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The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
by Anne Applebaum
From the Pulitzer-prize winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them
We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.
What book or books are you reading this week? (01/23/2025)
I just finished Volume IV of The Cazalet Chronicles which I loved. I am now reading Anne Applebaum's book, Autocracy, Inc. It is very interesting and well-written. So many of our assumptions after the Berlin Wall fell and the West opened trade with China in the 90s turned out to be wrong. It is a...
-Cynthia_Hampton
"Autocracy, Inc. is a valuable book for many reasons, but the focus on illicit wealth creation and on those in democracies who enable it is especially timely. So is Applebaum's recommendation that we wage war on autocratic behaviors wherever they occur." —The Washington Post
"A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism ... Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless." —The Guardian
"Anne Applebaum's far-sighted book reveals an international network of autocrats who seek to subvert democracy…But it is also a practical manual packed with specific proposals to combat autocracy, in all its nefarious guises. Now it's up to us—the proponents of democracy–to step up and put these ideas into action." —Garry Kasparov, chess grandmaster and author of Winter is Coming
This information about Autocracy, Inc. was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, Anne Applebaum became a staff writer at The Atlantic in January 2020. She is the author of five critically acclaimed and award-winning books: Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington, D.C.
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