Teaching the Authoritarian Playbook

A growing number of academic and policy fora treat the construction and maintenance of authoritarian regimes as an explicit, teachable subject — including courses whose capstone asks students to design a 20‑year takeover plan for a real country. That pedagogical move makes the mechanisms and institutional levers of authoritarian rule more legible and transferable to broader audiences. — Making authoritarian tactics a formal object of study normalizes detailed how‑to knowledge, raises ethical questions about research boundaries, and changes what journalists, policymakers and civil society can point to when diagnosing democratic erosion.