So that we're better prepared to analyze global geopolitical dynamics, let's first take a look at political regimes. That is the way in which different countries choose to organize themselves politically. And I would like to make the distinction among three different kinds of political regimes. And of course, in a moment, I'm going to tell you their distribution around the world. First, we have autocracies, sometimes we call these regimes dictatorships. Second, we have democracies, where people vote and they elect and they oust governments. And third we have anocracies, which is a weird combination of autocracy and democracy, as I will explain in a moment. But first let's focus our attention on autocracy or dictatorship. This is a situation in which few, if any, individual or group political rights are recognized and protected by the government. There is very little or no room at all for participation and opposition in politics. There is little or no separation of powers, such as the one that we have in Europe or in the United States in most countries around the world that are democracies. There's no free and competitive elections where government officials are elected and held accountable. Let me also say that there are mainly three types of dictatorships or autocracies in the world. We have totalitarian regimes. We have authoritarian regimes, and we have the so-called sultanistic regimes. So totalitarian regimes such as those in North Korea or in the former Soviet Union are situations in which no individual or group political rights are recognized at all. And these are regimes that do not allow for any kind of political participation and opposition other than that sponsored by the ruling party. And of course there is no separation of powers. Authoritarian regimes by contrast although they are still dictatorships, they do allow for some very limited forms of participation by certain groups like religious organisations or other civic associations. Although the dictator cannot be voted out of power by definition. Examples of authoritarian regimes include Spain under General Franco or South Korea under General Park. Lastly, Sultanistic regimes are a third category of autocratic or dictatorships in the world. In this case, members of an extended family or a clan run the political affairs at the expense of formal institutions, without appealing to any particular ideology. Examples of these kinds of regimes include Saudi Arabia and the various states and Sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf. The second category of political regimes besides autocracies or dictatorships are democracies. In democracies individual and groups political rights are recognized and protected. There are ample opportunities for citizens to exercise political participation and opposition to the government. There's a separation of powers. And there are free and regular elections held to decide who rules, who participates in the governments. Now, lastly, anocracies, I told you earlier that these are bizarre combinations of autocratic and democratic powers. In essence, an anocracy is an incoherent political system with an odd combination of democratic and autocratic authority patterns. These are typically countries that are formally democracies, in theory they are democracies and they organise elections every now and then. But in practice, an individual or a group of individuals manipulate the system, and they perpetuate themselves in power. I'm in the presidential palace in Havana. This is the President's office. Between 1902 and the revolution, Cuba was formally a democracy. And now I'm inside the room where the cabinet, the ministers met to make decisions. I'm now inside the museum of revolution in Havana. There are some interesting artifacts here. These are the remains of the American U2 spy plane that was shot over Cuba during the missile crisis in the 1960s. Right here is the launching pad that was used to shoot down that plane. Over there we have the remains of an American airplane. This is the yachts that Fidel Castro and 80 more revolutionaries used to arrive in Cuba from their exile in Mexico. This is one of the boats used by the Cuban counter-revolutionaries, during the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, [FOREIGN], right after the revolution. And this is a tank, Soviet made, that was used during those battles. Cuba today is obviously not a democracy. Cuba is right now ranked together with a number of other countries on the dictatorship scale. Those countries are Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Eritrea, Iran, Kuwait, Laos, Syria, and Vietnam. I would argue that Cuba today is a totalitarian regime. Let's take a look at the evolution of political regimes in the world using the three categories that I just told you about. So we have democracies, we have autocracies and we have anocracies. The chart here starts in the year 1800 and it goes all the way to the end of 2015, and as you can see over the last 30 or 40 years there's been massive change in terms of the distribution of political regimes in the world. We've never had more countries in the world that are democracies. Nearly 100 out of the 190 countries or so that we have in the world. At the same time the number of dictatorships or autocracies has declined very very quickly, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nowadays, we have only about 20 countries in the world that are autocracies, or dictatorships. Although, I should say that some of them are very large and they have very large populations including China. And then we have anocracies. As you can see, back in the 1960s or 70s there were only about 20 of 25 countries in this category. But the number of countries that had become anocracies, this weird combinations of democracy and autocracy has grown to about 50. Here on the screen you have some examples of countries that today, are classified as anocracies. As you can see, these are countries that are relatively unstable. And countries that tend to cause quite a bit of trouble in their respective neighborhoods in their respective regions around the world. So what you need to remember about this analogy of political regimes in the world, is that over the last two or three decades, there's been massive change. Democracy, apparently, has won over dictatorship in most parts of the world. However, a major source of instability in the world is the rise in the number of anocracies.
