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TABLE OF CONTENTS
HORIZONTAL ENGAGEMENT

GETTING TOGETHER

Why important Introduction Forming a Core GroupGroup Structure Getting People
Keeping People Leading Meeting and Deciding Facilitating Information Sharing
Door-Knocking Addressing Hot Issues Block by Block Organizing Fundraising
Nonviolent Communication Community Development Skinny Community Organizing's Top
11

PREVENTING GRASSROOTS ROT

How Groups Self-destruct Nonviolent Communication Conflict Resolution Heal a
Divided Public Problem People IAF Organizing

CREATING A PROJECT

Beginning Visioning Exercises Research Planning and Acting Getting Noticed
Evaluating

COMMUNITY PROJECT EXAMPLES

Bees CohousingListening Projects Study Circles Child Minding Co-ops Community
Gardens Community Kitchens Block Watch / Block Parents Community Crime
Prevention Block Parties Block Cleanups Festivals and Parades Guerrilla
Gardening Community Image Making Intergenerational Activities Environmental
Activities Street Reclaiming Good Neighbour Awards Rating People for Public
Office Other Activities
VERTICAL ENGAGEMENT

MAKING THE NEWS

Getting Noticed Framing Issues in the Media Raising the Status of Facts Public
Media in America

CONFRONTATION 101

Cooperation FirstRules for RadicalsConfrontational TacticsStrategic Thinking
Gandhi's Methods Direct Action with Hammers Power-broker Tactics

LARGE SCALE TACTICS

Methods for Social Movements Mobilization Cookbook pdf Conditions for Revolution
How to Remove a Dictator Ten Commandments for Change Citizens Juries IAF
Organizing
BOOKS ARTICLES LINKS

BOOKS

Books on building democracy Books on action organizing Books on media advocacy
Books on working with others

ARTICLES

Tackle Climate Change20-year-old Gets ActionCitizens in EmergenciesWays to
control the pandemicAsk for a RevolutionHow to Reduce Social Anger Solving
Homelessness Guide to Networked Campaigns The Mob Begins to Think Game Builds
DemocracyThe Organizational Virus Progressive politics gone wrongTyranny of
StructurelessnessSmartphone AddictionChina's Citizen Control SystemA Rigged
EconomyGlobal Tax EvasionFuture ShapingEconomic Nutrition LabelsCapitalism
Alternative mp3Framing Issues in the Media Framing Interconnectedness Homecoming
and Belonging Developing a Civic Culture Ladder of Public Participation Making
Citizens ScarceServing or Engaging Citizens Working Collectively The Roots of
Empathy Indentured MomsBowling Alone Grassroots Funding Notes on Occupy and
Equality Conflict Resolution Confronting NIMBYism Post-Alinsky Organizing
Consensus in Large Groups Work Less Tragedy of the Commons Running a Salon

LINKS

Many of the best online resources Community Toolbox ~ a vast resource Ashoka ~
social entrepreneurs Democracy Skills Course ~ Canadian The Control Game ~ spot
fake involvement Shelterforce ~ community dev articles ZNet ~ articles on social
change National Civic League ~ citizen involvement Civic Practices Network ~
lots of material Community Development Listserve Benton Foundation ~ media
action Training for Change
SUBSCRIBE

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The Dictator's Playbook

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Three Political Dimensions
Rules Ruling Rulers
Coming to Power
Mortality as a Threat
Bankruptcy as a Threat
Shrinking the Coalition
Managing Protest
Shocks as a Threat
Fighting Wars / Surviving War
Peace between Democracies
What is to be Done?




Editors' note:
The following is an 11 page edited version of the insightful 2011 book The
Dictator's Handbook, Why Bad Behaviour is almost always Good Politics by Bruce
Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. We’ve left out most of the author’s
examples – except those from Russia – and most of the commentary on democracies.
We’ve also substituted “electorate” for the authors' “selectorate”.

Vladimir Putin, an admirer of self-proclaimed fascists, Aleksandr Dugin and Ivan
Ilyan, is made of the stuff of dictators. But had he seen the documentary Winter
on Fire, showing the remarkable determination of the Ukrainian people in 2014 to
rid the country of Russian puppet president Viktor Yanukovych - he would have
realized that trying to install another puppet was never going to succeed.
Netflix has made Winter on Fire, available for free on YouTube.

