CBC Ideas Week: How to Defeat Authoritarianism

How do authoritarian leaders use threats, illusions and force to seize and maintain power? And what does it take for truth and justice to prevail? Guided by host Nahlah Ayed, Ideas explores the rise and fall of four pivotal authoritarians and their regimes from recent world history, and asks what we can learn from their eventual downfall.

Bashar al-Assad’s Syria

In 2000, Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria, also known as the authoritarian ‘Kingdom of Fear’ that his father Hafez al-Assad created three decades earlier. The younger Assad continued and intensified the use of imprisonment, torture and surveillance as tools of domination, and his violent crackdown on a pro-democracy revolution turned into a 13-year civil war. Nahlah and panellists discuss what we can learn about the rise, entrenchment and collapse of authoritarianism from Assad’s rule and the 2024 collapse of his regime.