This a guest post by Chris Armstrong (Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton). He researches matters of global justice. Here he discusses his recent work on dealing with dictators.
Dictators have been responsible for many grievous crimes. They have left behind them a trail of genocides and ill-considered wars. Even when they are not killing innocent people, dictators commit a major wrong by denying a voice to their subjects. They also frequently squander their countries’ wealth on Western luxuries even in the face of grinding poverty at home. There is little doubt, therefore, that a world with fewer dictators would be a far better one in many respects.
This leads naturally to the thought that those of us who are fortunate not to live under tyrants ought to do whatever we can to avoid supporting dictators – and indeed to avoid incentivising the emergence of more of them. But what can we do? One thought is that we should avoid buying goods such as oil from them, because in so doing we provide a stream of income for continued repression, and remove from dictators the need to rely on their own citizens for revenue (a reliance which, many political economists believe, can lead to improvements in governance over time). Another suggestion is that we should deepen our engagement with dictators, trading with them to an even greater extent. While this will strike many readers as deeply controversial, in a recent paper I argue that this is the more persuasive view: we should probably buy more, not less, from dictators.