The Rules of Politics

We can easily grasp most of what goes on in the political world if we give up
one assumption: the idea that leaders can lead unilaterally. No leader is
monolithic. If we are to make any sense of how power works, we must stop
thinking that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il can do whatever he wants. We must stop
believing that Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Genghis Khan or anyone else is
in sole control of their respective nation. Or that Enron’s Kenneth Lay or
British Petroleum’s Tony Hayward were in sole control of their companies. All of
these notions are flat out wrong because no emperor, no king, no sheik, no
tyrant, no CEO, no family head, no leader whatsoever can govern alone.

No one has absolute authority. All that varies is how many backs have to be
scratched and how big is the supply of backs available for scratching.


Three Political Dimensions



For leaders, the political landscape can be broken down into three groups of
people: the nominal electorate, the real electorate, and the winning coalition.

The nominal electorate includes every person who has at least some legal say in
choosing their leader. In the United States it is everyone eligible to vote, but
at the end of the day no individual voter has a lot of say over who leads the
country.

The second stratum of politics consists of the real electorate. This is the
group that actually chooses the leader. In China it consists of all voting
members of the Communist Party; in Saudi Arabia it is the senior members of the
royal family; in Great Britain, the voters backing the majority party.

The third and most important group is the winning coalition. These are the
people whose support is essential if a leader is to survive in office. In the
USSR the winning coalition consisted of a small group of people inside the
Communist Party who chose candidates and who controlled policy.

A simple way to think of these three groups is: interchangeables, influentials,
and essentials. These groups provide the foundation of all that’s to come in the
rest of this book, and, more importantly, the foundation behind the working of
politics in all organizations, big and small. Differences in the sizes of these
three groups give politics a three-dimensional structure that decides almost
everything that happens.


Rules Ruling Rulers

The first step in understanding how politics really works is to ask what kinds
of policies leaders spend money on. Do they spend it on public goods that
benefit everyone? Or do they spend mostly on private goods that benefit only a
few? The answer, for any savvy politician, depends on how many people the leader
needs to keep loyal—that is, the number of essentials in the coalition.

In a democracy, or any other system where a leader’s critical coalition is
excessively large, it becomes too costly to buy loyalty through private rewards.
The money has to be spread too thinly. So more democratic types of governments,
dependent as they are on large coalitions, tend to emphasize spending to create
effective public policies that improve general welfare. By contrast, dictators,
monarchs, military junta leaders, and most CEOs all rely on a smaller set of
essentials.

A smaller set encourages stable, corrupt, private-goods-oriented regimes. The
choice between enhancing social welfare or enriching a privileged few is not a
question of how benevolent a leader is. Honorable motives might seem important,
but they are overwhelmed by the need to keep supporters happy, and the means of
keeping them happy depends on how many need rewarding.

Staying in power, requires the support of others, forthcoming only if a leader
provides his essentials with more benefits than they might expect under
different leadership. When essential followers expect to be better off under the
wing of some political challenger, they desert.

Incumbents have a tough job, but have a huge advantage over rivals when they
rely on relatively few essentials, and the pool of potential replacements is
large. Lenin designed precisely such a political system in Russia after the
revolution. This explains why, from the October 1917 Revolution through to
Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, only one Soviet leader, Nikita
Khrushchev, was successfully deposed in a coup. All the other Soviet leaders
died of old age or infirmity. Khrushchev failed to deliver what he promised to
his cronies.

For political survival in any system there are five basic rules for leaders:

Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition
allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials
equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures.

Rule 2: Keep your nominal electorate as large as possible. A large nominal
electorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials
on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being
replaced.

Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine
who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed
themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of
people poor and redistributes money to keep their supporters wealthy.

Rule 4: Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal. Remember, your
backers would rather be you than be dependent on you. Your big advantage over
them is that you know where the money is and they don’t. Give your coalition
just enough so that they don’t shop around for someone to replace you and not a
penny more.

Rule 5: Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s
lives better. The flip side of rule 4 is not to be too cheap toward your
coalition of supporters. If you’re good to the people at the expense of your
coalition, it won’t be long until your “friends” will be gunning for you.


Coming to Power

To come to power a challenger need only do three things. First, he must remove
the incumbent. Second, he needs to seize the apparatus of government. Third, he
needs to form a coalition of supporters sufficient to sustain him as the new
incumbent. Each of these actions involves its own unique challenges, the
relative ease of which differs between democracies and autocracies.

