Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

THIEVES OF STATE

Sarah Chayes

Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

A former Special Advisor to Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, and award-winning NPR correspondent explains how government’s oldest problem is its greatest destabilizing force.

Thieves of State argues that corruption is not just a nuisance; it is a major source of geopolitical turmoil.

Many governments have grown so corrupt as to resemble glorified criminal gangs. And this development is provoking extreme reactions ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion.

Through intensive first-hand reporting, Chayes explores this link throughout our world: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government—but also redesigning Al Qaeda—and Nigerians embracing both evangelical Christianity and Islamist terrorist groups like Boko Haram. The pattern, moreover, pervades history. Canonical political thinkers such as John Locke and Machiavelli, as well as the great medieval Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk, all named corruption as a threat to the realm. In a thrilling argument that connects the Protestant Reformation to the Arab Spring, Chayes asserts that we cannot afford not to attack corruption, for it is a cause, and not a result, of global instability.

Sarah Chayes was a journalist, historian, and public intellectual before she went "inside the wire". She has crossed over to becoming a direct participant in the military as a civilian advisor at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

She was special assistant to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and contributed to Cabinet-level strategic decision-making on US policy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Arab Spring. Chayes focused on governance and corruption. Almost the only American to do so, she lived on the economy among ordinary Afghans in the heart of the growing insurgency.

Sarah is the recipient of the inaugural Ruth Adams Award for writing on strategic issues, the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah Award. Previously, she was a Paris-based correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), covering the war in Serbia and Bosnia, as well as conflicts in Israel/Palestine, Algeria, and Lebanon.

She was featured in the full-length Sundance/Frontline world documentary, Life After War/A House for Haji Baba, which was aired on the Sundance channel in 2003.

She founded Arghand [http://www.arghand.org/] – a manufacturing cooperative where men and women fashion high-end skin-care products for export, using local fruits, nuts, and botanicals.

Chayes graduated from Phillips Academy in 1980 and Harvard University in 1984, earning the Radcliffe College History Prize.

She is now a contributing writer for the LA Times and has published articles in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. She has appeared on “NOW with Bill Moyers,” ABC News (Person of the Week), CNN, the Rachel Maddow Show, Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, Reliable Sources, Anderson Cooper 360, NPR’s Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Chayes lectures widely.

Available products
Book Published 2015-01-19 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)
Book Published 2015-01-19 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

The target of her zeal is government corruption around the world -- an old challenge but one she recasts in urgent and novel terms.

Thieves of State is a compelling read. Drawing from detailed experience in Afghanistan as well as reporting from a number of today’s other crisis spots, Sarah Chayes illustrates how corruption not only impacts ordinary people, but poses an acute threat to the stability and security of countries.

This is an essential and very readable book about an explosive topic. In a stunning and compelling argument, Sarah Chayes transforms our understanding of the ugly reality behind sustained terrorism and other threats around the globe. She writes with an authenticity born of on-the-ground, in-the-markets and at-the-headquarters experiences that are unmatched by any other American.

[Chayes] tells the story of what happened in Afghanistan brilliantly, and compares her experience there with the current corruption in Egypt, Russia and the dismal rest… [a] page-turner.

Sarah Chayes provides a vivid, ground-level view on how pervasive corruption undermines U.S. foreign policy and breeds insurgency. Thieves of State provides critical lessons that all policymakers should heed.

...alarming account of the role played by acute government corrution in fostering violent extremism... insightful, disquieting reading.

Makes a strong case that acute corruption causes not only social breakdown but also violent extremism… An important book that should be required reading for officials in foreign service, and for those working in commerce or the military. The story will interest the nonspecialist reader too.

Illuminating…scholars and CNN junkies alike should be intrigued by the issues Chayes brings up and impressed with the solutions she suggests.

Informative, thought-provoking, very interesting and concisely written… Through personal experience and her own research, Chayes makes a simple yet profound argument.

Sarah Chayes brilliantly illuminates a topic no one wants talk about—but we must. Corruption is an insidious force that is causing some of the most dangerous challenges our world is facing. It has to be at the core of America’s strategies, engagements and relationships for the twenty-first century.

Thieves of State is a revolutionary book. It stands our understanding of the sources of violent extremism on its head, arguing that the governments we have been relying on to fight terrorism are themselves one of its most potent and insidious sources. Sarah Chayes weaves together history, adventure, political analysis, personal experience, culture, and religion in a shimmering and compelling tapestry.

Chayes tells [a] fascinating story… [T]he central revelation in Thieves of the State: at a certain point, systemic corruption became not just a lamentable by-product of the war but an accelerant of conflict… Chayes argues, convincingly, [that state-sanctioned larceny is] a threat not just to Afghanistan’s national security but to that of the United States.

I can't imagine a more important book for our time. With a novelist's fine sense of drama, Chayes has written about one of the most crucial issues at hand: the startlingly obvious—and entirely overlooked—connection between deep corruption and civil violence. Not only is this book a pleasure to read, it has a brilliant and urgent message about our world.