How Tyrants and Terrorists Win Hearts and Minds

Across the globe, past and present, autocracy is quite often unavoidable. Dictatorships rise and fall, kleptocrats come to rule over grand swathes of territory, and terrorists and brutal revolutions often find ordinary people living under their boot. It is a frightening ordeal to live under terror and tyranny, an ordeal that often sees innocents killed and countless people forced to suffer.

Often, there is no escape but hope, and sometimes, even hope is simply not worth the trouble. But the work of mad kings and brutal conquerors does not stop when their flag is raised over a newly captured land. In fact, it is just the opposite, and faced with restless, or even terrified populations desperate to escape their rule, those same brutal leaders must keep the peace.

They can rule by the sword, for as long as they can, knowing that such tactics cannot last forever, or they can keep control in another way. What follows is an examination of how some of the worst regimes and most terrifying movements on planet Earth have been able to stay on top — how they keep populations pacified, how they might even rally popular support, and why, when some of the world’s most universally condemned rulers have been forced out of power, a surprising number of people might be saddened to see them go. In a world where everything, and everyone, has a price, the civilian populations of the world are no different, and it is the price of winning hearts and minds that demands scrutiny.

Exceptional Cases, Not the Norm: The Dichotomy of Repressive Rule and Popular Acceptance

Right from the outset, there are a good few caveats that must be addressed, and the first, and most important of all, is that the cases examined here are exceptional rather than the norm. It is relatively unusual across time for conquerors and despots to effectively shift public opinion in their favor, at least in any real way. It is more common that repression, violence, propaganda, or negligence are a tyrant’s preferred means to keep control, than a concerted effort to win hearts and minds.

Both approaches can often come together, hand in hand, and nobody among the examples covered here is blameless, no matter what they might have done for the people living under their rule. What is of interest is a strange dichotomy: how rulers who are repressive, who are murderous, who are tyrannical, can manage to win the support, or at least the begrudging acceptance, of their people anyhow. And a remaining caveat is that the discussion often concerns begrudging acceptance here, rather than outright enthusiasm.

When the support of a population is discussed, it is in a relative sense, although in some cases, people do get quite passionate about their Dear Leader. This analysis is not about people who support an authoritarian leader, a conquering force, or a locally dominant non-state actor simply because they are part of the movement. It is not about how, say, civilians of a certain ethnicity feel when their country is taken over by someone preaching supremacy in a way that directly benefits them.

Nor is it about the people who that same leader might be trying to exterminate or put into concentration camps. The focus is on all the people caught in the middle, the people who might only have a stake in a conflict or a conquest because of the land they live on, or the country they swear allegiance to. They are neither the allies of a scary new ruler, nor their target, but they have been placed under the control of a regime that is, by all accounts, going to be really hard to live under.

It is a hard situation to imagine, for most people, who have simply never been there.

Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire: Carrot, Stick, and the Yassa Code

Of all the historical leaders who figured out how to maintain happy, healthy, and even collaborative control over a population that never asked for them, it is the example of Genghis Khan that set the standard for everyone who came after. Neither Genghis nor his Mongol hordes were anybody’s idea of a fun time, once they began exploding out in all directions and conquering all they could see. The Mongols were known for their often cruel and terrifying tactics, including the liberal use of terror campaigns and psychological warfare, frequent raids against civilian villages and hamlets, and frequent massacres and mass acts of sexual violence against the people in their path.

An Arab historian of the time, Ibn al-Athir, wrote of the advancing Mongols: “In the countries that have not yet been overrun by them, everyone spends the night afraid that they may appear there too.” Yet, for generations, the Mongols faced only rare rebellions in most places they ruled, even though, given how spread-out their soldiers were, they broadly lacked the means to stop a local uprising if it got too big. The difference-maker for the khans was their approach to rule, over the many territories and cultures that they had conquered.

The Mongol Empire was ruled over with a code of law that Genghis Khan himself had put together, referred to as Yassa, and, unusually for the legal codes of a conquering people, it had very little to do with either subjugating an occupied population or coercing them into living like the Mongols themselves. Instead, the backbone of Yassa was the idea that even people who were powerful administrators, wartime leaders, or wealthy people were subject to the same sorts of laws and penalties as everybody else. Civilians, no matter who they were, were granted a raft of protections, not as comprehensive as modern standards, but impressive by the standard of the thirteenth century.