There are three ways to remove an incumbent leader. The first, and easiest, is
for the leader to die. If that convenience does not offer itself, a challenger
can make an offer to the essential members of the incumbent’s coalition that is
sufficiently attractive that they defect to the challenger’s cause. Third, the
current political system can be overwhelmed from the outside, whether by
military defeat by a foreign power, or through revolution and rebellion, in
which the masses rise up, depose the current leader, and destroy existing
institutions.

While rebellion requires skill and coordination, its success ultimately depends
heavily upon coalition loyalty, or more precisely, the absence of loyalty to the
old regime. Hosni Mubarak’s defeat by a mass uprising in Egypt is a case in
point. The most critical factor behind Mubarak’s defeat in February 2011 was the
decision by Egypt’s top generals to allow demonstrators to take to the streets
without fear of military suppression. And why was that the case? Cuts in US
foreign aid to Egypt combined with serious economic constraints that produced
high unemployment, meant that Mubarak’s coalition was likely underpaid and the
people believed the risks and costs of rebellion were smaller than normal.
Revolutions occur when those who preserve the current system are sufficiently
dissatisfied with their rewards that they are willing to look for a new patron

Once the old leader is gone, it is essential to seize the instruments of power,
such as the treasury, as quickly as possible. This is particularly important in
small coalition systems. Anyone who waits will be a loser in the competition for
power. Speed is of the essence.

Buying loyalty is particularly difficult when a leader first comes to power.
When deciding whether to support a new leader, prudent backers must not only
think about how much their leader gives them today. They must also ponder what
they can expect to receive in the future, and recognize that they might not be
kept on for long. Allaying supporters’ fears of being abandoned is a key element
of coming to power. Of course, supporters are not so naïve that they will be
convinced by promises that their position is secure. But such political promises
are much better than revealing your true plans. Once supporters hear they are
going to be replaced, they will turn on a new leader.


Mortality as a Threat

First, on the list of risks of being deposed is the inescapable fact of
mortality. Dead leaders cannot deliver rewards to their coalition. Dying leaders
face almost as grave a problem. If essential backers know their leader is dying,
then they also know that they need someone new to assure the flow of revenue
into their pockets. That’s a good reason to keep terminal illnesses secret since
a terminal ailment is bound to provoke an uprising, either within the ranks of
the essential coalition or among outsiders who see an opportunity to take
control of the palace. Because rumors of impending death often induce political
death, spreading a rumor of terminal illness may help to remove a dictator form
office.

The sad truth is that if you want to come to power in an autocracy you are
better off stealing medical records than you are devising fixes for your
nation’s ills.


Bankruptcy as a Threat

A dictator must always remain solvent. If he runs out of money with which to pay
his supporters, it becomes far easier for someone else to make coalition members
an attractive offer. Financial crises are an opportune time to strike. The
Russian Revolution is often portrayed through the prism of Marxist ideology and
class warfare. The reality might be much simpler. Kerensky’s revolutionaries
were able to storm the Winter Palace in February 1917 because the army did not
stop them. And the army did not bother to stop them because the czar did not pay
them enough. The czar could not pay them enough because he foolishly cut the
income from one of his major sources of revenue, the vodka tax, at the same time
that he fought World War I.


Shrinking the Coalition

There is a common adage that politicians don’t change the rules that brought
them to power. This is false. They are ever ready and eager to reduce coalition
size. What politicians seek to avoid are changes that increase the number of
people to whom they are beholden. Yet much as they try to avoid them,
circumstances do arise when institutions must become more inclusive. This can
make autocrats vulnerable because the coalition they have established and the
rewards they provide are then no longer sufficient to maintain power.

Under the old Soviet system, Boris Yeltsin had no chance of rising to power. He
blundered in trying to end Communist Party members’ access to special stores,
privileged access to the best universities, and other benefits not shared by
working. Sure, that was popular with the masses but the masses didn’t have much
say in choosing who ran the Soviet Union—Party members did.

By the late 1980s the Soviet economy had stagnated. This left the recently
promoted Soviet leader, Gorbachev, with a serious dilemma. Facing the specter of
running out of money, he needed to loosen control over the people, freeing their
suppressed entrepreneurial potential.

