The world dies. A foul disease infects it, spreading its taint on the winds, in the waters, polluting the very land itself. And wherever it touches, it breeds corruption, manifesting as mutation, malformation, leaving it altered, changed, and utterly mad with the wickedness it instils. This is Chaos-the shadow that hangs over the Old World and beyond. It is the terrifying threat of the north, looming large in the minds of Men, Elves, and Dwarfs alike.

Tome of Salvation provides a detailed look at religion in the Empire, exploring faith's role and function within the nation's convoluted and complex society. Inside this massive sourcebook you will find new magic spells, new rituals and artifacts, new careers, and extensive details on gods, festivals, holy days, and the lives of Old World priests.

By 1816, Japan had recovered from the famines of the 1780s and moved beyond the political reforms of the 1790s. Despite persistent economic and social stresses, the country seemed headed for a new period of growth. The idea that the shogunate would not last forever was far from anyone's mind. Yet, in that year, an anonymous samurai produced a scathing critique of Edo society. Writing as Buyo Inshi, "a retired gentleman of Edo," he expressed in An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard a profound despair with the state of the realm. Seeing decay wherever he turned, Buyo feared the world would soon descend into war. In his anecdotes, Buyo shows a sometimes surprising familiarity with the shadier aspects of Edo life. He speaks of the corruption of samurai officials; the suffering of the poor in villages and cities; the operation of brothels; the dealings of blind moneylenders; the selling and buying of temple abbotships; and the dubious strategies seen in law courts. Perhaps it was the frankness of his account that made him prefer to stay anonymous. A team of Edo specialists undertook the original translation of Buyo's work. This abridged edition streamlines this translation for classroom use, preserving the scope and emphasis of Buyo's argument while eliminating repetitions and diversions. It also retains the introductory essay that situates the work within Edo society and history.

A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.

The pervasiveness of corruption has been aided by the readiness of both Peruvians and the international community to turn a blind eye.

Webs of Corruption is an innovative study demonstrating that terrorist and criminal activity intersect more narrowly than is widely believed. Mariya Y. Omelicheva and Lawrence P. Markowitz analyze the links between the drug trade and terror financing in Central Asia, finding that state security services shape the nexus of trafficking and terrorism.

Informal relations have been one of the major research topics of the social sciences since the 1990s. In order to allow for meaningful comparisons between different combinations of the positive and negative effects of informal relations on democratic representation, this book focuses on post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe as a particular region where formal democratic rules have been established, but competing informal rules are still strong. A broad spectrum of related analytical concepts is discussed from different perspectives and from different academic disciplines, then empirical cases of the relationship between informal relations and democratic representation are analyzed. The contributions span the whole continuum, as we perceive it, from civil society networks seen as supporting democratic representation to the perversion of democratic representation through political corruption. The final part of the book takes a closer look at corruption through four case studies from Russia.