(n.) Independent or self-derived power; absolute or controlling authority; supremacy.
(n.) Supreme, uncontrolled, unlimited authority, or right of governing in a single person, as of an autocrat.
(n.) Political independence or absolute sovereignty (of a state); autonomy.
(n.) The action of the vital principle, or of the instinctive powers, toward the preservation of the individual; also, the vital principle.
Example Sentences:
(1) The Copts stand to lose more than any other group in Egypt's current drift following the fall of an unpopular autocracy, and now face an uncertain future with a wide spectrum of possible outcomes, from a liberal democracy to an Islamic republic, or most likely of all, a continuation of army rule with different window-dressing.
(2) At the beginning, David Cameron spoke respectfully of "President Mubarak" and the "Egyptian government"; by this weekend, the prime minister is using the much more pejorative "regime" to describe the crumbling autocracy.
(3) The privy council only provides the flummery which camouflages their autocracy.
(4) Without question, the increased access to people's lives that the data revolution brings will give some repressive autocracies a dangerous advantage in targeting their citizens.
(5) The leader of the world’s largest autocracy will enjoy a 103-gun royal salute and a sumptuous, white-tie state banquet attended by three generations of the royal family; he will address the houses of parliament and at night will sleep in the palace’s Belgian Suite, in the very same bed that Duke and Duchess of Cambridge used on their wedding night .
(6) After five days away from his homeland, Abu Majid is convinced that the four decades of unshakable autocracy he left behind are now steadily unravelling.
(7) A toy autocracy may easily invite a real one; it was recently revealed that nuclear war would have made the monarch a genuine tyrant with the power to appoint a prime minister without an election, although it is hard to imagine Elizabeth II – with her rugs bearing a knitted royal crest, and her tiny dogs – as Gaius Julius Caesar.
(8) The book’s success was celebrated by the entry of a new word into the Russian lexicon: oblomovism, which became a term of abuse for the class that helped the autocracy survive for so long.
(9) The Kremlin, whose long slide into autocracy shows no sign of relenting, made deals with several of them, knowing it would be easier to keep them on side than to open up Russia's economy to proper procedures, competition, and fair trade.
(10) All of which confirms a country slipping from democracy back towards autocracy.
(11) The relentless expansion of markets over recent decades has generated a growing disconnect between citizens and states, be they military autocracies or august procedural democracies; for better or for worse, from the rise of maverick politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to institutional chaos in southern Europe and the dissolution of national borders in the Middle East, existing political models are buckling under the strain.
(12) A chaotic session of parliament before Christmas saw the annual budget voted through outside the main chamber without opposition support, while the outgoing president of Poland’s highest constitutional court accused Law and Justice of setting the country “on the road to autocracy”.
(13) An arrogant assumption, of course, to imply she spoke for all her people – and exactly the question that is impossible to answer in such a repressive autocracy.
(14) No more regressive form of taxation has been devised on this continent since the old autocracies were overthrown.
(15) For instance, in his speech, Jeb called for strengthening Egypt, the sclerotic autocracy the United States propped up for decades and whose torture and repression birthed Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood (out from under whose robes al-Qaida scuttled into the world); its current president took power in a coup and is hardly known for his weakness on anything but human rights and press freedoms .
(16) "So when Sisi stepped forward and did what he did, it was seen as a heroic act, taking a last-step measure to save the country from an ailing economy and a religious autocracy."
(17) True, he played a significant role in steering his country from pariah autocracy to a democracy embraced by the international community.
(18) In the conservative autocracies of the middle east, Qatar, a wealthy gas-rich emirate, has built up a reputation as a maverick, epitomised by its ownership of the al-Jazeera satellite television channel, which has often infuriated many Arab leaders.
(19) "This is not going to be an autocracy," Egypt's foreign minister, Nabil Fahmy, told the Guardian on Sunday.
(20) During the 2011-12 fiscal year, under President Bingu wa Mutharika (the current president’s older brother) donors withdrew budgetary support because of poor governance and the then president’s increasing autocracy.
Tyranny
Definition:
(n.) The government or authority of a tyrant; a country governed by an absolute ruler; hence, arbitrary or despotic exercise of power; exercise of power over subjects and others with a rigor not authorized by law or justice, or not requisite for the purposes of government.
(n.) Cruel government or discipline; as, the tyranny of a schoolmaster.
(n.) Severity; rigor; inclemency.
Example Sentences:
(1) Any unilateral action by the president seemed sure to inflame gun advocates, who argue that gun sales are protected under the second amendment and who equate gun control with tyranny.
(2) But within a few kilometres of these monuments to tyranny stand symbols of renewal – rows of solar panels bringing stable electricity to the homes of local people for the first time – and with them the chance of improving their lives.
(3) Hitchens responded to counter-examples of secular tyranny in the Soviet Union and China by saying: It is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists.
(4) Toynbee then claims that "league table tyranny" will increasingly sideline non-core subjects.
(5) The regime in Eritrea is, in short, a secretive, reclusive, authoritarian tyranny, which is ruthlessly controlled by president Afewerki.
(6) Before in Russia everybody had a gun and then the communists came and took them away and we had tyranny.
(7) Of course some writers can't wait to have a tyranny to work on.
(8) The way things are happening, it’s hard not to conclude that there is amount of dictatorship, there is an amount of tyranny, there is an amount of authoritarianism,” he told the Guardian in the capital, Harare.
(9) From the opening of the very first refuges and support services in the 70s, women have described the control and tyranny they experience as central to abuse, and more defining than the physical violence that sometimes accompanies it.
(10) Time to leave: Egypt may be liberated from tyranny but there was a chance the message hadn't got through to Sharm el-Sheikh.
(11) Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob.” It was argued that we could not leave the final word on such momentous decisions to ordinary voters: they didn’t know what they really wanted, or they had been tricked into wanting something that would hurt them, or they were too ignorant to make informed choices, or maybe they quite simply wanted the wrong thing.
(12) Alison, meanwhile, is a prime example of what Gilbert describes as someone freed from “the Tyranny of the Bride”: having done it once, and particularly having had a child, she feels no overwhelming need to do it again.
(13) Two European Championships and the World Cup after a tyrannial reign, the squad is buried at the Maracana with the same noise of a giant collapsing."
(14) The government was taking the “way of tyranny” by stopping the House of Commons from holding the executive to account, he said.
(15) "While not everyone necessarily agrees with Tawakkul's role in the protest movement today, her role since 2007 in the struggle against tyranny and injustice, promoting freedom of speech and women's rights is undisputed.
(16) I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the whites.
(17) Treating AGIs like any other computer programs would constitute brainwashing, slavery and tyranny.
(18) Her reluctance to take in Britain's UN quota of 10,000 was all the more embarrassing in that it came after Thatcher had lectured the Soviet premier, Alexey Kosygin, on the plight of the Vietnamese boat people after fleeing "the tyranny of communism".
(19) Unlike in 1940, Britain wasn't threatened with invasion or occupation in 1914, and Europe's people were menaced by the machinations of their masters, rather than an atavistic tyranny.
(20) Resisting tyranny was the central premise of the republican (with a small r) tradition of political theory on which the 18th-century American revolution rests.