Complete religious freedom was enshrined across the Mongol Empire, with few religious leaders ever facing persecution and all kept immune from tax. The Mongols set up a highly efficient mail system, unprecedented at that point in history, and fostered trade over greater distances, and across more cultures, than had nearly ever been achieved before. They established surpluses and charity networks to distribute food and other critical materials, built small communities into efficient cooperative organizations, imparted their knowledge and expertise to peasants on how to better till and protect the land, and established consistent tax codes that ensured that although something would always be taken, the size and frequency of taxes would remain consistent and manageable.

Mongol rule was a matter of the carrot and the stick. The stick side, the punishments for bad behavior, could get very harsh: frequent uses of capital punishment, or even collective extermination of a kingdom, a city, a culture, or a people who had substantially violated the Khan’s will and incurred his wrath. But the carrot side, the side that incentivized people for following along with the social program the khans had laid out, was even more impressive.

Keep loyalty to the Khan, and most societies could expect a good deal of autonomy, access to a vast trade network, advances in science, medicine, and mathematics, the freedom to study and worship what and who they pleased, and, in many cases, personal and collective legal protections that went way beyond what they had experienced in their own kingdoms before the Mongols arrived. Not siding with the Mongols was an unequivocally bad idea, but choosing to follow their customs and laws came with a whole lot of benefits, so much so that many societies could look past their very limited degree of choice in the matter.

The Inca Empire and Napoleon: Conquest Paired with Infrastructure and Reform

Only about a century after the Mongol example, the Inca Empire would employ similar tactics to become pre-Columbian America’s largest empire. Although they were certainly talented at winning wars, the Inca were able to pacify western South America without having to engage in prolonged campaigns of internal repression. Once they conquered an area, the Inca were diligent about keeping local rulers in power rather than destroying the society they had captured; instead, they would bring local kings to the Inca capital and bring them up to date on their new empire, before sending them back in a puppet role.

With Inca conquest came Inca infrastructure: an extensive road network for a society that did not yet have wheels or draft animals and still relied on foot travel, and new, innovative agricultural practices that made subsistence farming far easier in the Andes. Like the Mongols, the Inca did little to restrict the worship of local deities, although they placed their own sun god at the top of everybody’s religious doctrine. They redistributed food in times of disaster or shortage, they frequently threw religious feasts for the benefit of local populations, and they built up and enriched local elites, largely on the back of a thriving art economy.

By taking a relatively loose approach to governance and providing clear incentives for compliance, an empire of some forty thousand people was able to rule over ten million, for well over a century. All the while, they were totalitarian, brutally suppressing rebellions and killing people, amputating their limbs, and blinding them even for minor offenses — but again, it is a matter of the carrot and the stick. Tolerate the Incas’ most repressive acts, and they were good friends to have; try to stand against the empire, and be blown away.

A few centuries later, a short-lived empire under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte brought with it not only the violence, but the popular appeals of a Europe-wide unification project. The French Empire, for the few years it survived, assumed control of a range of various major and minor European powers, and while French conquest and occupation was very rarely seen as a positive across the rest of Europe, Napoleon’s rise brought with it a raft of reforms. Make no mistake, Napoleon was an autocrat, even a despot.

Simultaneously, he oversaw the spread of public education systems across Europe, introduced legal codes that granted substantial rights and protections to ordinary people, and abolished the highly repressive feudal systems that had dominated Europe for centuries. The Napoleonic Code would go on to be used as a guidebook well into the 20th century, and even today, for nations and societies attempting to modernize and engage in broad political reform. Parallel to all the destruction of Napoleonic rule, it was the aristocracy of the places he conquered, not the citizenry, who believed they could gain more from acting against Napoleon than tolerating his rule.

Pablo Escobar’s Robin Hood Strategy in Colombia

In a considerably more modern example, the analysis can step away from historical kings and empires, to look at a 20th-century local lord of a very different sort. This one happened to be named Pablo Escobar, and by the time of his death, his criminal empire would see him anointed as one of the richest people on Earth. But although Escobar’s cartel violence, his narcoterrorism, and his legacy of criminal enterprise are historic in their scale, his record and reception within Colombia is documented just as thoroughly.

Escobar embarked on large-scale philanthropic efforts back in his home nation, including the construction of several hospitals, some seventy community football fields, many schools, and large housing developments to provide homes for thousands among the urban poor. He would even open a public zoo, endearing him especially to children in the nation, and he became a parliamentarian too. Escobar gained something of a Robin Hood-style reputation in Colombia, and with it, he was able to pacify the population in areas controlled by the Medellín Cartel.

