NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer-prize winning author, an alarming account of how autacies work together to undermine the dematic world, and how we should organize to defeat them

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Times

"A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism... clear-sighted and fearless."—John Simpson, The Guardian • "Especially timely."—The Washington Post

We think we know what an autatic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autacies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptatic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of demacy and the evil of America.

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autacy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the demacies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.