Economic liberalization wasn’t a simple matter for the Soviets since allowing
people to communicate, coordinate, and interact can facilitate mass political
protest. But Gorbachev was between a rock and a hard place. Without a stronger
economy he could not pay party members their usual rewards, but to get a
stronger economy he had to risk his political control. Gorbachev rolled the dice
and ultimately lost.

First Gorbachev faced a coup from within his own coalition. In 1991, harder line
anti-reform party members, fearful of losing their special privileges, deposed
Gorbachev and took control of the government. But then Boris Yeltsin, standing
atop a tank in Red Square, ensured that the Soviet military would not fire on
protesters who wanted reform. The mass movement, with Boris Yeltsin at its head,
overthrew the coup that wanted to return to the Soviet Union’s more repressive
policies of the past. The mass movement returned Gorbachev ever so briefly to
power, leaving him with a much diminished rump Soviet Union, and paving the way
for the dissolution of the Soviet empire just a few months later.

Yeltsin, having gotten over his privileges fiasco, understood that he could not
forge a winning coalition out of the inner circles of the Communist Party, but
he could win over the apparatchiks by promoting greater budgetary autonomy for
the Russian Republic within the Soviet structure. They could become richer and
more powerful in Russia than they had been in the Soviet Union. In this way,
Yeltsin picked off essential members of Gorbachev’s coalition and made himself a
winner. Yeltsin was, as it turned out, much better at working out how to come to
power than he was at governing well, but that is a tale for another time.


Managing Protest

In autocracies the people get a raw deal. Their labor provides tax revenues that
leaders lavish on essential core supporters. Leaders provide them little beyond
the essential minimal health care, primary education, and food to allow them to
work. Life for people in most small-coalition regimes is nasty, solitary, poor,
brutish, and short.

So why don’t they always rise up against their government? The answer resides in
finding a crucial moment, a tipping point, when the future looks sufficiently
bad that it is worth risking the cost of rebellion. People must believe that
those few who first step forward have a decent chance of success and a decent
chance of making the lives of ordinary people better. If a regime excels at
brutal repression, at convincing people that stepping out of line means
incredible misery and even death, it can prevent rebellion.

Before deciding to gamble on the promises of revolutionaries, each prospective
demonstrator must judge the costs and the risks of rebellion. That is why
middle-of-the-road dictators, like Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista, Tunisia’s Ben Ali,
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the Soviet Union’s Gorbachev are more likely to
experience a mass uprising than the worst of their fellow autocrats.

That is not to say that when the people rise up they are right in thinking life
will be better. Many revolutions end up simply replacing one autocracy with
another. On some occasions the successor regime can actually be worse than its
predecessor.


Shocks as a Threat

Shocks that trigger protest come in many forms. On rare occasions protests may
happen spontaneously, more often they require an event to shake up the system.
At the collapse of the communist states in Eastern Europe in 1989, contagion
played a major role. Once one state fell, the people in the surrounding
countries realized their state could be vulnerable. Free elections in Communist
Poland triggered protests in East Germany. When security forces refused to obey
Erich Honecker’s order to break up demonstrations, protests grew. Successful
protest in Germany spawned further demonstrations in Czechoslovakia. As protests
grew and more states began to fall, it provided convincing signs of success to
people living in countries still under communist control.

A massive natural disaster, an unanticipated succession crisis, or a global
economic downturn that drives the autocrat’s local economy to the brink of
bankruptcy can also provide a rallying cry for protesters.

Other shocks can be “planned”; that is, events or occasions chosen by an
autocrat who misjudges the risks involved. One common example is a rigged
election. Dictators seem to like to hold elections. Whether they do so to
satisfy international pressure and gain more foreign aid, to dispel domestic
unrest, or to gain a misleading sense of legitimacy, their preference is to rig
the vote count. Elections are nice, but winning is nicer. Still, sometimes the
people seize the moment of an election to shock the incumbent, voting so
overwhelmingly for someone else that it is hard to cover up the true outcome.

Sometimes the shocks that spark revolt come as a total surprise. Natural
disasters, while bringing misery to the people, can also empower them. One
frequent consequence of earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts is that vast
numbers of people are forced from their homes. If they are permitted to gather
in refugee camps, then they have the opportunity to organize against the
government. On the morning of September 19, 1985, a large earthquake occurred
about 350 kilometers from Mexico City causing enormous devastation throughout
the city. The government did virtually nothing, leaving a quarter million people
to rescue themselves. Forced together into crowded camps, they shared their
disillusionment with the government. Organizing a protest rally was suddenly
relatively easy. Ready and willing participants were on hand and had little to
lose. With the government largely absent, these social groups rapidly deployed
as large anti-government demonstrations. Unable to oppose these groups, the
government sought to accommodate them. It is widely believed they played a key
role in Mexico’s democratization.


