Foreign policy author talks dictators, oppression leaders in Martin Forum
It’s not easy being a dictator these days, according to William Dobson, an author and foreign policy journalist and editor who spoke at Tuesday’s Martin Forum.
It is an undeniable statement, Dobson said. A room full of students and a few scattered UI professors and Moscow community members shifted in their seats.
Genie Tran | Argonaut
William J. Dobson, Author of the book “The Dictators Learning Curves,” visited UI Tuesday to speak to the UI Community about modrn dictatorship and democracy. Dobson is the politics and foreign affairs editor for Slate magazine.
“I don’t empathize,” he said.
Dobson said it wasn’t long ago that it was somewhat easy keep a population under the thumb of a dictator. He attributes a large part of the international political change to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was the economic lifeline of many regimes only 25 years ago.
Dobson, who released his 2012 book, “The Dictators Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy,” brought a journalist’s perspective of political regimes to the UI community Tuesday in the UI College of Law courtroom.
The Martin Institute, a UI based outreach program focused on international studies, has held Martin Forums since 1979. The forums bring in external experts on a myriad of topics to speak to students about political issues worldwide Dobson said his UI visit had been in the works for nearly two years.
“The Dictators Learning Curve” looks into the conflict between dictatorship, opposition leaders and democracy. The theme of his forum lecture closely followed the pages in his book.
He said in a world where democracies tripled in only a few decades and numerous dictatorships were overthrown, the smartest regimes found a way to stay afloat by learning and adapting.
“They honed new techniques for preserving power,” Dobson said. “And just as dictators have grown more nimble, so have those who challenge them.”
Dobson, who is currently the politics and foreign affairs editor for Slate magazine, has been widely published on international politics. He has had bylines in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and wrote daily on modern authoritarianism for The Washington Post during the height of the Arab Spring, a revolutionary period of protests and civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa from 2010 to 2012.
When Dobson told the audience of students and academics how he began to travel and seek out people involved not only in dictator regimes but those involved in the opposition movements trying to topple them, he said he was surprised by what he found.
“They were people who were creative, who were exceptionally sharp, who were strategic,” Dobson said. “They came from all walks of life.”
It was during that time that he met Srdja Popovic, a then 30-something-year-old who had played a large part in overturning Serbian dictator Slobodon Milosevic’s rule in 2000.
After the rebellion and a short-lived career in politics, he said Popovic created a non-profit organization, the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, to spread knowledge to other countries on nonviolent strategies and how to implement them in pro-democracy opposition groups.
Dobson befriended Popovic and made it a goal to witness one of the non-profit’s training sessions. Years later, Dobson was invited to a session after promising not to divulge where the training was or what opposition group was involved.
“I got a call and two days later I was on a Mediterranean island with activists from a Middle Eastern country being trained by Serbians,” Dobson said.
The weeklong training taught the opposition group the power of humor and nonviolence, as well as the ability to create alliances.
Dobson said the Serbian opposition group would practice nonviolence by deliberately taking pictures of police brutality on young rebels with the intent of turning the photos into large posters. The posters would then be plastered around the police officer’s home and city — complete with the officer’s name and telephone number.
“The poster would say, ‘Please call him and ask why he beats our children,'” Dobson said.
During training, the non-profit also emphasized the importance of maintaining good relationships with police when possible. When they were successful, Dobson said the rebels would end up sitting down and playing chess with their arresting officers.
Dobson said students studying international politics and related areas of study should look to personal experiences and current events, as he did, for indications of how the international political climate shifts over time.
“It’s because of creativity like this,” he said. “Because of these people that I think that it’s becoming harder to be a dictator.”
Michelle Castleton can be reached at [email protected]