In the first two articles in this series, we examined corruption’s devastating impact on economic systems and its corrosive effect on democratic institutions and political legitimacy. In this concluding piece, we turn to the dimension that receives the least attention and may be the most consequential: what corruption does to the social fabric — the norms, relationships, and shared institutions that make civil society possible....

Democracies are not destroyed overnight. They do not typically fall to tanks rolling through capital cities or dramatic coups broadcast live on state television. More often, they are hollowed out slowly, incrementally, from within — by corruption that erodes the institutions designed to hold power accountable until those institutions become shells, performing the rituals of democracy while delivering none of its substance. Corruption is democracy’s...

Corruption is not a victimless crime. It is not an abstraction confined to bad actors in distant governments or kleptocratic regimes we read about in Foreign Affairs. It is a pernicious, systemic force that imposes a brutal and largely invisible tax on every citizen — on the price of medicine, the quality of roads, the fairness of a business license application, and the prospects of...

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain One of the biggest mistakes multinational companies make is assuming that U.S. and UK sanctions compliance are essentially the same. They’re not. Last week’s joint guidance issued by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the UK’s...

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” — Winston Churchill For years, multinational companies have been hyper-focused on OFAC sanctions compliance. The UK sanctions regime was relatively quiet in impact until the global Russian sanctions hit. Now, the world has changed in many respects in the sanctions arena. Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and...