Suchergebnisse

The paper examines cases of corrupt military procurement in Uganda since the late 1990s. It also considers the illicit business activities of Ugandan army officers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1998. The paper then discusses how military corruption aroused the concern of parliament, and became a matter of importance in the 2001 presidential elections. We argue that the prevalence of military corruption was the result of government and army leaders not being subject to public accountability. Not a single leader has been faced with prosecution or punishment for corrupt military behaviour. We conclude by arguing that military corruption has helped to maintain the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in power, although this has been realised at the cost of building a professional national army in Uganda.

Abstract
Why are politicians more likely to be prosecuted and convicted for corruption in some contexts rather than in others? Pulling together disparate threads of the literature on what we call the politics of criminal accountability, this review organizes current explanations along three levels of inquiry: (1) micro, encompassing characteristics of individual criminal-accountability agents and defendants, such as their partisanship and ideology, professional ethos, enforcement costs and judicial corruption; (2) meso, emphasizing the independence, capacities and coordination degrees of criminal-accountability institutions; and (3) macro, including the impact of political regimes, political competition, support from civil society, corruption levels and international norms. In doing so, we draw attention to methodological shortcomings and opportunities for research on the topic, providing a roadmap for this field of inquiry that also includes unexplored questions and tentative answers. Furthermore, we present new systematic data set that reveals a substantial increase in the conviction of former heads of government for corruption since 2000, underscoring the importance of the phenomenon and highlighting the need for further research into the politics of criminal accountability.