Autocracy, Inc.
By Anne Applebaum
- Genre
- History, Society & Current Affairs
- Publisher
- Doubleday (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2024
- ISBN
- 9780385549936
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is a work of nonfiction by the historian Anne Applebaum, published by Doubleday in July 2024. It argues that modern autocracies cooperate as a networked system. A New York Times bestseller, it was longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for...
The old picture of dictatorship - one strongman, one closed country - is obsolete, argues Anne Applebaum, and Autocracy, Inc. sketches what has replaced it: a networked syndicate of autocracies that trade, launder, surveil and prop one another up across ideological lines. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and others cooperate less from shared belief than from shared interest in staying in power, aided by Western banks, lawyers and technologies. Applebaum, a historian of totalitarianism, writes with concision and authority, turning a sprawling subject into a short, alarming field guide. intendle recommends it for anyone trying to understand why democracy has been losing ground worldwide, and how the autocratic world actually functions. A New York Times bestseller and a Women's Prize for Non-Fiction longlist title, it names a system that had been hiding in plain sight. Bracing and clarifying, it insists that defending democracy requires understanding the machinery arrayed against it.