Those same people would be patient with Escobar through years of intense gang and anti-government warfare, and when Escobar was finally arrested in 1991, anti-Escobar officials and foreign media were flummoxed by attitudes across Colombia that seemed less grateful that the kingpin was in custody, and more indignant that he should face long-term incarceration. Those perceptions have changed starkly across Colombia ever since, as the excesses and destruction of Escobar’s rule have brought on a reckoning, but at the time, they were a significant asset to the drug lord and a major mechanism to preserve his own power.

The Islamic State’s Bureaucratic Caliphate: Terror and Municipal Government

When it comes to modern-day despots, it may be difficult to believe — but the strategy of investing in public works, social welfare, and other things in that same vein, works just as well for tyrants today as it ever has. To illustrate just how, consider one of the most fearsome villains of the twenty-first century: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS. ISIS is a terror organization that gained global notoriety as it surged to power during the Syrian Civil War, spreading with a wave of incredible violence across considerable Middle Eastern territory.

But although the Islamic State absolutely earned the horror and the revulsion of the world, the people living in the territory it controlled would quickly find out that the group’s intense violence was only one side of the coin. Unlike most terror groups, the Islamic State was bent on capturing a massive piece of territory, and expanding it as time went on, to establish a caliphate made in the Islamic State’s own twisted recollection of times over a millennium ago. But rather than exterminate the people on the territory it captured, or leave them powerless against anarchy, the Islamic State took a different tack, managing not just through violence, but through bureaucracy.

Journalists can reconstruct the experiences of the people who lived under the Islamic State, through a mix of their own accounts and the records that the terrorists left behind, and the picture that evidence paints is a deeply strange one. After taking over towns and cities, the Islamic State developed a rhythm: wait a few days for the dust to settle, demand that all public and civil workers report to their jobs, threaten to break their legs if they don’t comply, and put them back to work maintaining the same administrative organization that the Islamic State just captured. The terrorists were in control, but the bureaucracy remained, and when the terrorists began stacking on their own new pieces, not all were of the sort one might imagine.

There were the fearsome and deadly morality police, and a new Ministry of War Spoils that confiscated the assets of anyone who was not Sunni Muslim and gave them to Islamic State fighters. Women were expelled from the workplace, and those who remained were subject to intense and far-reaching restrictions with deadly penalties for ignoring them. The area also got new public works departments, food-aid distribution networks, and even bureaus of motor vehicles, all run by the Islamic State and all serving its cause.

Education and healthcare, albeit the Islamic State’s interpretation of both, were made free in many areas, food essentials were heavily subsidized, and the new jihadist civil infrastructure was merged with the administration that had been there before. In many areas, Islamic State control was a burst of adrenaline for civil departments that Iraq and Syria’s national leaders had allowed to stagnate. Record-keeping was more stringent and accurate than it had been under the proper regime; roads were paved better and had their potholes fixed far quicker; and marriage licensing, birth certification, public sanitation, tax collecting, and more, all proceeded just as efficiently, or even more so than they had done before.

Quoting a New York Times investigation into the caliphate’s work: “The documents and interviews with dozens of people who lived under their rule show that the group at times offered better services and proved itself more capable than the government it had replaced.” The reasons were not purely altruistic; not only did they placate the public, but they allowed for the Islamic State to co-opt public servants rather than having to send their own militants into desk duty. And by the time the Islamic State was pushed out of much of that territory, its administrative state was overseeing the transfer of so much wealth, all across the local economy, that it eclipsed even the figures the caliphate was making off oil at a rate of nearly six Iraqi dinars to one, allowing them to near-fully self-finance their cause.

All the while, the Islamic State was burned into the mind of the population as a repressive force, but also, in many ways, a useful one. Said one civil servant interviewed by the New York Times: “We have to be honest. It was much cleaner under ISIS.”

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Infrastructure as Geopolitical Leverage

From the Islamic State, the analysis moves to China, where although militarized conquest of a range of global developing nations is not on the cards, Beijing has engaged in an over-decade-long policy pairing infrastructural and financial investment into those nations, with political influence and debt-trap tactics to consolidate its influence. The initiative in question is the Belt and Road, alternately known as the New Silk Road. Initially announced in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative or BRI envisioned the spreading of massive road and rail networks, energy infrastructure, easily navigable border zones, common currencies, and vast trade and telecommunications networks across Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa.

