An authoritarian regime, broadly defined, is a form of government characterized by dominant central power and the subordination of individual rights and freedoms to the authority of the state. Despite the international order being founded on the ideals of liberal democracy, research by the Human Rights Foundation suggests that nearly four billion people in over 90 countries currently live under regimes that can be described as non-democratic.
Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the New York Times bestseller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, considers the spectrum of regimes that make up authoritarianism’s modern incarnation.