Draft:Encyclopedia Tyrannica

• Comment: The draft needs to be significantly rewritten. Also, please make sure that the cited sources demonstrate notability. Kovcszaln6 (talk) 13:23, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

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Cover illustration for the Encyclopedia Tyrannica using artwork adapted from ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’ by William Blake (public domain).

The Encyclopedia Tyrannica: A Research Guide to Authoritarianism, shortened as the 'EncTyr' was published on 16 June 2025. This open-access compendium offers a systematic review of more than seventy years of research on authoritarianism and democracy, featuring around 288 detailed entries and 947 pages. The book's name is a wink to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The encyclopedia stands out for its:

• Global coverage, ensuring no world region with authoritarian legacies is understudied and incorporating non-Western perspectives.
• Focus on both basic and advanced topics, catering to undergraduate students, advanced scholars, and practitioners.
• Integration of literature reviews, methodological guidance, definitions, and regional variations, while addressing conceptual blind spots and Western-centric biases.

The Encyclopedia Tyrannica has been designed to serve as a foundational reference for educators, students, and researchers working on comparative authoritarianism, supporting both teaching and the development of new research agendas. The EncTyr can be downloaded for free.

The EncTyr was created to facilitate a deeper understanding of the emergence, consolidation, and eventual decline of dictatorships, as well as the enduring effects of authoritarianism on institutions and collective memory. Recognizing that the complexity of global politics precludes any single explanatory framework, the encyclopedia draws on the insight that authoritarian regimes, like all political systems, must continually innovate, adapt, and structure reality. By identifying recurring patterns and situating them within theoretical frameworks, the book aims to advance scholarly understanding of authoritarianism.

Rather than serving as a guidebook for would-be autocrats, the Encyclopedia Tyrannica is intended as a comprehensive repository of key findings from over seventy years of comparative authoritarianism research. It is designed as a starting point for readers seeking to understand the dynamics of non-democratic regimes and their impact on contemporary politics.

Didactic Companion

Complementing the encyclopedia, the project developed a didactic companion titled Navigating Dictatorship and Democratization in the Classroom. This resource provides:

• A learning outcomes framework aligned with the encyclopedia's content.
• Lesson plans, pre-reading questions, and classroom activities to foster critical thinking.
• Methodological insights and practical instructions for educators, derived from fieldwork and expert consultations.

The companion aims to bridge scholarly research and classroom practice, equipping educators to address complex issues in comparative authoritarianism and democracy studies.

The Didactic Companion was developed as part of the M.O.R.D.O.R. project to enhance the teaching and study of comparative authoritarianism and democracy. Its primary logic is to bridge the gap between advanced scholarly research and practical classroom application, providing educators and students with a comprehensive suite of resources tailored to the complexities of political regimes and democratization processes.

This companion serves as a repository of structured teaching materials, including a Learning Outcomes Framework that benchmarks the content of the Encyclopedia Tyrannica against educational standards. It offers detailed lesson plans, pre-reading questions, class activities, and assignments across Political Science, International Relations, and Area Studies, along with practical advice for educators on fostering higher-order thinking, mitigating regional biases, and integrating new topics into curricula.

Additionally, the companion incorporates methodological insights drawn from the authors' teaching experience, peer reviews, and fieldwork in diverse regions, addressing common pitfalls in regime classification and conceptual usage. It integrates the latest findings from the EU Policy Report on democratization, ensuring that the materials reflect both current academic debates and policy developments.

By combining theoretical rigor with practical tools, the Didactic Companion aims to transform higher education on dictatorship and democracy, equipping educators to address key challenges in the field and preparing students to critically engage with complex political realities worldwide

About the M.O.R.D.O.R. project

The EU project behind the EncTyr was the M.O.R.D.O.R. project, which ran from 2021 to 2024. M.O.R.D.O.R. stands for Mapping & Organizing Research on Dictatorships – Open access Repository) and was an international consortium of higher education institutions and think tanks active from 2021 to 2024. The project was coordinated by Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and brought together ten partner institutions and eleven associated partners from across the globe. As an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership, M.O.R.D.O.R. was co-funded by the European Union with a budget of €400,000, aiming to enhance education and research on authoritarianism and to provide innovative policy recommendations for EU democracy support. The project number is 2021-1-PL01-KA220-HED-000023034. The project name's abbreviation was inspired on the Lord of the Rings books, in particular by the name for the empire of the primordial evil Sauron, called the land of Mordor. The project logo reflects this, and also includes an 'all-seeying' eye.

The success of the M.O.R.D.O.R. project was underpinned by the balanced and complementary contributions of its consortium and associated partners, each bringing distinct expertise and resources to advance the project's objectives.

• Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland, coordinator)
• University of Essex (UK)
• Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic)
• University of Ostrava (Czech Republic)
• University of Coimbra (Portugal)
• University of Catania (Italy)
• University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
• Ghent University (Belgium)
• European Partnership for Democracy (Belgium)
• German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)

Associated partners hosted fieldwork delegations and contributed to regional expertise, ensuring the encyclopedia and policy recommendations reflected diverse perspectives.

• University of Pretoria
• North West University (Potchefstroom, South Africa)
• University of Nigeria (Nsukka)
• Institut français d'études sûr Asie centrale (IFEAC – Bishkek)
• British Teaching University (Tbilisi, Georgia)
• Zayed University (Abu Dhabi, UEA)
• Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina (Buenos Aires)
• Universidad de San Andrés (Buenos Aires)
• Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (Manila)
• De La Salle University (Manila)
• University of the Philippines (Manila)
• University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur)

The project was further enriched by contributions from Seoul National University and the Tyrannica Group, who supported fieldwork, reviewed outputs for global relevance, and promoted dissemination.

M.O.R.D.O.R. has fulfilled its mission by delivering structural tools for education and research in the fields of authoritarianism and democracy. Its outputs are freely accessible via the project website and the official EU project platform, with project partners committed to maintaining the digital repository for long-term access. Dissemination strategies included hosting master classes and an international conference (Understanding Authoritarianism: New Frontiers in the Study of Dictatorship and Democracy) during the project lifetime and book launches and networking events in Brussels (for the policy paper titled Harnessing the Democratising Potential of the EU's Foreign Policy Agenda.