The below is an excerpt from our new report, “Tracing Corruption: Emerging Patterns in the Global Arms Trade” (World Peace Foundation and the Corruption Tracker, August 2025).
In 2019, Raytheon Technologies (now known as RTX), one of the largest arms manufacturers in the world, was served with a subpoena as part of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into potential corruption. The inquiry centered on two separate schemes, between 2012 and 2018, involving the defrauding of the U.S. government in relation to Patriot Missile fire units and a surveillance radar system. Raytheon inflated contract costs and paid bribes to a Qatari agent to secure the contracts, causing more than $111 million in “financial harm” to the government through overpayments for defense products and services. Numerous internal warnings, ranging from vague invoices to irregular consulting contracts, were reportedly raised but largely dismissed, allowing Raytheon’s operations to continue without disruption.
Despite extensive evidence of wrongdoing, Raytheon resolved the case through two Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA) with the U.S. Department of Justice. DPAs allow corporations to avoid criminal conviction by agreeing to certain conditions (usually financial penalties, compliance programs, and vague commitments to reform) without admitting guilt. These agreements effectively shield corporate actors from legal accountability while enabling business as usual.
Under the terms of Raytheon’s DPAs, the company avoided criminal prosecution in exchange for paying fines, admitting to certain facts, and agreeing to internal reforms and monitoring. The combined penalty ($146.8 million in criminal fines and $111.2 million in restitution) amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist for a transnational corporation year. This case exemplifies a broader pattern: arms manufacturers implicated in corruption routinely avoid meaningful consequences, protected by legal frameworks designed to preserve their profitability. These outcomes reveal how accountability, as currently practiced, upholds militarized power structures while failing to prevent harm or dismantle the conditions that enable it.
The Raytheon case is not an exception, but part of a systemic pattern in which mechanisms like fines, settlements, and corporate monitors serve as a facade of accountability. These tools rarely address endemic corruption and do nothing to disrupt the structural impunity granted to transnational arms dealers. Lower-level actors, especially those from non-Western, purchasing countries, are more likely to face punitive outcomes, while corporate executives, board members, and key decision makers routinely avoid individual liability. When it comes to prosecution and incarceration, responses to international crimes mirror the racism and class inequality embedded in domestic carceral systems. This stark imbalance exposes a global economy sustained by militarism, surveillance, and incarceration, where legal systems selectively enforce accountability to protect capital and uphold state power.
In an era marked by escalating global violence, ballooning defense budgets, and expanding carceral systems, the lack of meaningful accountability for arms corporations is not a regulatory flaw, it is a deliberate feature. Shielding corporations from consequence entrenches militarized economies and contributes to the erosion of community safety, participatory oversight, and equity. Confronting this reality requires moving beyond technocratic reforms or simply imposing harsher, more “effective” carceral sentences. This section examines how DPAs function not as tools of justice but as mechanisms of impunity in the global arms trade. DPAs do not disrupt the systems that perpetuate harm. Rather, they prioritize stability for powerful institutions over justice for impacted communities. In exposing the legal, political, and economic dynamics that underpin these agreements, this section makes the case for an abolitionist approach to accountability, one that moves beyond carceral and financial remedies and toward justice, community repair, and demilitarization.
DPAs and the Arms Trade: Instruments of Impunity
In response to the challenges of prosecuting powerful corporations, states have increasingly turned to DPAs as an alternative mechanism for resolving cases of corporate crime in the arms trade. While DPAs are now common in the U.S., U.K., France, and Canada, their global expansion reflects a dangerous normalization of impunity in high-stakes industries like defense and aviation. Notable examples from the Corruption Tacker database include:
- Rolls-Royce (2017): The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) reached a DPA with Rolls-Royce over widespread bribery and corruption offenses spanning multiple countries and decades, with the company agreeing to pay a total of £497.2 million. The DPA, approved by Southwark Crown Court, required Rolls-Royce to pay penalties, disgorge profits, implement enhanced compliance measures, and cooperate fully with ongoing investigations. Despite the severity of the conduct, including senior executive involvement and the use of offshore payments, the court found the DPA “fair, reasonable and proportionate,” citing the company’s extensive cooperation, management overhaul, and commitment to reform (see Rolls-Royce Hawk Jet Deal).
