16th IACC

At a time when hard security threats drive an increasing proportion of western policymaking, this session is designed to make the case that corruption isn't "just" a values issue, a matter of right and wrong, or a brake on economic development. Corruption lies at the root of most of the security crises the world is grappling with today, including extremist insurgencies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, Iraq’s collapse and the spread of ISIS, revolutions and their spin-offs from the Arab world to Ukraine, and the state implosion witnessed in Latin America where governments are entering into symbiotic relationships with transnational criminal superpowers. Countering corruption is no luxury. The security of the planet depends on it.

The primary aim is to make this case. Most anti-corruption activists tend to think in economic terms, in terms of human development or human security, rather than looking at the problem with a harder "international security" framing. Consequently, they don't understand why western governments and major western private-sector actors seem so stubbornly to continue enabling corruption. This session will help participants place the corruption issue within a context that is meaningful to top decision-makers in western government and business.

The session will derive an analytical framework for understanding the structure of corruption in a particular country, the types of security risks that can result, and the vulnerabilities that allow for concerted action between local civil society and Western activists seeking to influence the behaviour of their own governments and key private-sector players.

This session will be particularly focused on Western foreign and security policies that enable acutely corrupt practices, either unwittingly, or because policy trade-offs push corruption down on the list of priorities. While certain human rights concerns do gain traction in policy circles, corruption seems rarely to figure in bilateral relations with difficult countries. (The Ukraine and Iraq crises represent initial signs of change in this regard.)

International collaboration -- both among governments seeking to curb corruption, and between local civil society activists and their Western counterparts pressuring their home country governments and businesses -- is critical to changing the incentive structure within which corrupt officials are operating.

This session will be focused on a subset of states that can be considered "acutely" or "systemically" corrupt. It will examine corruption in such countries as a functioning system, in which government itself has been repurposed to serve the aim of enriching the ruling clique. Impunity for such corruption is created when the international community looks the other way, or actively facilitates it, by laundering perpetrators' assets -- and their images. Western collusion -- witting or unwitting -- is a significant element of the structure of impunity these networks build and enjoy.