Roughly 150 countries have indicated at some point during the BRI initiative that they either had joined it, or wanted to, and many have accepted a mass influx of Chinese workers and investment to build everything from seaports to pipelines to railways. But the BRI has drawn condemnation from much of the world as a form of neocolonialism, by a range of countries, including an increasing number of current participants, that allege that China’s true intention is to entrap its participating nations under massive debts that will take decades to pay back. As infrastructure projects are built, and come to benefit the people of the nations where the BRI operates, public opinion toward China may rise, political changes will likely favor China, and the cycle continues, allegedly, until those nations become a vassal to Beijing.

The entire reason why that would happen, according to the BRI’s opponents, is because of the way that a crush of China-owned debt will lead these nations into a state of increased dependence on China. The campaign, allegedly, turns hearts and minds in favor of China across the world, but does it by offering a decent-size carrot for compliance, and a much bigger economic stick to punish bad behavior among its partner nations.

Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and India’s Narendra Modi: Modern Autocratic Bargains

For a smaller-scale example, consider the nation of Rwanda, where President Paul Kagame was very recently elected to yet another term in office with some 99 percent of the official vote. Kagame has ruled Rwanda for nearly a quarter-century, coming to power as an icon of reconciliation after the Rwandan genocide, but he has long since become a dictator, shuttering the free press, violently repressing dissent, exiling and killing opposition leaders and reporters, and even fomenting wars in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. For the record, he has also enjoyed the support of most Western nations for his entire time in office, but that is somewhat beside the point.

What is more important to focus on is Kagame’s keen awareness of which stress points in his society are worth exploiting — and which are worth preserving. Kagame has taken steps to restrict discourse on social media, while his regime has sought to dramatically expand Internet access across the country. Kagame has jailed journalists or, allegedly, had them killed, but he has taken care to fix many of the problems that were leading to such urgent journalistic outcry: things like extreme poverty, and large-scale health crises.

Kagame has relied on lobbyists to keep Western governments engaged in his nation, and he has made enough progress in enough areas — infrastructure, education, agriculture — to be able to point to that progress, and insist his regime is worthy of further support. Broadly, Kagame’s grand initiatives do tend to succeed, and the lot of the average Rwandan is far better today than it was when Kagame first took the presidency, back in the year 2000. The price to pay for that progress is tolerance of Kagame’s rule, as President for Life, but that is a price that the people of Rwanda have, at least broadly, been willing to pay.

In a free and fair election, it is widely expected that Kagame would fall, but that free and fair election is nowhere to be found. The Rwandan public could attempt to bring such a change about, mobilizing en masse to try and bring down their leader, but no such protest movement has emerged. Narendra Modi presides over an increasingly Hindu-nationalist, increasingly polarized India, and recently underperformed, but still came out victorious, in an election that saw Modi take a significantly more discriminatory and anti-democratic approach than in past years.

But Modi enjoys broad popularity across much of India, riding a wave of development that has taken his nation to increasing heights and lifted vast numbers of people out of poverty. The next two years in India will see the equivalent of over half a trillion US dollars’ worth of infrastructure come online, roughly the same value as all the infrastructure India built in the prior eleven years combined. Elsewhere across the country, Modi has merged his architectural projects with his political messaging, transforming initiatives like a Himalayan highway tunnel and a road-and-rail bridge over the Bogibeel River into expressions of his populist message to his people.

But just as Modi relied on this approach when he was at the height of his political power, it is perhaps even more interesting to see him use the same tactics, after an election that went sideways. Prior to the election, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, had moved away from the social welfare initiatives they had historically relied upon, and after those initiatives were written out of its budget in February. But when, in June, the BJP was handed a major setback, those social welfare programs were immediately written back into India’s new budget changes.

That included the equivalent of 24 billion US dollars on urgent job creation, 18 billion US dollars on spending around agriculture, and billions more for the refurbishment and expansion of roads and the construction of airports and medical schools. With those changes came a raft of other measures meant to draw India back from the long-term projects Modi was planning on pivoting toward, back when he still thought he had the mandate of the masses. Instead, Modi turned to the same tried-and-true social relief programs that he knows, from his own experience, are likely to bring the masses back.

Why It Works: Self-Interest, Status Quo, and the Calculus of Compliance

With such a range of cases, both current and historical, it is time to zoom out and ask the broader question: What is happening here? Why is it that so many shrewd leaders, past and present, have chosen to rely on such a consistent approach? And, perhaps more importantly, why does it work?

