Sarah Chayes’s unusual trajectory has led from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio to a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, including service to two commanders of the international forces there and to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Internationally renowned for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications, she has probed its workings on five continents – and most recently the United States. There as elsewhere, she has found, systemic corruption lies behind explosive crises: violent ideological extremism, nationalist authoritarian political leadership, mass migration, environmental devastation.

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 Paw Paw, West Virginia and Portland, Dorset, UK