Corruption in public administration dates from time immemorial. And though agencies such as Transparency International rate some states as more or less corrupt than others, no state is above, beyond, or immune to public corruption. One need only review the serial revelations of corruption within the governments of the District of Columbia, Spain, or Hong Kong in recent years to see that it can and does happen everywhere. However, as this book argues throughout, the recent proliferating interaction among criminal, terrorist, and insurgent networks and the exponentially greater magnitude of their commerce made possible by the processes of globalization have moved the overall threat posed by state collusion with transnational illicit networks from the status of international nuisance to a substantial threat to the contemporary international order