’s successful bid for the presidency.

Following a socially embedded approach to the study of corruption, this chapter shows how corruption, its meaning, and the battle against it are deeply local and temporal. Relying primarily on original party documents and news reports, this chapter traces the chronological order of anti-corruption practices between 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established, and 2020 to illustrate how the meanings of corruption, types of misbehavior to address, and the type of selected punishment were all articulated temporally.

That obtaining a driving license in India is all too easy is a public secret; the prime reason behind this “ease” is the ubiquitous and ambivalent figure of the broker who, as public understanding goes, is enmeshed in a system of bribery at the Regional Transport Office (RTO). This chapter explores why brokerage and bribery have become institutionalized at the RTO. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over three years in the southern city of Hyderabad, I analyze the frameworks through which the act of hiring a broker is rationalized and articulated by Hyderabadi motorists. I show how brokerage is justified and even actively desired through two central framings both of which emphasize that brokers act as buffers in mediating between motorists and the RTO: one, brokers act as an insurance against an arbitrary state and, in doing so, make the state legible to motorists and vice versa; and two, brokerage enables a distancing from corruption and blurring the line between legality and illegality. All these factors contribute toward a quiet but potent institutionalization of brokerage at the RTOs in Hyderabad and, on one level, become caught up in the complex contestations around the very function and purpose of a driver’s license.

This chapter explores the impact that participation in bureaucratic corruption has on citizen activism in an autocracy. Using an original survey of Russian adults (N = 2350), we find that when citizens feel extorted, they are most likely to engage politically – likely, because they resent having to pay bribes. Yet we also find that Russians who give bribes voluntarily are also more politically active than those who abstain from corruption. To explain this finding, we focus on social relationships within which corruption transactions occur and embed them into political structures of an autocracy. Our analyses reveal that, relative to citizens who abstain from corruption, personal networks of bribe-givers are more extensive, mobilizable, and strong. Such networks, we argue, sustain meaningful encounters among “birds of a different feather,” facilitating citizen collaboration across social cleavages. In unfree societies then, corruption networks build a structural platform that can be utilized for collective resistance.

Chapter 5 discusses a series of orders issued by commanders of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts in each country the two army groups occupied. It argues that these orders make it clear that the attacks on civilians were not part of leadership policy. However, several factors prevented the implementation of a strict disciplinary. Although relatively few soldiers and officers were punished, thousands of soldiers were prosecuted for crimes against civilians in Europe, including rape. The most frequent punishment was that troops’ found responsible for attacking civilians were sent to penal units. The chapter also argues that the disciplinary regime was stricter in “friendly” Yugoslavia and “neutral” Bulgaria than in “enemy” Romania, Hungary, and Austria.

It is widely recognized that inadequate government policy performance undermines public trust in government. However, there has been a lack of comprehensive studies regarding how citizens attribute responsibility across different levels of government within an authoritarian unitary context. This chapter utilizes the case of China to examine how government performance across various policy domains influences central-local political trust. The findings reveal that local governments are particularly susceptible to losing public trust due to issues of corruption. Conversely, the central government experiences a decline in public trust primarily as a result of unsatisfactory economic conditions. Additionally, both local and central governments face diminished trust stemming from poor performance in key areas such as environmental protection, food safety, public health, and primary and middle school education. The central government is not always able to evade accountability, as its perceived responsibility varies depending on specific policy issues.

China’s urban reforms commenced with a focus on micro incentives for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Over time the focus gradually shifted to the resource allocation and pricing mechanism from the single track of the planned economy, to a dual track, and ultimately to the single-track market economy. During the transition, non-state-owned businesses, including private businesses, joint ventures, and foreign-funded enterprises, were encouraged to enter the market. Their growth has facilitated the stability and rapid development of China’s economy in the course of the transition from a planned economy to a market economy. However, this transition has also brought about challenges such as corruption, widening regional disparities, and income gap, among others.