Mr. Dobson delivers portraits of some of the world’s leading intellectual, tactical and financial advocates of grass-roots democracy. These scruffy luminaries include Gene Sharp, the American intellectual whose 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” is available for download in more than two dozen languages.

But Mr. Dobson is most galvanizing at ground level, when he’s talking to activists and explaining their stratagems. He points out that more people are willing to attend opposition events, for example, if they are held at night and in the dark, “safe from the prying eyes of the regime.”

He discusses the importance of attracting sympathetic members of the police and military long before things get rough. There’s even more value, perhaps, in recruiting these people’s children. He quotes a strategist who says, “Generals don’t like to attack crowds with their children in the front ranks.”

He is excellent on the uses democracy movements can make of humor. When Mr. Putin cracked down on a television station that broadcast “South Park,” activists carried signs that read: “Putin Killed Kenny.” These people “were protecting free speech,” Mr. Dobson writes, “but they wouldn’t say it that way. They would say they were protecting Kenny and Cartman.”

One Venezuelan opposition member vividly underscores many of this book’s lessons when he says, “If you’re going to fight Mike Tyson, you’re not going to box against him, because, even though he is crazy, he’s going to kill you. But if you can challenge him to a game of chess, you might have a chance.”

“The Dictator’s Learning Curve” is agile and light on its feet, but among its salient points is that pro-democracy movements need to be more than that. Happy thoughts and hippie clothes are not enough. “Revolutions, if they are to be successful,” Mr. Dobson writes, “require planning, preparation, and an intelligent grasp of how to anticipate and outwit a repressive regime that thinks of little beyond preserving its own power.”