Mawarire had discovered something that many other autocratic governments have now learned: smear campaigns work. When a state apparatus combines the prosecution service, the courts, the police, state-controlled media, and social media in order to frame someone in a particular way—to tell a particular story about their life and their beliefs, to

A Russian, Angolan, or Chinese oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware, and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal ownership to tax authorities anywhere. American and European intermediaries—lawyers, bankers, accountants, real estate agents, and public relations and “reputation

Putin’s portrayal of Russia as the leader of an alliance of strong, traditional states against weak democracies has nevertheless won some adherents in America. White nationalists marching in the infamous Charlottesville demonstration that ended in violence in 2017 shouted, among other slogans, “Russia is our friend.” Russians participate in

After Mnangagwa pushed out Mugabe in 2017, he began to shut down whatever elements of the rule of law remained in Zimbabwe. He assaulted the court system, amending the constitution in 2021 to give himself the power to hire and fire judges, and distributed bribes, disguised as housing loans, to keep judges friendly. In the run-up to elections in

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, an illiberal hybrid state, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war. He has adopted the pretense that ongoing tension between his government and the U.S. government concerns religion and gender, when in fact the poor relationship was created by Orbán’s deep financial

In both the Mexican and the Catalan cases, these tiny, inexpensive social media investments, if they helped at all, were probably judged worth the effort. After he became president, López Obrador handed over civilian enterprises to the military, undermined the independence of the judiciary, and otherwise degraded Mexican democracy. He also promoted

People believed him because the White Helmets were ordinary people who helped other ordinary people, because their work created trust. The Russians knew this, which is why they sought to undermine that trust, linking the White Helmets alternately to George Soros and al-Qaeda, claiming that their rescue operations were “staged,” smearing their

The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.

Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic. Nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.