The “Good” Dictator: The Semiotics of “Desirable” Authoritarianism
Abstract
While authoritarianism is deemed undesirable, whether an autocrat is considered an ally or an adversary impacts how they are seen in Western media. This leads to the question—while it is easy to imagine adversarial autocrat archetypes (e.g., Vladimir Putin)—what comprises the visual archetype of a “good autocrat”? To answer this, this article examines the visual news coverage given by the influential Western publication, Time, to two Pakistani autocrats allied with the United States: General Zia-ul-Haq and General Pervez Musharraf. Using semiotic methodology, this article presents a triadic heuristic model outlining the visual archetype of a “good” autocrat: Humanization, Absence, and Hobson’s Choice. It demonstrates how visual cues associated with these heuristics serve to construct regimes of truth that present desirable autocrats as “valuable” bodies whose soft power is constructed at the expense of an “other.” Finally, it interrogates the significance of these dynamics in analyzing contemporary populist “strongmen.”