Alastair Smith is co-author of an excellent book, “The Dictator’s Handbook: How Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics”. It explains the principles that dictators use to control things so that activists can plan on how to challenge them and generate meaningful reform.

A key finding is that dictators rely on and fear those who could possibly replace them or who they rely on to stay in power; not ordinary people. This is why dictators reward powerful supporters.

It’s a careful game. What it realy tells us is that to produce real change we have to focus our efforts on those elite supporters of a regime who we can persuade to join the people and not just focus on the ordinary masses. We need both the masses and the elite supporters of a regime. We need material support from people of power, known in Arabic as ‘nussrah’. Without this approach we will get nowhere, no matter how many people come out onto the streets and lay down their lives.

[thanks to Shez for the link]