- Airbus (2020): Following a multi—year investigation by French, British, and U.S. authorities, Airbus admitted to a bribery and corruption scheme involving defense and aviation sales across at least 19 markets. The company ultimately entered into three DPAs, agreeing to pay nearly $4 billion in penalties. No individual executives have been held accountable to date (see Airbus: Indonesia Aircraft Deals, Airbus: Vietnam Aircraft Deal, and Airbus: Ghana Aircraft Deals).
These cases highlight how DPAs function as tools of regulatory theater, creating the appearance of accountability without challenging the structures that enable corporate profit. DPAs are often presented as pragmatic alternatives to criminal prosecution, justified by the need to avoid economic disruption or protect national security. Through secretive, state-sanctioned negotiations, arms manufacturers and other powerful actors accused of serious harm are allowed to self-regulate, pay fines, and resume business as usual, keeping access to public contracts and strategic partnerships.
In the global arms trade, DPAs expose the deep entanglement between state power and corporate misconduct. Governments frequently fail to regulate the industry effectively and may even benefit from or enable corrupt practices. State actors’ political and strategic interests in arms deals complicate impartial investigation or prosecution. While prosecutors may not personally profit, they often work within legal and political frameworks aligned with national security and economic priorities. Rather than disrupting corruption, DPAs serve to manage it discreetly, revealing a system designed not merely for enforcement failure but to protect dominant interests.
The opacity of DPAs compounds the harm. These agreements are typically negotiated behind closed doors, shielded from public scrutiny. Communities affected by the arms trade, whether through corruption, conflict, or displacement, are excluded from the process entirely. The rationale for settlements, the extent of wrongdoing, and the terms of so-called remediation are hidden from view.
More troubling still is how corporations entering into DPAs remain eligible for future government contracts. In the defense sector, where state contracts are a primary source of revenue, this continued access represents not just complicity but reward. DPAs do not deter misconduct; they normalize it, treating penalties as manageable costs of doing business. What is framed as “accountability” becomes a transactional process that strengthens corporate influence while failing to prevent further harm.
At a deeper level, DPAs reveal how national legal systems structurally favor the powerful with leniency while disproportionately punishing the poor and marginalized. Critics rightly describe DPAs as emblematic of a two-tiered system, one in which wealth and influence shield corporations from criminal consequence, while individuals, particularly in overpoliced and under-resourced communities, face incarceration for far lesser offenses. As Open Secrets notes, “When the criminal justice system imprisons those without money and resources but allows for a DPA for those with money, this undermines the legitimacy of the justice system itself.”
Sam Perlo-Freeman, one of the few scholar-activists writing about DPAs in the context of corruption in the arms trade, argues that they are typically granted after misconduct is uncovered rather than in response to voluntary self-reporting, thereby undermining their intended legal function. Examining DPAs more broadly, Branislav Hock and Elizabeth Dávid-
Barrett describe them as part of a “compliance game,” where corporations consolidate multiple offenses into a single negotiation to mitigate risk. This approach secures institutional continuity while shifting blame from individuals to the abstract corporate entity. Taken together, these dynamics illustrate how DPAs not only fail to deliver justice but actively reproduce structural inequalities under the guise of legal accountability.
Ultimately, DPAs are not instruments of justice but tools of containment. While they may appear to address corporate misconduct, their actual function is to preserve the legitimacy of militarized economies by managing dissent and avoiding disruption. Their application within the arms trade, an industry inseparable from global violence, neocolonial extraction, and imperial enforcement, demands not reform but radical rethinking and experimentation.
