A Sunday Times Bestseller

An Economist Best Book of the Year

The acclaimed historian and journalist reveals the networks trying to destroy the democratic world. We all have in our minds a caricature of what an authoritarian state looks like, with a bad man at the top. But in the 21st century, this caricature has little to do with reality. Today, authoritarian governments are not run by a single villain, but by complex networks made up of kleptocratic funding structures, security services, and professional propagandists.

Members of these networks are connected not only within a specific country but across many countries. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. Propagandists share resources – troll farms promoting a dictator's propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another – and themes that relentlessly hammer home the same messages about the failures of democracy and the evils of America.

Unlike military or political alliances of other times and places, this group does not operate as a bloc but rather as a hodgepodge of companies: Autocracy, Inc. Their relationships are not based on values but are purely transactional, which is why they easily cross ideological, geographical, and cultural lines. In fact, they agree on only one thing: their abhorrent stance toward us, the inhabitants of the democratic world, and their desire to undermine both our political systems and our values.

This shared understanding of the world – where it comes from, why it persists, how it works, how the democratic world has unwittingly helped to systematize it, and how we can help crush it – is the subject of this book.

Pages: 256, Dimensions: 13x13cm