The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy by William J. Dobson

(Doubleday, $29)

Dictators aren’t stupid, said Christian Caryl in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Put Kim Jong Il’s “weird hairstyle” and Muammar al-Qaddafi’s “goofy fashion sense” aside and you might recognize that both recently departed leaders were actually quite good at what they cared about most: holding onto power. In William J. Dobson’s “fascinating” new book, the Slate.com foreign editor takes a close look at five modern authoritarian regimes to tease out the strategies that today’s despots have developed to meet the particular challenges posed by 21st-century democratic movements and the communications technologies that aid the upstarts. In Dobson’s view, the world’s contemporary strongmen have adapted by turning away from violence and co-opting the surface symbols and structures of democracy.

Dobson’s reporting provides a “bracing” corrective to the unbridled optimism that greeted last year’s Arab Spring, said Joshua Kurlantzick in Bloomberg Businessweek. The number of democracies in the world actually declined between 2005 and 2010, and rulers like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela have shown a remarkable talent for inventing subtle new means of fending off challenges. Putin places proxies atop leading media and industrial firms, for instance, and creates nongovernmental organizations that air mild criticisms of the regime while drowning out the more strident voices of true opponents.

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This book’s scouting reports on democracy’s foes can be dispiriting, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Many current autocrats use confusion as an ally, making it hard for dissidents to guess where liberties end in a so-called free press or free election. But Dobson is himself an optimist about where trends are heading in the long run, and he spends many pages chronicling how democracy’s advocates are answering with innovations of their own. “His explanation of how citizens are using fresh, bespoke tools against modern dictators is almost absurdly inspiring.” Here’s hoping those pages reach the right hands.