Welcome back to the podcast, bribed, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Roggey, and we're talking today about a great new book on corruption,

The Conundrum of Corruption.

My guest is Michael Johnston, friend, and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science

Emeritus at Colgate University. Michael

wrote his most recent book with Scott Fritzen, Dean of the College of International Studies,

and William J. Crowe Jr. Chair in Geopolitics at the University of Oklahoma. Michael,

welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining me.

Thank you. It's good to be back.

Your book is ambitious, so it probably makes sense to follow the outline that you and Scott use in it.

Can I just start by asking you to take us through part one of the book and looking back at where the anti-corruption community started and where we are now.

That's an enormous question to open with.

But let me turn that over to you to hit the highlights.

A really important bundle of concerns to start with, and one way to organize it is the way in which what

was an anti-corruption movement reflecting many sources, many outlooks, many interests, has

solidified and grown and acquired resources in such a way as to become an anti-corruption industry.

And Scott and I are not the only two to note that in our writing.

Nonetheless, it's an important kind of change because the growth has brought resources and

analytical capacity that we never had that we couldn't have dreamed of. It has brought

international legitimacy. Anti-corruption now has a pretty much permanent place on the international

agenda, whereas 30 years ago it did not. And yet at the same time, the industry has become more or less

set in its ways, somewhat hegemonic, has become, I think, indifferent to the fact that its track

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