Sarah Chayes

Sarah Chayes’s unusual trajectory has led from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio to a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, including several years as a soap-maker, and service to two commanders of the international forces and to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. Internationally renowned for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications, she has probed its workings on five continents – and most recently in the United States. Here as elsewhere, systemic corruption lies behind apparently diverse crises, including ones we will be discussing at this symposium: climate and environmental calamity, mass migration, and income inequality, as well as extremist uprisings and civic revolt. She is the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (a 2016 L.A. Times Book Prize winner) and On Corruption in America – And What Is at Stake. She lives in Paris and Paw Paw, WV.