Why are people, across cultures and across time, so willing to overlook or tolerate regimes that range from repressive, to outright murderous, for this? Perhaps the most basic answer to that question is simple self-interest. Although, on the one hand, history has shown again and again that people will rise up against injustices and fight for a better future, it has also shown on the other hand that fighting losing battles is a losing strategy.

Broadly, people are inclined to do a few key things: to live as comfortably and as safely as they can, to keep themselves and their loved ones well, and, whether things are going well or going poorly, people are typically interested in living to see tomorrow. So, a ruler that understands that dynamic — whether they are a king, a president, an insurgent, or something else entirely — is able to prey on the balance that people are typically trying to maintain. A person who believes they have more to lose by accepting the status quo, than by pushing for change, will push for change — but a person who believes they have more to lose by pushing for change, than accepting the status quo, will seek to maintain the status quo.

That same status quo might be difficult, uncomfortable, unstable, risky, or outright dangerous, but if it is less bad than the alternative, a person is still likely to accept it. It is relatively easy to institute the sorts of pension programs that recent studies have shown make regime change significantly less likely in autocratic nations. It is relatively easy to make a big show about, say, opening a hospital or running an anti-corruption probe, trusting that in six months’ time, people will not realize that the probe never implicated any politicians or that the hospital is underfunded and understaffed.

Those sorts of initiatives do not have to build long-term loyalty to a regime; they have just got to help people accept the idea that the regime is something they can tolerate for another day, and for another day after that. It is here that a regime’s investment in the people and communities it rules over can offer a sort of trade. The purpose of, say, Genghis Khan’s religious tolerance, or Pablo Escobar’s initiative to build hospitals and schools, is not to be liked; in fact, being liked typically matters very little.

Instead, the goal is to add more and more incentives for a person to accept the status quo, rather than try and change it. An ordinary citizen of Medellín likely will not enjoy hearing the explosions of nearby car bombs a few times each week, but they may find their patience extended, based on a few key changes. If a person knows that the same leader responsible for the car bombs is also responsible for their child’s halfway-decent education, their elderly parents’ treatments for illness, and their own enjoyment of their community football league on the weekends, then that same person now has to reckon with those more positive counterweights, every time they curse Escobar for the latest explosion.

And for regimes that clearly define, and rigidly enforce the terms for a person either earning or escaping a punishment, the incentives for an ordinary civilian to accept the status quo will only increase. If, say, a person living and working under the Islamic State in Raqqa knows that the local militants are strict about enforcing laws against shaving or pants covering the ankle, but do not bother people who are visibly compliant with their rules — well, then, do not shave, do not wear pants that cover the ankle, and one should be okay. It is in this way that despots and autocrats can sweeten the pot for their civilians, not to inspire any genuine sense of gratitude, but to ensure that it is in people’s self-interest to go along with their leaders, rather than try and interfere.

The Feedback Loop: Disengagement, Informants, and Wealth Extraction

The public might still feel a long-standing opposition to a given ruler, they might even hate them — but there is more to lose, and less to gain, by upsetting their delicate system, than by keeping their heads down and choosing to live in it. And once a population makes that choice, it becomes far easier for a ruling regime to keep control. People who do not like their current rulers but do not have a way to change their situation, are likely to disengage from political matters; that, in turn, leads to fewer challenges to a ruler’s policies or their authority, and means that they can engage in more, and greater overreaches, knowing that fewer and fewer people care enough to observe them doing it.

As people become more firmly entrenched in the tolerable social structures where they have learned to eke out a living, they, in turn, become more opposed to movements and ideas that might upset their delicate balance. In communities that have accepted the abuses of their government, in exchange for marginally better lives on the individual and local level, it is all too easy to, say, become an informant for the local police, or to rat out one’s neighbor or coworker for engaging in actions that might foment dissent. If a person is led to believe that such actions will lead to more harm than good, and they are already living in a way meant to maximize good and minimize harm, then the reaction to such a disruptive force is obvious.

And investing in infrastructure, in education, in public health, and in other social programs is useful for ruling regimes for a wide range of reasons. Yes, it quite often means that they will get away with more repression, more violence, and more state-organized theft from the population — but there are greater benefits than just that. A society with better transport infrastructure, more abundant crop yields, and better technology to work the land, will bring in more revenues via agriculture — and will, quite likely, tolerate higher taxes or a system that lets people subsist off their crops, but demands that the government claims the surplus.