Fighting Wars

Leaders of democracies, who depend on lots of essential backers, only fight when
they believe victory is nearly certain. Otherwise, they look for ways to resolve
their international differences peacefully. Leaders who rely only on a few
essential supporters, in contrast, are prepared to fight even when the odds of
winning are not particularly good. Democratic leaders try hard to win if the
going gets tough. Autocrats make a good initial effort and if that proves
wanting they quit. These strategies are clearly in evidence if we consider the
Six Day War in 1967.

As its name tells us, the Six Day War was a short fight, begun on June 5, 1967,
and ending on June 10. On one side were Syria, Egypt, and Jordan; on the other
was Israel. By the end of the war, Israel had captured the Sinai from Egypt;
Jerusalem, Hebron, and the West Bank from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from
Syria.

To understand the war and how our way of thinking explains it, we must first
comprehend some basic facts about the adversaries. The combined armed forces of
the Arab combatants on the eve of war came to 360,000, compared to Israel’s
75,000. Although the Arab side had 83 percent of the soldiers, they spent
considerably less per soldier than did the Israelis.

Remember that large-coalition leaders must keep a broad swath of the people
happy, including those who are soldiers. Although conflict involves putting
soldiers at risk, democrats do what they can to mitigate such risk. In
autocracies, foot soldiers are not politically important. Autocrats do not waste
resources protecting them.

The difference in expenditures per soldier is greater even than the numbers
alone indicate. The Israeli military, like the military of democracies in
general, spends a lot of its money on buying equipment that is heavily armored
to protect soldiers. Better training and equipment enable democracies to
leverage the impact of each soldier so they can achieve the same military output
while at the same time putting few soldiers at risk. The Egyptian military’s
tanks, troop transports, and other equipment were lightly and cheaply armored.
They preferred to spend money on private rewards with which to ensure the
loyalty of the generals and colonels.

In a small-coalition regime, the military serves two crucial functions. It keeps
the incumbent safe from domestic rivals and it tries to protect the incumbent’s
government from foreign threats. In a large-coalition government, the military
pretty much only has to worry about the latter. Sure, it might be called upon to
put down some massive domestic unrest from time to time, but its job is to
protect the system of government and not the group running government. Its job
description does not include taking out legitimate domestic political rivals.
Autocrats, of course, don’t recognize any rivals as legitimate. To keep rivals
at bay, the soldiers must have their rewards. If they don’t, they might turn
their guns on the leadership that employed them.

Why did the Arabs lose the 1967 war? The difference between Israel and the Arabs
lay in their approach to war. In Israel, everybody takes part in war, but in the
Arab countries only the army. When war breaks out, everyone in Israel goes to
the front and civilian life dies out. While in Syria, many people did not find
out about the 1967 war until it was over.

When it comes to fighting wars, institutions matter at least as much as the
balance of power. The willingness of democracies to try harder goes a long way
to explaining why seemingly weaker democracies often overcome seemingly stronger
autocracies. Tiny Israel has repeatedly beaten its larger neighbors. The
minuscule Republic of Venice survived for over a thousand years until it was
finally defeated by Napoleon in 1797. The smaller, but more democratic
government of Prussia defeated the larger Austrian monarchy in the Seven Weeks
War in 1866. History is full of democratic Davids beating autocratic Goliaths.


Surviving War

Democrats are much more sensitive to war outcomes than autocrats. Indeed, even
victory in war does not guarantee a democrat’s political survival. For instance,
within eighteen months of defeating Saddam Hussein, and over 80 percent approval
ratings, President George Herbert Walker Bush was defeated at the polls by Bill
Clinton. Similarly, British voters threw Winston Churchill out of office despite
his inspired leadership during World War II.

Autocrats are much less sensitive to defeat. Despite defeat in the First Gulf
War and a costly and inconclusive result in the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988),
Saddam Hussein outlasted four US presidents (Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton).
Only defeat in the Second Gulf War cost him his job, and that war was fought
primarily to remove him. Unless they are defeated by a democracy seeking policy
concessions, autocrats can generally survive military defeat provided that they
preserve their resources.


