In his new book, Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in Global Politics, Barnard political science professor Alexander Cooley explores how authoritarian regimes aren’t just resurging around the globe, they are reshaping the very institutions, industries, and cultural spaces — from sports to media — where liberal norms once flourished.
Cooley, who is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science and Vice Provost for Research and Academic Centers, co-authored the book with Alexander Dukalskis, an associate professor at University College Dublin. Together, the professors examine how authoritarian states are using the tools and channels of liberal democracies to rewrite the rules of global engagement, accumulating power and influence around the world.
Named one of Foreign Policy’s most anticipated books of 2025 and one of the Five Sunday Reads by The Atlantic, Dictating the Agenda serves as both a warning and a call to action, urging us to recognize and confront the increasing threat and prevalence of what the authors call “an authoritarian snapback.” Cooley helps to Break This Down.
What made you want to write this specific book about authoritarian snapback?
A lot of my research career has been tracking the backlash against liberal values broadly in the post-communist sphere, in Russia and Eurasia, and increasingly on a global level. I was especially drawn to [topics like] global media, consumer boycotts, global sports, and transnational higher education. These are all areas where you’ve seen cooperative partnerships between democracies and autocracies typically promoted, but over the last 10 years, they’ve all transformed because authoritarian governments have intentionally tried to curtail their political content. And so that’s the purpose of the book — it’s to draw our attention to these different spheres of global governance and global social life, where we assume that liberal norms would be transmitted, and that’s no longer the case.
So for an average person just going about reading the news, where would they see this happening and maybe not necessarily think, “This is authoritarianism coming in,” but it is?
There are so many ways in which authoritarians are infiltrating the infrastructure of sports. Right before the FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022, one of the big campaigns was a pro-LGBTQ+ rights campaign, where players were going to wear rainbow armbands in support of LGBTQ+ rights. This was a movement that FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, said that it supported. It even supported a public campaign the summer before the World Cup. But as the event itself grew nearer, FIFA officials became more and more critical of these advocacy campaigns and talked about how we have to be respectful of other countries’ traditions and laws. Right before the tournament began, they indicated a specific rule change saying that any player who was observed to be wearing an armband would not only be fined but would be issued a yellow card. In other words, their participation in the game would be compromised. It’s not just authoritarians being defensive or trying to hide what they’re doing — it’s a very concerted, explicit pushback against the substance of a lot of these liberal advocacy campaigns.
You mentioned global media, so how are governments like China’s and Russia’s playing a role in that space?
We have two things happening in parallel: One is the withdrawal of U.S. legacy media from a position of global engagement — we used to have bureaus all over the world — while China and Russia have poured billions of dollars into their state media. China has close to a hundred formal offices around the world in its Chinese state media. One of the things that we do in the book is we look at things that aren’t so visible — what we know as content-sharing agreements, where local or national newspapers agree to take the news feed from an official state source, Xinhua News Agency in China, or ITAR-TASS in the case of Russia. The Western equivalent would be newswires like Reuters. You pay Reuters, and then you can use Reuters stories in your news outlet for your run-of-the-mill news. The thing about Reuters is that it is expensive. China and Russia give their news away for free. So when you think about what goes into the content of, say, a newspaper in Kenya or in Peru, they’re picking up the ITAR-TASS stories for news around the world. But what are some of the things they’re not going to cover? They’re probably not going to cover stories about democracy, about human rights violations, about democratic transitions. Without even actually knowing it, the substance of local newspapers is dictated through these kinds of content-sharing agreements and network associations. And again, these are areas where the West used to have a monopoly. Freedom of information is no longer free.
Is there anything people can do on a personal level or even a small level to combat this?
We talked about the trade-off between convenience and sources of information. I think we all have to push ourselves to dig a little deeper and to really question what we take for granted in terms of our assumptions about the world. We all have to accept the fact that we live in a very contested world. It’s contested at the community level, the state level, the national level — we’re such a polarized country — and increasingly at the global level. Politics is about contestation, right? It’s about different ideas. It’s about different values. As concerned citizens, we need to identify those opportunities in our daily lives where we can make choices in those kinds of contestations. We can support organizations or companies that are very open about their values or their ability to sort of protect free speech in certain communities. So, if I watch the NBA or Formula One — any of these sports that have had real questions over fundamentally protecting the right of athletes to speak — we need to be aware that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t watch them, but just realize that a lot of our culture, our entertainment, and our information are operating under new ground rules and always ask ourselves what is being excluded and which values are being represented.
It’s become so difficult nowadays to curate an unbiased social media feed. Even when you try to add both sides, you eventually end up with one or the other.
I feel like maybe the solution isn’t so much in trying to get rid of bias. We ought to have bias. We all have values. We all have things that we believe in, that we’re passionate about, that we want to advocate for. I think it’s more about understanding how the world gets rewired and being conscious that much of the agenda-setting that appears normal isn’t actually natural. Agendas are always the result of certain configurations of power, market conditions, and intentional interventions on the regulatory front, and just to be aware.
What do you do about the bigger picture?
I think you have to affirm what you stand for, and you have to do it even though you might think it’s a given or you didn’t have to articulate the importance of such values before.
For more books by Barnard community members, check out “Summer 2025 Reads,” courtesy of Barnard Magazine.
