This textbook provides a systematic, comprehensive and historically embedded introduction to the formation, functioning and development conditions of today's non-democratic regimes. It disseminates the results of international autocracy research, familiarises readers with its concepts and methods, provides information about the most important types of autocracy and illuminates the conditions for their stability. System transformations are also examined from the perspective of autocratic regimes. The book integrates approaches, findings and perspectives from different research traditions and aims to encourage an interdisciplinary view.
The author works at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the University of Dresden.