My book is out today!

How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive

As of this morning, my new book How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive is officially released!

Writing a book is rather nerve-wracking, but so far I’ve been lucky to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback. In their review of the book, The Telegraph called it “entertaining.” Another review said it was “thought-provoking.” The author Bradley Hope called it “gripping” while Professor Joseph Wright, an American expert on authoritarianism, said it was “a joy to read.” To my amazement, How Tyrants Fall has also been reviewed in The Economist alongside Anne Applebaum’s new book.

It’s about Putin, Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping, but also about all the things that could happen if our own democracies die.

I’m writing this post to give you a little preview of How Tyrants Fall. Last week, I shared the opening of the book. If you missed it, click here. This week, the publisher is letting me share a few more pages.¹

I’d be honoured if you decided to read the book, listen to it, or tell a friend about it. Thank you so much!

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…Introduction continued

A million thoughts were running through my mind. Behind the walls of the compound, a stray bullet was unlikely to become a problem. But what if that explosion was 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 from the 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 be to 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 to do?’ The answer was: ‘Nothing.’ Yes, they had heard the shots, but they had heard them before and nothing very serious ever affected them, 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 his church in Lubumbashi. When it became evident to the self-declared prophet that he wasn’t going to be successful, he fled the country with five of his eighteen wives and twelve of his nineteen children. Joseph Kabila, who had ruled the country since his father was assassinated, 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 struggle like 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 another tyrant 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 experience severe instability with such regularity that their people have grown so inured to it? Why did Kabila manage to hold onto power for five more 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 attempted in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, I have worked on these issues not just at university but also with multinational companies, 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 to the 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 they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear.

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 a myth. No political leader has ever had absolute power. Even the most powerful dictators need others in order to stay in power. To remain on 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 a never-ending cycle of new problems. Eventually, the tyrant may fall off his pedestal. And when that happens, it’s not just the tyrant who is at 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 and oppressive. 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 tyrant could 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-party state or at the top of a theocracy – deriving its legitimacy from God’s supposed will. The nation he leads can be rich or poor, mountainous or flat.

This diversity also applies to the tyrants themselves. Some, such as Saddam Hussein, have had terrible childhoods in which they were regularly beaten and abused. Others, such as Mao, were coddled when they were young. Adolf Hitler was such a choleric that he could barely stop himself from shouting once he became agitated. Pol Pot rarely showed any emotion. There are also massive differences between the way these tyrants have attained power. Some have climbed the pedestal by being good at organising and outmanoeuvring their competitors. Others, such as Idi Amin, were simply more brutal than everyone else. The most ‘successful’ tyrants, for example Stalin, 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 the forest, we can better understand most of the trees. Unfortunately, we can’t always inspect them close up. Unlike democracies, which are comparatively transparent and open, dictatorships are dens of secrets. People who talk out of turn can disappear. Government documents 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 most important political figure in the country. Or perhaps the institutions of the state don’t matter much because they are controlled by a revolutionary political party. Or, maybe neither state nor party matters anymore because power is so personalised. It is quite possible that the tyrant’s bodyguard is more powerful than cabinet members or party elites because he has the dictator’s ear and proximity is more important 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 not every day that a tyrant actually falls. In a functioning democracy with meaningful elections, you get plenty of chances to observe how leaders 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 – partly because it happens so rarely, but partly because the fall of tyrants often involves a tipping point, at which leaders become so unstable that their supporters desert them en masse – only later to pretend that they had been opposed to them all along.

You also can’t understand tyrants just by looking at the person. They operate within a system – and they need that system to stay in power. We’ll therefore be exploring how authoritarian regimes work. One way to think of a regime, as opposed to the leader, is to think of it as the rules by which new leaders are chosen. So when the generals that make up a military dictatorship replace the top general with a new general, it’s a different leader but still the same regime. But if protestors sweep away the entire military junta to create a democracy or 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 the subject of the book is so broad, I also consulted experts on economic sanctions, nuclear weapons, military history, quantitative forecasting 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 discuss Emperor Caligula’s reign with me at great length. Next, I met an American-Gambian who went to prison for plotting to liberate his homeland 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 politician accused 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, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) always felt distant. The GDR existed neither long ago nor far away, but it might as well have been in a different universe because it was almost impossible to imagine it existing so close by. The journey of writing this book changed that. To speak to Siegbert Schefke, who was instrumental in bringing down the regime beyond the wall, I drove to Leipzig. Hearing him talk about 9 October 1989 – the day that ‘fear changed sides’ – made all the things that had seemed so abstract feel real and essential for me and for all of us to understand.

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The introduction goes on, but I have to stop here. If we were to read on, we’d meet an exceedingly strange Turkmen dictator before discussing the emergence of democracy and Western support for various tyrants during the Cold War.

How Tyrants Fall should be available from your local bookshop and online. Physical copies will arrive in the United States after the election but ebooks and audiobooks should be available now.

I hope you have a great day and that you’ll enjoy reading the book. Here’s another photo of How Tyrants Fall in the wild:

-Marcel

1. The real opening includes references, of course. The formatting is also different.