The Autocrat’s Playbook

A powerful account of how authoritarian leaders make cruelty, exclusion, and repression appear morally justified.

Across democracies and autocracies alike, a growing form of authoritarian control uses moral slogans and patriotic scripts to quash dissent. Leaders increasingly justify repression in the moral defense of families, children, values, or the nation itself.

In The Autocrat’s Playbook, Baris Cayli Messina introduces the “moral trap,” a novel framework that reveals how authoritarian regimes around the world use morality to create fear, stigmatize activists, criminalize dissent, and ultimately isolate people from one another. Drawing on historical and contemporary cases ranging from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to apartheid South Africa, Putin’s Russia, and the Trump-era United States and beyond, Messina shows how autocrats consolidate their power and manufacture obedience by reshaping what people believe is right, normal, and worthy. Timely and provocative, The Autocrat’s Playbook offers a bold new way of understanding how social and political repression works and how collective resistance survives.

Baris Cayli Messina is Professor at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln; Editor-in-Chief of the International Social Science Journal; and author of A Slow Revolution, Queer Under Siege, and Violence and Militants.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Entering the Moral Trap

1. Moral Anxiety: Manufacturing Fear

2. Moral Stigmatization: Branding the Enemy

3. Moral Control: Legalizing Oppression

4. Moral Isolation: Dividing the World

5. Escaping the Moral Trap: Resistance in Immoral Times

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index