Anne Applebaum is a journalist, historian and staff writer at ‘The Atlantic’. Over the past three decades she has reported on different forms of authoritarian power, from the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe to the threat of 21st-century disinformation. Here she speaks to Ben Horton, Head of the Director’s Office at Chatham House, about her latest book ‘Autocracy Inc’, which explores the alarming rise of autocracies and the financial, security and technological networks which sustain them.
What do you mean by Autocracy Inc?
We all have an idea of how a dictatorship works. There’s an isolated bad guy at the top, and he has police and flunkies; he fights against dissidents, and that is how he maintains control in society. But that’s not necessarily true in the modern world. Dictatorships in different countries are linked together across many sectors.
