How Tyrants Fall 1-1

 Dr Marcel Dirsus is a Non-Resident Fellow at the institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. An expert on regime instability and politicalviolence, he has advised democratic governments, foundations, multinational corporations and international organisations includingNATO and OECD. His writing and research has been featured by the Financial Times, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, New York Times andWashington Post.

OceanofPDF.com

How Tyrants Fall

And How Nations Survive

Marcel Dirsus

www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

OceanofPDF.com

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by John Murray (Publishers)

Copyright © Marcel Dirsus 2024

The right of Marcel Dirsus to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designsand Patents Act 1988.

Cover design © Luke Bird

Cover image © Shutterstock.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by anymeans without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that inwhich it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ebook ISBN 978 1 399 80951 1

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

John Murray Press, part of Hodder & Stoughton Limited

An Hachette UK company

OceanofPDF.com

Look out for linked text (which is in blue) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between notes and main text.

OceanofPDF.com

For Anneliese

OceanofPDF.com

Contents

Introduction: The Golden Gun

1 The Dictator’s Treadmill

2 The Enemy Within

3 Weakening the Warriors

4 Rebels, Guns and Money

5 Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

6 You Shoot, You Lose

7 No Other Option

8 Be Careful What You Wish For

9 How to Topple a Tyrant

Acknowledgements

Notes

OceanofPDF.com

Introduction: The Golden Gun

I don’t deny I’m lonely. Deeply so. A king, when he doesn’t have to account to anyone for what he says and does, is inevitably verymuch alone.1

Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, shah of Iran

The most powerful tyrants on earth are condemned to live their life in fear. They can make their enemies disappear with a snap of theirfingers. They, their families and their acolytes may control entire countries from the luxury of their palace, but they also have to spend theirevery waking hour plagued by the fear of losing everything. No matter how powerful they become, they cannot pay for or order that fearto disappear. If such tyrants make one wrong move, they will fall. And when tyrants fall, they often land up in exile, in a jail cell, or under theground.

On a cold winter day in late 2007, the patrolling Amazonian Guards in their green camouflage gave the all clear. A moment later, ColonelMuammar Gaddafi emerged from the Hôtel de Marigny in central Paris. After descending the steps, he walked along a red carpet drapedover the pristine grass. At the end of the carpet lay a giant tent. The Hôtel de Marigny, the building used by the French government toaccommodate state guests, was used to catering to the whims of powerful rulers, but never before had a Bedouin tent been constructed inthe garden so that a visiting dictator could meet guests in the ‘desert tradition’.2

Inside, the tent was adorned with images of camels and palm trees. It was furnished with huge leather chairs in which an attentive audiencecould sit and listen. In the evening, visitors were greeted by the flames of a large fire.

Beyond his tent, which was a workplace, Gaddafi made Paris his personal playground. Originally invited to France for just three days, hedecided he would stay for five. He had arrived in Paris with his infamous all-female bodyguards and an entourage so large it required ahundred vehicles to snake through the city. He was received by President Nicolas Sarkozy with full military honours. When Gaddafidecided that he would like to see the Palace of Versailles because he was fascinated by Louis XIV, he brought with him a ‘delegation’ of ahundred people. He was whisked from his tent in an extra-long white limousine that caused traffic jams wherever it went. When he wantedto take a boat down the Seine, the bridges along the river had to be closed to the public.3 Gaddafi even went on a pheasant shoot, a highlyunusual outing for a twenty-first-century visiting head of state.4 But for Gaddafi, it was normality. His high-handed approach to the rest ofthe world had been exemplified by his response to an incident in 2008 when his son was arrested in Geneva for assaulting two domesticemployees in a luxury hotel. The following year the dictator asked Italy, Germany and France to ‘abolish’ Switzerland.5 When thatdidn’t happen, Gaddafi called on Muslims around the world to wage a holy war against the country. And at the United Nations GeneralAssembly, where leaders usually get fifteen minutes to speak, Gaddafi spoke for ninety-three. During the speech, he called the SecurityCouncil the ‘terror council’, promoted his own website, complained about being jet-lagged and discussed the assassination of John F.Kennedy.6

Eccentricities aside, Gaddafi, who had controlled Libya since the late 1960s, was a murderous dictator.

