The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

The celebrated historian and journalist, Anne Applebaum, joins David Aaronovitch, journalist, broadcaster, and author, to discuss the networks undermining global democracy—and how we can combat them.

Anne Applebaum has been monitoring the erosion of democratic systems for decades. Currently, a new threat has emerged: autocracies are collaborating to maintain power. These regimes are not led by a single dictator but are supported by complex networks involving kleptocratic financial systems, security services, and technological experts specialising in surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. Countries with such centralised autocracies include Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, and many others.

Anne Applebaum will explain how rogue states endure sanctions, circulate their wealth, and redefine the post-war ‘rules-based order', and how the democratic world has unintentionally supported this new reality, risking the loss of control over our economic futures and democratic systems.

Join us in-person or online to understand the urgent, radical changes necessary to preserve democracy, and why immediate action is crucial.

Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books, including GULAG: A HISTORY which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; IRON CURTAIN, on the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war, which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature; and RED FAMINE, on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, which provides the background to today's Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In 2020 she published the bestselling TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY, which analyzed the appeal of autocracy to Western intellectuals and politicians.

Her newest book, AUTOCRACY, INC, published in July 2024 is available for advance purchase with your ticket and at the venue.

David Aaronovitch is a journalist, television presenter and author. He is a regular columnist for The Times and the author of Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists, Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History etc.