How Tyrants Fall by Marcel Dirsus review – road to revolution

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” roars Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III. He wants to put his life of crime behind him and go legit, but circumstances conspire against him. It’s a frustration shared by tyrants. Being one, Marcel Dirsus says, is “like being stuck on a treadmill that one can never get off”.

But then, losing control can be a devastating experience. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal killing at the hands of rebels after four decades of misrule was a lesson in the transience of autocratic power.

International justice can be nearly as harsh as frontier justice. So Charles Taylor learned when the Nigerians handed him over to a special UN-backed court in The Hague. These days the Liberian warlord is in Britain, serving a 50-year sentence at HMP Frankland.

Since the second world war, 23% of the world’s rulers have ended up exiled, imprisoned or killed after leaving office. For dictators, though, the figure rises to 69%. This was impressed on Robert Mugabe not through statistics but by seeing what happened to his friend Taylor. Subsequently, he let it be known there was only one way he was going to leave Zimbabwe – “in a coffin”. How Tyrants Fall arguably belongs to the genre known as “mirrors for princes” – manuals for monarchs – whose exponents include Al-Ghazali and Machiavelli. Dirsus is a worthy heir to that tradition. He wears his research lightly and ranges widely, lathering his dark material with a bright impasto of playful irony.

Dictatorships, he argues, are rather precarious things. Anything can bring them down. Beware the big crowd. Dirsus endorses the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s “3.5% rule”. If that many of your subjects participate in mass demonstrations, you’re done for. So how do you deal with the mob? Don’t suppress them, Dirsus says, for if “you shoot, you lose”. Violence begets a spiral of resistance and repression.

As a clever dictator, you might want to plump instead for “dictatorship by cartography”. Notice how the world’s biggest protests take place in city squares: Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Cairo’s Tahrir, Kyiv’s Maidan. If you do away with them, as the Burmese have in Naypyidaw, the capital expressly built to house tight-lipped bureaucrats, with its soulless boulevards and no place for congregating dissidents, that’s half the battle won.

Sometimes you’re done for not because you’ve alienated huge swathes of young people, but a key swing voter. Sometimes that swing voter is the person you share your bed with. So Tsar Peter III learned in 1762, when he was ousted in a palace coup and replaced by his wife, Catherine the Great. If this sounds like distant history, dictators would do well to remember that since 1950, about 65% of them have been removed by regime insiders. The army is another potential enemy within. Still, you need one to stave off external threats. The US alone has tried regime change on 74 occasions; a third of these attempts have been successful. But empower your generals too much, and you have a problem closer to home. Dirsus’s counsel is “counter-balancing”. Like the Saudi royals, balance your regular army with a paramilitary force (the Saudi Arabian National Guard) and a family protection unit (the Saudi Arabian Royal Guard). Indulge the latter two: “Spoil them rotten. Give them money, give them toys.”

Also try “ethnic stacking”. That’s what the Brits did in India. Choose a few loyal minorities, such as the Sikhs and Gurkhas, christen them “martial races”, and have them police the majority. The odds are they won’t develop any sense of fellow-feeling for the masses, and so won’t hesitate to use force against them.

The dust-jacket tells us Dirsus’s book is a “blueprint” for bringing dictators down, but this is a theme he explores only in the final 20 pages, which feel tacked on to deflect the charge that he’s a despot whisperer. He offers the usual nostrums: targeted sanctions and the like. He rightly believes it is unpardonable that the west allows despots to hoover up western assets. Qatar Holdings LLC, for instance, owns a 10th of Volkswagen. The Saudis have billions tied up in Google, Microsoft and JP Morgan.

Dirsus cautions against coups. To be sure, they are risky enterprises. The mercenary Simon Mann discovered this the hard way when he tried to dislodge Teodoro Obiang, one of the world’s longest-serving heads of state, on behalf of oil investors. As it was, Equatorial Guinea’s ruler outsmarted the Eton-educated SAS veteran. Mann was arrested before the coup got off the ground.

“You know, you go tiger shooting and you sort of don’t expect the tiger to win,” Mann sheepishly told the Channel 4 journalist who visited him at Black Beach, one of Africa’s worst prisons. Omar Little said it best in The Wire: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

• How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive by Marcel Dirsus is published by John Murray (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.