If he wanted this life to continue, he needed to stay in power. And to stay in power, he relied on striking fear into everyone he ruled. On thestreets of Tripoli, ordinary people, if they ever spoke out against the regime, faced immediate danger of imprisonment or even death. Ona single day in the summer of 1996, his security forces massacred more than twelve hundred people in one of the regime’s tortureprisons.7 Even anti-regime thoughts were deemed dangerous. As one Libyan put it: ‘Not only would we not dare express any criticism,we wouldn’t even dare thinking anything critical in our heads.’8

Yet even at the height of his power, with many of his enemies rotting underground or in prisons, Gaddafi saw threats all around. The wallsaround his main compound were four metres high and one metre thick. Underneath the compound, Gaddafi had his men construct anetwork of tunnels so vast that a golf cart was used to move around within it.9 The tunnels served as a means of escape and also containedan underground television station to allow the dictator to address his people while under siege.10 Another Gaddafi compound in Tripolicontained an operating theatre behind heavy blast doors, so the dictator’s life could be saved, even during a bloody revolution. Theunderground labyrinth there was so extensive that one journalist referred to it as a ‘maze’.11

A man who thinks his future will be bright doesn’t need multiple compounds with kilometres of underground tunnels. But Gaddafi knewhis future wasn’t secure. For dictators, there is a very real need to construct such defences. The threats are huge and constant.

On 15 February 2011, protests broke out in Benghazi, Libya’s second most populous city, after the regime arrested a lawyer whorepresented victims of the 1996 prison massacre. In Gaddafi’s Libya, where opposition wasn’t tolerated, it was a rare sign of dissent.12With the regime’s armour cracked, the situation rapidly escalated as opposition intensified and spread to other cities. In response,Gaddafi gave a speech on national television in which he vowed to ‘cleanse Libya house by house’.13 ‘I will not leave the country,’Gaddafi said, before adding that he would ‘die as a martyr’.14

But at this stage, Gaddafi was still confident that he wouldn’t have to die. And although the rebels came to control entire cities, the regimeretained the ability to go on the offensive. By 16 March, Gaddafi’s forces were closing in on rebel-held Benghazi when one of his sonsgave an interview in which he boasted that ‘everything will be over in 48 hours.’15

With Gaddafi having referred to his enemies as rats, there was now the real possibility that a campaign of mass killing would unfold in frontof the world’s eyes.16 Faced with that prospect, the United Nations Security Council voted 10‒0 in favour of taking ‘all necessarymeasures’ to protect civilians.17 The end was a long time coming, but this was its beginning. Two days later, French fighter jets took tothe air to attack the regime while warships of the United States Navy launched cruise missiles to neutralise Libyan air defence systems.Speaking from Brazil, President Barack Obama said: ‘We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy.’18

In October, with the regime severely diminished and bombs still falling from above, Gaddafi knew the moment he had long feared hadarrived. There were no more compounds, no more tunnels, no more walls that could protect the dictator. Instead, Gaddafi and his menmoved from house to house in Sirte, the coastal town near which the dictator had been born. Supplies were limited and his bodyguardswere forced to scrounge around to find pasta and rice to feed the group. Gaddafi himself was clearly confused. ‘Why is there no water?Why is there no electricity?’ he would ask the head of his guard. Trying to flee was risky, but with the rebels so close and the shellingconstant, staying in Sirte was not an option. Eventually, a reluctant Gaddafi agreed to escape. Originally scheduled to leave at 3 a.m., underthe cover of darkness, his convoy of around forty cars didn’t leave until five hours later. By that time, the sun was up. Half an hour after theconvoy left, it was struck by missiles. One of the explosions was so close that the airbag deployed in the Toyota Land Cruiser in whichGaddafi was travelling.19 The leader and a few of his men decided to flee on foot. After making their way across a farm, they had no optionother than to hide in a foul-smelling drain.20

When rebels grabbed him, he was unable to compute what was happening. He was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Godfather of Libya,King of Kings of Africa. And, as he once described himself: the Leader Who Lived in All Libyans’ Hearts. ‘What’s this? What’s this, mysons? What are you doing?’ Gaddafi asked.21 His ‘sons’ proceeded to brutalise him. Beaten by the mob and sodomised with abayonet, the last footage of Gaddafi shows him on top of a car, his head bloodied, asking for mercy.22

With the dictator finally under their control, the rebels celebrated. In one of the defining images of the conflict, a young rebel was seenbeing carried on his comrades’ shoulders, holding a golden gun decorated with intricate engravings. That gun belonged to Gaddafihimself, supposedly given to him by one of his sons.23 This is what I call the Golden Gun paradox: tyrants can have all the trappings ofpower, even a gun made of gold, but at the point where they need to use their power to save themselves, it is already too late. A dictatorcan never save himself with a golden gun. For Gaddafi, holding the gun only imbued power as long as people believed it did. The momentthey stopped, the gun was useless.

