Sins of Commission: The Arms Trade and Its Impact on Accountable Democracy

Andrew Feinstein is the author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As a South African parliamentarian, Feinstein investigated and exposed a massive and corrupt arms deal that implicated top government officials. He is currently creating a web-based resource on the global arms trade for use by civil society groups, watchdogs, elected representatives, activists, and journalists.

Elected to parliament as a member of the African National Congress in 1994, Feinstein served on the committee on public accounts. In that role, he attempted to investigate the involvement by senior government and party officials in the largest corruption scandal in the nation’s history. Forced by his senior colleagues in the party to resign his seat, Feinstein now lives in London, where he works as a campaigner, writer, and advisor to corruption investigations. He is a founder of Corruption Watch, whose mission is to monitor and expose corporate bribery and its impacts on governance, democracy, and development.

He is the author of the best-selling political memoir After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa's Uncertain Future.

Karin Lissakers is executive director of the Revenue Watch Institute.

She has held senior posts in the U.S. government, academia and several think tanks. Lissakers was United States executive director on the Board of the International Monetary Fund from 1993 to 2001, representing the Fund’s largest shareholder during a period of turmoil in international markets and a U.S.-led campaign to redesign the international financial architecture and reform the IMF, including opening its policies and practices to public scrutiny.

Lissakers served as deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State and was staff director of the foreign economic policy subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the first woman to hold such a post.