First published 1997, this volume examines the way in which political corruption remains neglected as a matter of scholarly enquiry and research. There is still a powerful and traditional taboo which is quite out of the step with the topic’s real world significance and the increasing attention it receives from serious sections of the media. The book aims by systematic exposition and case study to break down that taboo and to demonstrate the topic’s importance within a framework provided by the discipline of geography. The novelty of the book is then that it considers a formerly unconsidered factor - corruption - as part of the world’s geography, as both part of the geographical context in which human activity takes place and as a spatially variable condition explicable at least in part in terms of other geographies. The conclusion is that much geographical scholarship ignores this factor at the risk of its credibility.