The Importance of an Open Society

What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy?

Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13.

"The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats, so they put on civilian suits and travel to Davos to talk to the business elite. They talk to democratic counterparts to pretend that they are like them. And that's exactly the challenge to understanding that these are still non-democratic regimes. We still need to. do something about them because otherwise, we see the encroachments on democracies. And we see also the weakening of our democratic world.

If you think about Viktor Orbán, he started off as a democratic leader, but eventually turned his country into a place where the opposition doesn't have an equal chance to come to power. Another one would be Donald Trump. Trump will very much try to come back and basically, these leaders build a spin dictatorship, want to gain power and stay in power using propaganda and misleading and false information. And so far, American institutions have stood up to those challenges, but who knows what happens next?"

https://sites.google.com/site/sguriev/
https://spindictators.com/
www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/en/researcher/sergei-guriev.html

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