By the end of that day, 20 October 2011, the gun was gone and the dictator was dead. As a final indignity, Gaddafi wasn’t afforded thequick burial that is customary in Islam. Instead, his topless corpse was displayed in the meat locker of a local shopping mall for all to see.24When a journalist talked to a local man about it, he responded that Gaddafi had chosen his own destiny. ‘If he had been a good man, wewould have buried him,’ he said.25

And indeed, if Gaddafi had been a good man, or even just a democratic leader instead of a dictator, chances are he would have had a verydifferent end.

Tyranny is hazardous.

According to a recent study that examined the way 2,790 national rulers lost power, 1,925 (69 per cent) were just fine after leaving office.‘Only’ about 23 per cent of them were exiled, imprisoned or killed.26 But that was across all countries and political systems. Zoom in onthe personalist dictators – the leaders with most power concentrated in their hands – and the numbers are reversed: 69 per cent of thosetyrants are thrown into jail, forced to live their life abroad or killed.27 The odds for a tranquil retirement are worse than the flip of a coin.

I’ve studied dictators and the way they stay in power or lose it for more than a decade. As a postgraduate at Oxford, I examined the livesof the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Who were these people? How did they rise to the top in a system that couldbe so hostile? And what did they care about?

After I left Oxford, I thought I was done with worrying about tyranny (and sitting in dusty libraries). Eager to see the world, I decided towork for a brewery in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the most memorable lessons I learned there weren’t about hops or barley,but about how authoritarian regimes work – and how many tyrants are constantly living on a knife edge.

While I was in Lubumbashi on 30 December 2013, armed attackers stormed the studios of the national broadcaster in Kinshasa. Gunmentook control of the airwaves and delivered a message against the president, Joseph Kabila. They told him he was finished, his time was up.While they spoke, their accomplices attacked the country’s main airport. A military base was hit.28

On the other side of the country in Lubumbashi, reliable information was hard to come by: ‘Have you heard what’s happening inKinshasa?’ curious people asked at the brewery. During lunch, I tried to find out what exactly was going on. Nobody knew. With theviolence seemingly far away, I started to make my way back to the office which, like my bungalow, was within the same compound. On anormal Monday, this walk would have been one of the best parts of the day. Lubumbashi itself is not exactly a green city, but thevegetation within the compound was lush. While walking, I’d marvel at the size of the palm trees or watch strange-looking birds flyingoverhead. It seemed like an oasis.

That day was different. On my way back to work, the stillness of the air was broken with a crack. It was a gunshot. Then, another one andanother one, a rat-a-tat of gunfire coming from three directions. Then I heard something bigger, an explosion. A million thoughts wererunning through my mind. Behind the walls of the compound, a stray bullet was unlikely to become a problem. But what if that explosionwas a mortar? Another one of those could do serious damage even if I wasn’t the intended target. I was more than 1,500 kilometres fromthe German Embassy. The airports were closed, so flying wasn’t an option if things got worse. If we had to evacuate, it would have to beto the south, via land, across the border to Zambia. Now in a slight panic, I turned round to talk to colleagues. ‘What are we going todo?’ The answer was: ‘Nothing.’ Yes, they had heard the shots, but they had heard them before and nothing very serious ever affectedthem, so why should it now?

And that was that. As a visiting European behind a concrete wall, there was a layer of insulation between the danger and me. Out in the city,others weren’t so lucky.

I turned around again and went back to work.

The coup attempt in Kinshasa had been launched by a religious leader – Paul-Joseph Mukungubila – and the military was attacking hischurch in Lubumbashi.29 When it became evident to the self-declared prophet that he wasn’t going to be successful, he fled the countrywith five of his eighteen wives and twelve of his nineteen children.30 Joseph Kabila, who had ruled the country since his father wasassassinated, stayed in power.

I remember thinking that the calm reactions were strange. Shouldn’t something be done? But then again, when it comes to a strugglelike Mukungubila’s with Kabila, what can you do? Nothing. All you can do is wait and see if the tyrant will fall, paving the way for anothertyrant to take his place.

A few months later, I returned to Europe, but I could never get that day out of my head. How can it be that some countries experiencesevere instability with such regularity that their people have grown so inured to it? Why did Kabila manage to hold onto power for fivemore years? When do leaders like him lose power? And, when they do, what happens next?

