Gideon Rachman

Foreign correspondent Gideon Rachman looks at why authoritarian leaders have become a fixture of global politics in both authoritarian political systems and liberal democracies.

Rachman says that the EU referendum and the election of Trump in 2016 were a watershed moment, but the trend really started at the beginning of the millennium when Putin took power in Russia. How and why did these new leaders gain power and how have they survived? Will they lead the world into war or economic collapse? And what liberal forces exist that can keep them in check?

Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times and has been in the same room as most of the leaders he describes. He won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2016 and was a foreign correspondent for the Economist for 15 years. Here he talks to Frederick Studemann, literary editor of the FT.

An FT Weekend at the Bodleian event.