ABSTRACT
In the long and difficult process of peacebuilding in post-conflict states, corruption has increasingly been identified as a major obstacle to success. In this chapter I argue that behind the seemingly practical questions of how best to eliminate corruption in peacebuilding contexts lie a number of substantial conceptual problems linked to how we define corruption and how we understand its place in unstable political contexts. These problems are rarely squared up to in the peacebuilding literature, and the corruption literature rarely deals with peacebuilding as a distinct problem area. 1 In an attempt to bridge the two areas, I begin by identifying a set of problems with current definitions of corruption and by developing a definition of corruption that has a number of key advantages over those current in the literature.
