Dictator Learning Curve

The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy by William Dobson presents a thorough analysis of the continuous struggle in the modern world of dictatorship. For this research, Dobson travelled to a lot of countries with dictatorial government, with the intention of showing the rest of the world how modern dictatorship maintain its power and deal with any opponents who threaten its regime. In the beginning of the book, Dobson mentions that it is hard for dictators to keep their crimes away from the world. Dobson also talks about how communication media first affected dictatorship. In 1974, the Portuguese military played a song that signaled for a military coup, which caused the nation to exile its own dictator the following day (3). In essence, Dobson proposes that throughout the years the internet and social media have greatly hurt dictatorial regime’s power. However, Dobson also claims that dictators have learned their mistakes over the years and somehow managed to increase their power on their people, hence meaning of the dictator’s learning curve.

Throughout his book, Dobson mentions several examples of the effect of social media and mass media on dictatorship. For example, Dobson thoroughly talks about how a large group of people around the world quickly came together to protest against the dictatorship. This incident arose from “an anonymous call for a Chinese Jasmine Revolution…over social media and the Chinese equivalent of Twitter” (Dobson 50). Dobson later mentions that China’s senior leaders had a meeting on how they should control China’s mass and social media on the events happened in the Middle East, so that such incident would not occur in the future (50). This effect of social media and the ...

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... dictators have been exiled or even executed as a result of the widespread use of these technologies. Dobson also writes that the biggest problem that dictators and authoritarians face is their own people (9). These factors drive dictators to learn their mistakes and their fellow dictators’ mistakes, causing the nature of dictatorship to change over the years. Particularly, Russia and China are still going strong as dictatorial regimes even though they do not appear to be so. Additionally, the involvements of non-state actors such as the CANVAS, have also affected the dictatorial regime power. With these non-state organizations have grown stronger and more powerful over time, the power of dictatorial regime has become more vulnerable to attack. In fact, these non-state actors can easily overthrow some less powerful dictator and might forget their democratic identity.