How Tyrants Fall

In the fight for freedom, we must not only understand how tyrants rise - but how they fall.

The history of humanity is mostly a history of tyrants. Safe in our democratic societies, it's easy to take freedom for granted. We shouldn't. Across the world, autocrats are scoping out territory to conquer and people to oppress, whilst established democracies flirt with strongman rule. To push back on tyranny in the 21st century, we need to learn how these dictators and despots gain power and, crucially, how they lose it.

How Tyrants Fall answers this urgent question. Drawing on extensive field research and over a hundred personal interviews with people in and around collapsed regimes, political scientist Marcel Dirsus explores the various conditions that spell the end for despots. Even if, somehow, tyrants thread the needle to avoid both internal and external enemies, then eventually madness or old age comes for them all - and t he way they meet their end determines the future of their nation. Filled with stories from Napoleonic France, to the Rum Rebellion in Sydney, to parallel armies in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, How Tyrants Fall reveals how coups, cronyism, civil war and revolution interlink in the rise and fall of democracies - vital for our grasp of the global political narratives we are witnessing today. By examining how dictators and their demises have shaped international history, Marcel Dirsus draws the blueprint for how to topple tyrants, offering a chink of hope in these times of growing authoritarianism.