I decided to research how tyrants fall. During my doctorate I focused on irregular leadership changes like the one Mukungubila attemptedin the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, I have worked on these issues not just at university but also with multinationalcompanies, foundations and international organisations such as NATO and the OECD, always drawn to the question of how tyrants fall.

In October 1938, when Nazi Germany had already annexed Austria and taken over the Sudetenland, Winston Churchill gave a speech tothe people of the United States. It was a call to arms:

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides theyare guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before theworld, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear.31

When most people think of tyrants, they conjure images of a man (and it is almost always a man) who wields absolute power. That is amyth. No political leader has ever had absolute power. Even the most powerful dictators need others in order to stay in power. To remainon their pedestal, they need to manage those closest to them. If they don’t, they are at immediate risk.

The central problem that tyrants face is that eliminating the many immediate threats to their position can be costly and creates anever-ending cycle of new problems. Eventually, the tyrant may fall off his pedestal. And when that happens, it’s not just the tyrant who isat risk, because entire countries can crumble under the weight of a falling dictator.

Before we go further, a word of caution: no two dictatorships are alike. North Korea isn’t Turkmenistan and Cuba isn’t Russia. Similarly,tyrants are different from one another. Nowadays, leaders are usually described as tyrants when they act in a way that is cruel andoppressive. That leads to an incredibly broad array of leaders. Since most of them are men, I will usually refer to the tyrant as he. The tyrantcould be a king, a personalist dictator or the head of a military junta. Or perhaps the tyrant is general secretary of the party in a one-partystate or at the top of a theocracy – deriving its legitimacy from God’s supposed will. The nation he leads can be rich or poor, mountainousor flat.

This diversity also applies to the tyrants themselves. Some, such as Saddam Hussein, have had terrible childhoods in which they wereregularly beaten and abused.32 Others, such as Mao, were coddled when they were young.33 Adolf Hitler was such a choleric that hecould barely stop himself from shouting once he became agitated. Pol Pot rarely showed any emotion. There are also massive differencesbetween the way these tyrants have attained power. Some have climbed the pedestal by being good at organising and outmanoeuvringtheir competitors. Others, such as Idi Amin, were simply more brutal than everyone else. The most ‘successful’ tyrants, for exampleStalin, were good at both.

As a result of this diversity, every sweeping statement will have an exception. But there are patterns and common traits. By looking at theforest, we can better understand most of the trees. Unfortunately, we can’t always inspect them close up. Unlike democracies, which arecomparatively transparent and open, dictatorships are dens of secrets. People who talk out of turn can disappear. Governmentdocuments are laced with lies. Journalists who report the truth may not last long.

Trying to understand tyranny is not easy. Perhaps the deputy prime minister is a mere puppet, or perhaps he really is the second mostimportant political figure in the country. Or perhaps the institutions of the state don’t matter much because they are controlled by arevolutionary political party. Or, maybe neither state nor party matters anymore because power is so personalised. It is quite possible thatthe tyrant’s bodyguard is more powerful than cabinet members or party elites because he has the dictator’s ear and proximity is moreimportant than formal power. It’s hard to tell. Dictatorships run on whispers, clandestine deals and cover-ups.

The other difficulty of studying the fall of tyrants is that, however severe the political instability, however frequent the rebellions, it’s notevery day that a tyrant actually falls.34 In a functioning democracy with meaningful elections, you get plenty of chances to observe howleaders lose office. Dictators, on the other hand, can remain in office for many decades. When they do go, they might fall in an instant,taken out by a single gunshot, or toppled within hours during a coup. And it can be difficult to determine how exactly they did fall – partlybecause it happens so rarely, but partly because the fall of tyrants often involves a tipping point, at which leaders become so unstable thattheir supporters desert them en masse – only later to pretend that they had been opposed to them all along.35

You also can’t understand tyrants just by looking at the person. They operate within a system – and they need that system to stay inpower. We’ll therefore be exploring how authoritarian regimes work. One way to think of a regime, as opposed to the leader, is to thinkof it as the rules by which new leaders are chosen.36 So when the generals that make up a military dictatorship replace the top general witha new general, it’s a different leader but still the same regime. But if protestors sweep away the entire military junta to create a democracyor a communist dictatorship in its stead, that’s a new regime. It’s not just the person, but the system itself, that has changed.

