A complex anxiety tends to afflict those who work on corruption, particularly political corruption, whether they are activists engaged in combating it or merely curious to contemplate its phenomenon, concept, and definition. The anxiety greatens with the wider the research’s breadth and the deeper one penetrates the variations of its levels and types in both the Global South and the North. Its tyranny and the flexibility of its definition make it difficult to determine its exact nature and ways to combat it and minimize its effects. 

This concert has transformed into a state of dissatisfaction of the limited results in fighting corruption, despite all the efforts made in the last few years, whether in Palestine, the Arab World, the Global South, or even in the North. 

Various reasons may explain the failure of these efforts, including the fact that those who lead these efforts in most cases are parties that are able to use their positions to scatter the impact and feasibility of such efforts on the ground. This is especially the case because these parties themselves frequently are the beneficiaries of corruption – contrary to what their political and ideological discourse suggests, as observed in the neoliberal era in which we live today. 

This volume comes as a contribution to the discussion of this important topic, as it deals with corruption as a concept and within the framework of various approaches that are presented in twelve chapters that cover conceptual-ontological and theoretical aspects, in addition to surveying its manifestations in the Arab and Palestinian contexts.