SHADOW ELITE

Governments and administrations come and go, but not so a new breed of power brokers, who always seem to pop up just where the action is. Wearing different hats, they press their agendas in venue after venue. According to award?winning anthropologist Janine Wedel, these are the "shadow elite," the prime movers in a vexing new system of power and influence.

In Shadow Elite, Wedel charts how these players make public decisions without public input in realms from domestic to foreign and financial policy. Maneuvering through their many spheres of influence, they challenge both governments' rules of accountability and businesses' codes of competition, ultimately answering only to each other. From the Harvard economists who helped privatize post?Soviet Russia and the neoconservatives who helped privatize American foreign policy for thirty years (culminating with the debacle that is Iraq) to many lesserknown operators, these players flout once?sacrosanct boundaries between state and private, bureaucracy and market. This new breed, unseen by most, is steadily gaining power. Janine R. Wedel is a professor at George Mason University and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Wedel's published works include The Private Poland, and Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, which received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. She lives in Washington, D.C.