The Night Circus - ANTHEA

42
July 2012
Doubleday
Rights sold:
Germany: Karl Blessing
Other rights available
WILLIAM DOBSON has been
an editor at Foreign Affairs and
Newsweek International. Under
his direction, Foreign Policy won
the coveted National Magazine
Award for General Excellence in
2007 and 2009. His articles and
essays have appeared in the New
York Times, the Washington Post,
and the Wall Street Journal, and
he has provided analysis for ABC,
CNN, CBS, and MSNBC, and NPR.
The Dictator’s Learning Curve
Inside the Global Battle for
Democracy
William Dobson
“William Dobson is the rare thinker who combines a gift
for storytelling with a farsighted understanding of how the
world works. . . . He is one of the best new voices writing
about global politics today.”—Fareed Zakaria
In this riveting anatomy of the new face of authoritarianism,
acclaimed journalist William Dobson explains why, despite
the recent “revolutions” in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisa, the world
is actually becoming less free.
Across the world, repression is on the rise. The problem
isn’t that democracy has lost its appeal; rather that the
nature of dictatorships has evolved. Today’s despots and
authoritarians are not frozen–in-time regimes of Burma,
Zimbabwe, and North Korea. They are the ever-morphing
Russia, China, Iran, and Venezeula, far more technologically
sophisticated and savvy, who have replaced more brutal
forms of intimidation with subtle coercion. They run “free”
elections and allow opposition parties. They pepper their
speeches with references to liberty, justice, and democracy,
even human rights. They know they must concede ground in
order to maintain it. To combat them, a growing global army
of democratic advocates, from private millionaires to bloggers
to student groups, are using digital technology to attack the
dictators from within their own regimes. But don’t count the
dictators out.
The Dictator’s Learning Curve reveals a new breed of
dictatorship, wielding new techniques for preserving power,
that threatens democracy at home and abroad.