No Justice in Deals or Cells
While DPAs are often framed as pragmatic tools for corporate accountability, their real-world application, particularly in industries like the arms trade, where political power and militarized interests converge, exposes their inability to address the root causes of harm. DPAs, like other legal mechanisms, are embedded within systems that prioritize state and corporate stability over justice, and often operate to deflect scrutiny rather than confront violence or exploitation. Criminal charges are occasionally brought against individuals, as seen in illustrative cases from the CT database, such as Fraudulent Contracts for Peter the Great Cruiser Overhaul, The Halal Meat Scandal, or The Indonesian AW101 Helicopter Deal.
Carceral sentences, long upheld as necessary for punishment and deterrence, are increasingly revealed to be both ineffective and harmful. The logic of general deterrence, based on the assumption that the threat of imprisonment discourages future wrongdoing, has been challenged by extensive criminological research. A 2021 meta-analysis of 116 studies found that incarceration either had no effect or slightly increased a person’s risk of future crime compared to non-custodial sentences, across all demographics and facility types. This data undermines one of the central justifications for punitive accountability and exposes prison as a site of compounded violence, not prevention.
This critique is especially salient when considering white-collar and corporate crime. In these contexts, the risk of detection is low, prosecution rare, and sentencing lenient—conditions that severely undercut the very notion of deterrence. As Pedro Gerson states, “White-collar crime is underenforced: not enough cases are brought, not many convictions are secured, and when they are, those who were convicted usually benefit from leniency not seen in other kinds of criminal wrongdoing.”93 Similarly, Perlo-Freeman argues that prosecutions of arms-exporting companies for corruption are infrequent, typically limited to mid-level managers, while convictions of officials in recipient countries are more common and depend on local political dynamics and judicial independence.[i] This lack of accountability stems from both the complexity of transnational bribery cases and the political protection afforded to major defense firms considered vital to national security, as seen in the UK’s 2006 decision to halt the BAE-Saudi Al Yamamah investigation.
Traditional approaches to corporate accountability, such as criminal prosecution and monetary sanctions, also carry significant social consequences that often disproportionately impact workers, communities, and those already economically vulnerable. Arms manufacturers, like other multinational corporations, are deeply embedded in national and regional economies, providing employment and infrastructure investment while simultaneously profiting from conflict, extraction, and displacement. Criminal sanctions that disrupt or dissolve such corporations are frequently avoided due to concerns over job loss or market destabilization.[ii] But this logic reveals the state’s deeper investment in protecting militarized economic structures, even when they perpetuate violence. This is not unique to the arms trade; it echoes the post-2008 financial crisis, when major banks were deemed “too big to fail.” Today, arms manufacturers have joined the ranks of this corporate elite, seen as too strategically important to hold accountable, and increasingly treated as too big to even regulate. This exposes the contradiction at the heart of conventional accountability: justice is only pursued when it does not threaten capital accumulation or the authority of the state.
Towards Abolitionist Accountability
An abolitionist approach refuses to treat harm as something that can be resolved through punishment, fines, or surface-level reforms. It rejects accountability frameworks that reduce justice to transactions between elites or procedural box-checking. Instead, abolitionist accountability demands dismantling the political and economic structures that enable and normalize widespread violence and exploitation. Justice is reframed not as discipline or punishment but as a collective, community rooted process centering healing, reparations, and liberation.
Rather than preserving or legitimizing carceral and corporate institutions, abolitionist accountability calls for building new systems grounded in transparency, mutual care, and a radical redistribution of power and resources. It insists on solidarity with those most harmed by war, corruption, and incarceration, and on divesting from the industries and ideologies that sustain these violences. In the arms trade, this means rejecting not only DPAs but the entire illusion that justice can coexist with capitalism. It requires confronting and uprooting the systemic entanglements between governments and arms dealers and replacing them with global practices rooted in life-affirming alternatives, such as:
- Dismantling economic and political power structures: An abolitionist stance refuses reformist tinkering with the arms trade and instead targets the foundational systems that uphold it, ending defense industry influence on policy, divesting public funds from arms manufacturers, and challenging the normalization of weapons as instruments of diplomacy, development, and security. Next steps could include establishing uncompromising whistleblower protections and implementing legally binding, enforced mandates for divestment from contracts linked to corruption.
