Anne Applebaum has been monitoring the erosion of democratic systems for decades. Currently, a new threat has emerged: autocracies are collaborating to maintain power. These regimes are not led by a single dictator but are supported by complex networks involving kleptocratic financial systems, security services, and technological experts specialising in surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. Countries with such centralised autocracies include Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, and many others.

She will explain how rogue states endure sanctions, circulate their wealth, and redefine the post-war ‘rules-based order’, and how the democratic world has unintentionally supported this new reality, risking the loss of control over our economic futures and democratic systems.

Speakers:

Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books, including GULAG: A HISTORY which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; IRON CURTAIN, on the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war, which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature; and RED FAMINE, on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, which provides the background to today’s Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In 2020 she published the bestselling TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY, which analyzed the appeal of autocracy to Western intellectuals and politicians.

David Aaronovitch is a journalist, television presenter and author. He is a regular columnist for The Times and the author of Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists, Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History etc.

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