A society with abundant natural resources will be better able to mine them, if their people are better educated in effective mining techniques, if their railroads can better transport what they collect, and if their ports are built to serve ships from all across the world. Regimes that give their citizens the education and other benefits to allow them to be more efficient, and regimes that invest in the physical and other infrastructure that allows those same countries to maximize productivity, are able to extract wealth more completely, and more efficiently, than other regimes could. And with the balance in their nation weighted in a way that pushes people to maintain the status quo despite the overreaches and abuses of their rulers, more of that wealth can be siphoned off for the benefit of those in charge.

Why Not Every Autocrat Takes This Path — and What It Means When They Do

Of course, all this begs another question. If a strategy of investment into social and infrastructure programs is so effective for autocrats and conquerors, then why does not every authoritarian nation take this same approach? Sometimes, the answer is obliviousness; leaders do not have an understanding of this political dynamic, and do not realize that they can use it to their advantage.

Other times, it is incompetence or disbelief; some rulers are much more comfortable relying on violent, even totalitarian repression, or try to implement these policies but fail. Sometimes, especially in societies that are more diverse or more unequal, it is difficult for a government to stack the costs and benefits in their favor from the perspective of one part of the population, without alienating themselves to another group, and making unrest more likely. And sometimes, there simply is not the money or the other capital to make this happen.

In especially poor or resource-scarce areas, or areas that have been underdeveloped or ruled by complacent autocrats for a very long time, there is simply not enough to invest, and social programs of small scale and limited efficacy would be more trouble than they are worth. But for regimes that can figure out how to achieve this balance, and have the resources to make it happen, the results can be stunning. Effective social control is a mainstay for some of the greatest empires of all time, some of the most enduring autocracies, and some of the most successful insurgencies and criminal organizations ever.

It is easy, for those living in free, fair, and developed nations around the world, to lack understanding for people who seem to tolerate a life of oppression. But to the people living inside that situation, faced with a regime that has little tolerance for dissent but no proactive interest in doing them harm, there is a real, difficult decision to be made. When faced with a choice pitting a life under the regime that is not so bad, most of the time, against the serious penalties for dissent that probably would not work anyhow, it is almost like there is no choice at all.

The rulers who understand that balance receive a blank check on their own soil, and the freedom to do as they please. Understand that, and tyranny, vile as it may be, begins to make a lot more sense.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Genghis Khan maintain control over conquered populations despite thin military garrisons?

The Mongol Empire was governed by the Yassa code, which granted religious freedom, consistent and manageable taxation, legal protections for civilians, and equal treatment under the law. These benefits gave conquered peoples strong incentives to comply with Mongol rule rather than rebel. Because the carrot of compliance outweighed the stick of resistance—which could result in collective extermination—the Mongols faced remarkably few uprisings across an empire too large to police by force alone.

What was the ISIS caliphate’s approach to civil governance in captured territory?

After seizing towns and cities, ISIS demanded that all public servants report to work under threat of violence, then layered its own administration on top of existing bureaucracies. It ran public works departments, food-aid distribution networks, and motor vehicle bureaus, made education and healthcare free in many areas, and subsidized food essentials. A New York Times investigation found that in some areas ISIS offered better services than the governments it replaced, which helped pacify populations and co-opt local officials rather than requiring militants to fill every desk.

Why did Pablo Escobar build hospitals, schools, and football fields in Colombia?

Escobar’s philanthropic investments—seventy community football fields, hospitals, schools, and housing for the urban poor—gave residents of areas controlled by the Medellín Cartel concrete reasons to tolerate his rule. By ensuring that people had more to lose from instability than from accepting the status quo, Escobar extended public patience through years of intense gang and anti-government warfare. When he was arrested in 1991, many Colombians reacted with indignation rather than relief.

How does China’s Belt and Road Initiative function as a hearts-and-minds strategy?

Launched in 2013, the BRI funds roads, railways, ports, energy infrastructure, and telecommunications networks across roughly 150 countries. As this infrastructure benefits local populations, public opinion toward China tends to rise and political changes favor Beijing. Critics argue the true mechanism is debt—once nations accept Chinese investment at scale, the resulting obligations push them toward economic and political dependence on Beijing, turning infrastructure goodwill into long-term leverage.

Why don’t all authoritarian regimes invest in social programs if the strategy is so effective?

Some rulers are unaware of the dynamic, others lack the competence or resources to implement it, and in highly diverse or unequal societies it can be difficult to stack costs and benefits favorably for one group without alienating another. In extremely poor or resource-scarce countries, small-scale social programs may be more trouble than they are worth. The strategy tends to succeed only when a regime has enough capital to make meaningful investments and the political skill to use them to shift the calculus of compliance.

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