When I started working on this book, I spoke to diplomats, journalists, dissidents, human rights activists and (former) spies. Since thesubject of the book is so broad, I also consulted experts on economic sanctions, nuclear weapons, military history, quantitativeforecasting and many other topics. Not everyone can be quoted, but all of them were fascinating.

There were also some more unusual encounters. Early on, I spoke to a professor of Roman history who was kind enough to discussEmperor Caligula’s reign with me at great length. Next, I met an American-Gambian who went to prison for plotting to liberate hishomeland from a tyrant who had pledged to rule for a billion years. At one point, I was in a WhatsApp call with a Central African politicianaccused of war crimes, wondering whether I genuinely thought it was ‘nice to meet him’.

The book also allowed me to discover more of my own country. To me, born in western Germany just after the end of the Cold War, theGerman Democratic Republic (GDR) always felt distant. The GDR existed neither long ago nor far away, but it might as well have been in adifferent universe because it was almost impossible to imagine it existing so close by. The journey of writing this book changed that. Tospeak to Siegbert Schefke, who was instrumental in bringing down the regime beyond the wall, I drove to Leipzig. Hearing him talk about9 October 1989 – the day that ‘fear changed sides’ – made all the things that had seemed so abstract feel real and essential for me andfor all of us to understand.37

This is a book about the trade-offs faced by dictators and the people around them. They all want multiple things and they can’t havethem all, so there are tough choices to be made. In the next chapter, ‘The Dictator’s Treadmill’, I am going to lay out why tyrantsusually try to stay in power once they have attained it. For starters, tyranny can be an attractive position. But more importantly, steppingdown voluntarily is incredibly dangerous. Most aren’t willing to take the risk, so they attempt to stay in power. To have any chance ofstaying in power, they have to focus on palace elites and soldiers. But, as I demonstrate in the chapters ‘The Enemy Within’ and‘Weakening the Warriors’, doing so is difficult. Also, focusing time and money on neutralising threats from armed men and powerfulelites creates plenty of problems down the line. As resources are taken from the masses and given to a narrow group near the top, thepopulation may rise up against the regime. As members of the elite are purged from the capital, they may return from the hinterland asrebel leaders. And as the military is paralysed, soldiers have a more difficult time dealing with rebels or foreign invaders. Lastly, somethings simply exist outside the tyrant’s control. A dictator can do everything to maximise his chances of staying in power, but still beassassinated. The risk might even be higher as a result of doing everything ‘right’. In the end, whether through natural death or violentremoval, every tyrant does fall. But what happens next? The fall of tyrants often leads to chaos and conflict. In the chapter ‘Be CarefulWhat You Wish For’, I explore under what circumstances that can be prevented. Now that we know how tyrants fall and what happenswhen they do, other questions come into focus. Can outsiders accelerate the fall? If so, how? And should they?

Tyrants cannot be ignored. We must pay attention to them – and understand them better. Losing power can easily mean not just a loss ofprivilege but a loss of freedom or even life. And to a large extent, this peril explains why tyrants act the way they do while they are in power.We’ve all read outlandish stories about dictators who seem unhinged. The Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov built atwelve-metre-high gold statue of himself on top of a monument in Ashgabat that rotated to follow the sun.38 The North Korean leader,Kim Jong-un, had an education ministry official executed with an anti-aircraft gun – supposedly for falling asleep in a meeting.39 Part ofIdi Amin’s self-bestowed title was ‘Lord of All The Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire inAfrica in General and Uganda in Particular’.40

At first glance, these rulers seem insane. And evidently, these aren’t normal people. They’re often narcissists; sometimes psychopathic;and almost always ruthless. But the surprising truth is that most of them are also rational. They haven’t lost their minds. Instead, given thesystem in which they operate and the information they have, strategies to torture, kill and let the masses starve while they collect riches inthe presidential palace are rational. It’s a way to survive.

And it has been that way for thousands of years. Democracy as we now understand it is young, dictatorship is old. Most humans,throughout recorded history, have suffered under the rule of tyrants. In 1800, nobody on earth was living in a genuine democracy. Crueland oppressive governments weren’t an exception but the norm. Whether the tyrant was a chief, duke, king, emperor, bishop, sultan orcolonial governor, that’s how societies were organised. People were subjects and tyranny felt inevitable. Political change largelydetermined who was the tyrant, not whether there was one.

