Noted: Written before the last six months of authoritarian unpleasantness, Jessica Weeks?s just-released ?Dictators At War and Peace? nevertheless explains an awful lot of what?s been going on in Russia, China and elsewhere. An assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Weeks argues that international relations scholarship has focused too much on the differences between democratic and authoritarian regimes and not enough on the differences within authoritarian regimes. She sets up a typology of non-democratic states: authoritarians with powerful civilian audiences (think China or Iran), authoritarians with powerful military audiences (think Thailand), and personalist strongmen without powerful domestic audiences (think Putin in Russia).
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