Conclusions: I summarize some of the shortcomings of current international legal regimes for dealing adequately with grand corruption, summarize some promising avenues for doing so; evaluate the proposal to create an International Anti-Corruption Court, tackle some of the admitted shortcomings of my approach and note the convergence of current anti-corruption struggles with other social movements.

This chapter first provides a broad definition of corruption and discusses why it is so toxic to effective governance. We then address how corruption has emerged as a key issue in the development process after being ignored for many decades. We explore the ways in which, without proper vigilance, government and corruption can become intertwined and feed off each other, destroying the foundations of human prosperity and the very purpose of governance. Existing efforts to tackle corruption at the national, regional and global levels are reviewed, and additional ways forward, particularly as regards the role of economic policies in developing the right sorts of incentives and institutions to reduce the incidence of corruption, are presented. Finally, proposals are put forth for the establishment of an International Anticorruption Court (IACC) to greatly strengthen and better implement a range of legal instruments that are already in place, but that have had limited success in checking the growth of multiple forms of corruption across the planet – affecting developing and developed countries alike. The setting up of an IACC is seen as a necessary adjunct to existing tools to check the spread of what many now regard as a global epidemic.