The questions

Why was Caesar assassinated? Why have some dictatorships been stable and long-lasting (those in the USSR, China, Cuba, Iran), whereas others have proved to be unstable and very short-lived (such as many of the regimes in Africa and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s)? Why did the regimes in South Africa and the former USSR collapse? Just as important, why didn't they collapse sooner than they did? Why have countries such as South Korea, China, and Chile grown so fast in recent years? Is political dictatorship good for economic growth? Why are some regimes (Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Pinochet's Chile) extremely repressive, whereas others are less so? Why do even relatively repressive regimes have periods of thaw in which the level of repression is temporarily reduced? Have dictators such as Cuba's Fidel Castro or Iraq's Saddam Hussein stayed in office so long because of their capacities to repress their peoples, or because they are popular? Can the answer be: both? Was Adolf Eichmann, the transportation coordinator of the Final Solution to the Jewish question, himself guilty of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime, or was he just a cog in the machinery of mass murder? Should functionaries in other regimes – such as those in Argentina, South Africa, or China, which committed massive violations of human rights – be tried for the activities practiced by those regimes?

All of these questions, and others like them, concern different aspects of the behavior of dictatorships.