Peace Between Democracies

Democracies hardly ever (some might even say never) fight wars with each other.
This is not to say they are peace loving. They are not shy about fighting other
states. But the reasoning behind the tacit peace between democracies provides
some clues to how the world could become more peaceful.

Democratic leaders need to deliver policy success or they will be turned out of
office. For this reason they only fight wars when they expect to win. Of course
they may turn out to be wrong, in which case they then double down to turn the
fight in their direction – as the US did in Vietnam.

If we are correct, we should hardly ever witness two large-coalition regimes
fighting against each other. According to our reasoning, democrats will only
fight when they believe they are almost certain that they will win. As long as a
large coalition leader believes that his dispute is unlikely to escalate to war,
he can move partially up the escalation ladder, pressing his foe into backing
down or else backing down himself, and negotiating if he concludes that the
other side is prepared to fight and that his own prospects of victory are too
small to justify fighting. Autocrats, as we saw, don’t need to think they have a
great chance of winning. They are prepared to take bigger risks because they
believe the personal consequences of defeat are not as bad as the personal
consequences of not paying off essential supporters.


What is to be done?

For some time, the editors of The Citizens Handbook have been thinking about
broad solutions to getting rid of dictators. One idea the keeps coming up is the
notion of providing ways to encourage dictators to retire from the business of
making misery. We suggest a Last Resort, an island somewhere in the South
Pacific where dictators could retire with some portion of their ill-gotten gains
to lead a life of luxury free from the threat of trial, imprisonment and death.
The United Nations would need to lease an uninhabited location and make an
arrangement to provide paid staff. The Last Resort would be self-governed, but
the international community would need to provide protection against external
threats, especially from those wishing to exact retribution for the dictator’s
prior acts.

The Dictator’s Handbook concludes on a similar tack:

The UN could prescribe a process for transition from dictatorship to democracy.
At the same time it could stipulate that any dictator facing the pressure to
grant freedom to the people would have a brief, fixed period of time, say a
week, to leave the country in exchange for a blanket perpetual grant of amnesty
against prosecution anywhere for crimes committed as his nation’s leader. There
is clear precedence for such a policy. It is common practice to give criminals
immunity if they agree to testify. Some victims are bound to resent that the
perpetrator of heinous acts goes unpunished. Unfortunately, the alternative is
to leave the dictator with few options but to gamble on holding onto power
through further murderous acts.

The incentives to encourage leaders to step aside could be further strengthened
if, in exchange for agreeing to step down quickly, they would be granted the
right to retain some significant amount of ill-gotten gains, and safe havens for
exile where the soon-to-be ex-leadership and their families can live out their
lives in peace.

Offering such deals might prove self-fulfilling. Once essential supporters
believe their leader might take such a deal, they themselves start looking for
his replacement, so even if the leader had wanted to stay and fight he might no
longer have the support to do so. The urge for retribution is better put aside
to give dictators a reason to give up rather than fight. Muammar Qadaffi had
none of these opportunities and so faced a stark choice: live the life of the
hunted or fight to the death. He chose fight on to the end, to the detriment of
the Libyan people.

Additional choices could be provided. Britain’s transition from monarchy to
constitutional monarchy provides a valuable lesson. Leaders want to survive in
office and maximize their control over money. But what if their choice is to
trade the power of office in exchange for the right to the money? What if they
had the option of keeping a title and some portion of their wealth in return for
handing power over to a properly elected government of the people, as William
and Mary and the subsequent Hanoverian dynasty did in England. This is an option
the Saudi Arabian royal family, the Jordanian royal family, and the royal
families of the Emirates might well contemplate as a better option than trying
to crush rebellion. Revolutionaries might fail today or tomorrow, but leaders
have only to lose once and by then it will be too late for them to negotiate
their way to a soft landing.

The Dictator's Playbook pdf
See also How to Get Rid of a Dictator
And Social Movements
And Conditions for Revolution

Here is a partial list of Putin's essential supporters.



The Citizen's Handbook / About / Table of Contents
The Citizen's Handbook / Charles Dobson / citizenshandbook.org






The Troublemaker's Teaparty is a print version of The Citizen's Handbook
published in 2003. It contains all of The Handbook plus additional material on
preventing grassroots rot, strategic action, direct action and media advocacy.
You can get a copy of The Teaparty from bookstores, Amazon or New Society
Publishers.