Principal speaker
Sarah Chayes
Other speakers
Professor Susan Forde, Griffith University
After more than a decade analysing corruption in the developing world, Sarah Chayes turned her lens on her own country: The United States of America.
She discovered that the same models of corruption fit too closely for comfort.
Vested interests have bent government powers to serve themselves, not the citizens, with dizzying results - egregious Supreme Court rulings, revolving doors and cozy deals between the state and the private sector, and forty years of financial meltdowns.
Corruption today, far from just acts committed by disreputable individuals to line their pockets, is the standard mode of operation for sophisticated networks crossing political, ideological and national boundaries. Even the Trump administration's venality is more a symptom of a widespread trend than an aberration (Chayes, 2020).
Returning Integrity 20 speaker, Sarah Chayes, is an international expert on corruption and its causes. She is author of the prize-winning Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security and the recently released On Corruption in America and What is at Stake.
Sarah will be in conversation with Professor Susan Forde, director of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research and chair of Integrity 20.