autocracy

For the Athenians, demokratia, literally “people power,” meant endlessly striving to find ways of harnessing the tendency of leaders toward autocracy.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 8, 2026

The Gbagbos protested against Houphouët-Boigny's autocracy, which lasted for 33 years, calling for multi-party democracy.

From BBC ● Sep. 12, 2025

Now the formally restless Susan Choi turns to social realism in her beguiling if baggy “Flashlight,“ mapping a family’s journey among political autocracy and personal pain, from Midwestern cornfields to the Pacific Rim.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 2, 2025

The death of most European monarchies after World War I did not signal the demise of lawless autocracy so much as its translation into the new form of nonhereditary dictatorships, Adolf Hitler’s first among them.

From Slate ● Feb. 21, 2025

Although his reign may have begun idealistically, Cahokia quickly became an autocracy; in an Ozymandiac extension of his ego, the supreme leader set in motion the construction projects.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann

The Games were held in the middle of autocracies, the middle of pandemics and the middle of nowhere.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 15, 2026

Though in fairness, the app has stood firm against other censorship orders from autocracies like Myanmar and Russia, the latter of which temporarily banned the app in 2018.

From Slate ● Aug. 28, 2024

When we picture the ways autocracies end and, more specifically, how dictators end, the greatest hits to mind.

From Salon ● Apr. 8, 2024

Will Tracy, the show’s creator and co-writer, said he read 20 books about autocracies, authoritarian leaders and totalitarian states to develop the six episodes.

From New York Times ● Mar. 15, 2024

The worst was, that the growing autocracies found support in the divisions which had grown within the cities themselves.

From Mutual Aid; a factor of evolution by Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Prince