- Community-led transparency and accountability: True transparency goes beyond government mandates and corporate self-policing by centering the voices and leadership of communities most harmed by arms-related corruption and violence.[iii] Accountability requires transformative tools such as people’s tribunals, public hearings, and grassroots monitoring initiatives that actively dismantle systems of impunity. At a minimum, full and timely public disclosure of all DPA agreements, compliance monitoring, and regulatory decisions should be mandated, alongside the funding and empowerment of independent anti-corruption bodies that include community representatives in oversight roles throughout the entire accountability cycle.
- Transformative and restorative justice: Instead of punishment, abolitionist frameworks prioritize healing, accountability, and relationship repair. Reparations for communities harmed by corruption and violence include financial compensation, community-driven investment, and justice processes that center collective care and transformative change. One potential approach could be establishing community-led reparations councils in regions impacted by arms-related corruption and violence, tasked with designing and distributing financial compensation, public acknowledgments of harm, and infrastructure investments tailored to local needs.
International solidarity and non-carceral responses to corruption: Given the transnational nature of the arms trade, abolitionist accountability roots itself in international solidarity. It resists criminalization and carceral logics and calls for dismantling militarized borders, opposing arms-based authoritarianism, and developing shared non-carceral strategies to challenge both corporate and state violence. Divestment and redistribution of resources: Abolition demands defunding the arms industry and redirecting public investments toward life-affirming infrastructures (e.g., education, healthcare, housing, climate repair) and enacting strict bans on political contributions and government procurement contracts involving corrupt or abusive corporations.
Taken together, the evidence and arguments laid out in this section reveal that DPAs are not failures of justice, but expressions of a legal and economic order built to shield militarized corporate power. True accountability cannot be achieved through mechanisms designed to preserve impunity. If we are to meaningfully address the harms of arms trade corruption, we must reject frameworks that rely on punishment, opacity, and elite negotiation. Abolitionist approaches are not abstract ideals, they are necessary strategies for confronting entrenched power, restoring community safety, and transforming a global system that treats corruption and violence as normal.
This essay is an excerpt from “Tracing Corruption: Emerging Patterns in the Global Arms Trade” (World Peace Foundation and the Corruption Tracker, August 2025). Read the full report here: https://worldpeacefoundation.org/publication/tracing-corruption-emerging-patterns-in-the-global-arms-trade/
[i] See Sam Perlo-Freeman, “Military Spending and Corruption,” The Economics of Peace and Security Journal 13, no. 2 (2018): 37–45, https://doi.org/10.15355/epsj.13.2.37; and Sam Perlo-Freeman, “Corruption in the Arms Trade,” in The Elgar Companion to the International Criminal Court, ed. Margaret M. deGuzman and Valerie Oosterveld (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/ed-coll/9781789900989/9781789900989.00015.xml.
[ii] Refer to the commentary by Common Wealth and Anna Stavrianakis, which discusses recommendations for the US and UK to advance a just transition that balances worker support with ecological restoration, advocating for public ownership and repurposing of the arms industry alongside the state’s obligation to provide alternative employment pathways for military personnel. Patrick Bigger et al., “Less War, Less Warming. A Reparative Approach to US and UK Military Ecological Damages,” November 6, 2023, https://www.common-wealth.org/publications/less-war-less-warming-a-reparative-approach-to-us-and-uk-military-ecological-damages; Anna Stavrianakis, “Demand for Conversion: Economics and Ethics,” PRISME Initiative, accessed July 29, 2025, https://prismeinitiative.org/publications/demand-for-conversion-economics-ethics-anna-stavrianakis/#sd-footnote20sym
[iii] Most weapons are never used. This raises an important question: who constitutes the directly impacted community in such cases? In the context of the South African arms deal, Andrew Feinstein effectively argued that the harm was borne not by victims of direct violence, but by those deprived of state resources, such as the millions suffering from HIV/AIDS, who were denied adequate care due to corrupt arms procurement draining public funds. Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
