Making the World Safe for Dictatorship

Authoritarian states work hard to manage their images abroad. They invest in foreign-facing media, hire public relations firms, tout their popular celebrities, and showcase their successes to elite and popular foreign audiences. However, there is a dark side to these efforts that is sometimes overlooked. Authoritarian states try to obscure or censor bad news about their governments and often discredit their critics abroad. In extreme cases, authoritarian statesintimidate, physically attack, or even murder their opponents overseas. All states attempt to manage their global image to some degree, but authoritarian states in the post-Cold War era have special incentives to do so given the predominance of democracy as an international norm.This book is about how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using both "promotional" tactics of persuasion and "obstructive" tactics of repression. Alexander Dukalskis looks at the tactics that authoritarian states use for image management and the ways in which their strategies vary from one state to another. Moreover, Dukalskis looks at the degree to which some authoritarian states succeed in using image management to enhance their internal and external security, and, in turn, tomake their world safe for dictatorship.Making the World Safe for Dictatorship uses a diverse array of data, including interviews, cross-national data on extraterritorial repression, examination of public relations filings with the United States government, analysis of authoritarian propaganda, media frequency analysis, and speeches and statements by authoritarian leaders. Dukalskis also builds a new dataset—the Authoritarian Actions Abroad Database—that uses publicly available information to categorize nearly 1,200instances in which authoritarian states repressed their critical exiles abroad, ranging from vague threats to confirmed assassinations. The book looks closely at three cases, China, North Korea, and Rwanda, to understand in more detail how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using combinations ofpromotional and obstructive tactics. The result is a new way of thinking about the international dimensions of authoritarian politics.

This book carries the authoritarianism scholarship forward with a comprehensive analytical framework, a freely available database and rich interview data. It will appeal to academics, policymakers and foreign correspondents who are considering working in China, The unfortunate conclusion is that the world is becoming ever safer for dictators. Dukalskis builds the framework to untangle the growing and insidious power of authoritarians to sell dictatorship and crush dissent., By connecting concepts such as authoritarian soft power and public diplomacy to extraterritorial repression, Dukalskis shows how autocratic regimes shape global norms. ... Dukalskis builds the framework to untangle the growing and insidious power of authoritarians to sell dictatorship and crush dissent. Highly recommended., Alexander Dukalskis's intriguing book, in which he puts forward the concept of 'authoritarian image management', defined as 'comprising efforts by the state or its proxies to enhance or protect the legitimacy of the state's political system for audiences outside its borders'., It is difficult to combine approaches from Comparative Politics and International Relations in ways that both speak to contemporary issues, yet also provide scholars with a framework that could be applied to other cases. Dukalskis deftly accomplishes this task in Making the World Safe for Dictatorship.

Alexander Dukalskis is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. His research and teaching interests include authoritarianism, Asian politics, and human rights. His work has been published in several leading journals, including Government & Opposition, Review of International Studies, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Peace Research, and Democratization. His firstbook, The Authoritarian Public Sphere: Legitimation and Autocratic Power in North Korea, Burma, and China, was published in 2017.