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.

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.

This concluding chapter outlines the contours of the Party-state and develops a conceptual framework to explain its distinctive mode of governance. At its core is a dual normative system: a legal system grounded in popular sovereignty is overseen and constrained by a power-based normative system designed to uphold the absolute authority of the Party Center—an organizing principle essential to maintaining the structural integrity of the Party-state. The chapter argues that the governance logic of the Party-state is best captured by the theory of Normalized Political Prerogative (NPP). According to this theory, governance unfolds through a three-step process: operationalization, normalization, and regulation. Together, these constitute the formal institutional foundation of Party-state rule. The NPP framework elucidates the systemic proliferation of corruption as an inherent byproduct of this mode of governance, the role of the Party’s disciplinary apparatus as a self-correcting mechanism to mitigate its adverse effects, and the evolving dynamics between institutions and leadership that shape politicking and power struggles within the Politburo.

The fourth chapter discusses the officers and personnel of the Court, particularly how they obtained and benefited from their positions. In so doing, the chapter reveals another additional cost wardship imposed – as much as the Crown and its favourites profited from wardship, many of the proceeds were also secreted away by its officers. This originated at the very top – Masters of the Court certainly took bribes from those seeking to obtain wardships, to the bottom, with the Court’s county officer, the feodary. The chapter includes the case study of one such feodary, John Goodhand, whose activities can be traced through the surviving documentary record. Goodhand, as well as making the usual extortions, was accused of kidnapping children he claimed were in wardship – ‘sheep committed to the wolf’ in one court document. Found guilty, he was briefly imprisoned and fined £1,000. But from the Crown’s perspective, he had been an indefatigable servant who had raised Court revenues in his county. After the fine was paid, he re-entered royal service with a letter from Charles I protecting him from future prosecutions.

In that the Crown was only able to appropriate a very small proportion of the potential revenues that might have accrued from wardship, the fourth chapter explains how this was typical of the other fiscal instruments adopted by the Tudors and, more especially, the early Stuarts to raise funds. In particular, the inability of the Crown to prevent massive embezzlement by its officers and agents is emphasised. In the longer term, the atrophying fiscal capacity of the English state and its inability to provide security from even modest external threats helped precipitate the English Civil War.

This chapter discusses the background and characteristics of the Desolate Boedelskamer’s staff, in order to analyze how they contributed to the professionalization of insolvency procedures in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Through a closer examination of the ways in which the institution dealt with fraud or mistakes, it will become clear how it helped to create a more professional and trustworthy insolvency procedure. Ultimately, it was the daily labor of commissioners and subordinate officials that constituted the foundation of the systemic trust generated by the Desolate Boedelskamer as a crucial means to repair broken relations between insolvents and their creditors.