THE DICTATORSHIP SYNDROME
by Alaa Al Aswany 

Details

International Politics
Publication Date: November 2019
RRP: £12.99
160 pp
HBK
9781912208593

Review

‘The Dictatorship Syndrome is a personally powerful story of how the strongman rule has tuned the Arab lands into a wasteland. Autocrats have not only pauperized large segments of the Arab people but also politically enslaved them. There is a fierce urgency to Alaa Al Aswany’s call for the Arab people to break their political chains and regain their consciousness.’ – Fawaz A. Gerges, author of ISIS: A History and Making the Arab World

A fascinating work on the nature of dictatorship, how it takes hold and how it survives, from the author of the international bestseller The Yacoubian Building

The study of dictatorship in the West has acquired an almost exotic dimension. But authoritarian regimes remain a painful reality for billions of people worldwide who still live under them, their freedoms violated and their rights abused. They are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, corruption, ignorance, and injustice. What is the nature of dictatorship? How does it take hold? In what conditions and circumstances is it permitted to thrive? And how do dictators retain power, even when reviled and mocked by those they govern? In this deeply considered and at times provocative short work, Alaa Al Aswany tells us that, as with any disease, to understand the syndrome of dictatorship we must first consider the circumstances of its emergence, along with the symptoms and complications it causes in both the people and the dictator.

Author Bio

Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building has sold over a million copies worldwide and his work has been published in over a hundred countries. Al Aswany was named by The Times as one of the fifty best authors to have been translated into English in the last fifty years.

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