Even in comparatively recent history, tyrants reigned supreme. At the end of the Second World War, more than 90 per cent of countrieswere not democracies.41 This was also a time when vast swathes of the world didn’t rule themselves at all. Instead, they were coloniesruled from afar. Following this, during the Cold War, both sides supported tyrants if they judged it to be in their interest. London had ahand in overthrowing a democratically elected leader in Iran in favour of Shah Pahlavi. Beijing kept Pol Pot’s regime alive while it keptkilling. Worried about falling dominoes, the United States fought wars in defence of vile dictatorships in Korea and Vietnam. The Frenchgovernment paid for the coronation of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the Central African dictator who crowned himself emperor, while his peoplestarved. Bokassa might have been a despot, but he was their despot. That was in 1977.

But the Cold War was also a time of national liberation – with many people who had once been colonised taking back control. Originally,the United Nations had just fifty-one members. By the middle of the 1970s, it had reached 144. Now it’s 193.42 Unfortunately, thathasn’t always led to freedom or democracy. In fact, studies show that the number of dictatorships grew between 1946 and the 1970s.43For many, independence meant trading in a foreign power for a local tyrant. And those foreign powers were apt to back a loyal despot inorder to retain influence. A friendly tyrant, they frequently figured, was more useful to them than an elected adversary.

After the end of the Cold War, democracy blossomed. By 2012, less than 12 per cent of countries remained closed autocracies – the typeof system in which citizens don’t get any choice at all.44 For a while, it even looked as if the model of liberal democracies had triumphedto become the new normal. Western societies waited for what Francis Fukuyama called the ‘End of History’, the ultimate triumph ofdemocracy.45

But of course, tyranny had never truly gone away – it was just easier to ignore. In the twenty-first century, that became impossible. Theworld couldn’t ignore Kim Jong-un, who had access to a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping out entire cities in a single attack, when hefired missiles over Japan. Vladimir Putin destabilised an entire continent, committing war crimes along the way. Saudi tyrants sent a deathsquad to dismember a journalist working for the Washington Post. Rwanda’s regime has repeatedly hunted down opponents to murderthem.46 After securing his position at the top of the Chinese Communist Party for life, Xi Jinping told his generals that they should ‘dareto fight’.47

Those, of course, are only the autocracies that already exist. In Europe, for example, multiple democracies are at imminent risk. In 2014Viktor Orbán declared he would make Hungary an ‘illiberal democracy’ – in reality, a form of authoritarianism. In Turkey, Recep TayyipErdoğan and his allies have restricted the political space to such an extent that it has become increasingly difficult for the opposition to winelections.

And while totalitarian leaders have become rarer, the world’s remaining dictators continue to persecute their own people andopponents. Whether it be via wars of conquest or the attempted destruction of entire cultures, the threat of tyranny remains acute. If wedon’t understand how tyrants operate, we can’t constrain them at home or limit their threat abroad.

Over the last decade, there have been countless newspaper articles, tweets and books about the defence of liberal democracies. None ofthem will be sufficient. Whether it happens suddenly by means of a coup d’état or gradually through the dismantling of core institutions,some democracies will die. When that happens, all of us should know what comes next and how it can be reversed.

That is the primary purpose of this book: to provide a guide to despots’ limitations, their regimes’ weaknesses and the ways theycollapse. But understanding them isn’t enough. This book will also explore how to bring them down.

That can seem idealistic. Tyranny often looks remarkably stable, after all. Some of the world’s most famous dictators support this view:Muammar Gaddafi, for example, ruled Libya for over four decades, more than twice as long as Angela Merkel was chancellor of Germany.And on top of that, the data show that autocratic regimes can be even more durable than individual leaders.48 To give just one example,North Korea has been ruled by three men for more than half a century, father, son and grandson.

Look closer, though, and you soon realise that authoritarian stability tends to be a mirage. Most non-democracies aren’t like Gaddafi’sLibya. Instead, they are often more like Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo, with a lack of central government control and constantconflict, sometimes civil war. And even Gaddafi’s type of tyranny only looks to be stable – but isn’t. Unlike democracies, these arepolitical systems which are designed to revolve around a single individual or a small group of elites. That might work for them, for a time,but systems such as those are not resilient. When a shock comes and the system is challenged, the consequences can be devastating,leading to conflict, starvation or war. In the case of Libya, the war against Gaddafi was followed by war amongst the militias that wanted toreplace him. More than a decade after his golden gun failed to save him, the shooting still hadn’t stopped.

The amateurish coup attempt that happened while I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo wasn’t an anomaly. Most attempts to takeout a tyrant fail because strongmen are prepared. But inevitably, they do fall. The question, then, is how.