Internationally recognized for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications, Sarah Chayes has uncovered the unrecognized reality that severe and structured corruption often prompts international crises -- including violent religious insurgency. From covering the fall of the Taliban in 2001, to living in their former heartland for a decade and advising the highest ranks of the U.S. military, Chayes will speak from her remarkable perspective to help us draw crucial lessons from the Taliban's triumphant return to power.
Former special advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Author, NPR correspondent, and former senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Sarah Chayes's remarkable trajectory has led her from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio and covering the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan to running a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency. She went on to advise the topmost levels of the U.S. military, serving as special adviser to two commanders of the international forces in Kabul and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. She left the Pentagon for a five-year stint at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she extracted the broadly relevant core from those experiences.
Internationally recognized for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications, she has uncovered the unrecognized reality that severe and structured corruption can prompt international crises, such as revolutions and other uprisings, violent insurgency, and environmental devastation. Corruption of this sort is the operating system of sophisticated networks, which weave together government officials, business magnates and private charities, and out and out criminals, and represents, in Sarah's view, the primary threat to democracy in our lifetimes.
She is the author of On Corruption In America: And What Is at Stake, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (winner of the LA Times Book Prize), and The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.
She lives in Paris and Paw Paw, West Virginia.
Virtual Event in collaboration with World Denver. Register at https://secure.worlddenver.org/np/clients/worlddenver/eventRegistration.jsp?event=197