Charles G. Taylor is an example of how hard it can be for an authoritarian leader to retire peacefully. A former warlord who became president of Liberia, Mr. Taylor led the country from 1997 to 2003. He ultimately resigned after international leaders intervened — and promised asylum — during talks between the government and rebel factions to try to end Liberia’s war.

“History will be kind to me,” Mr. Taylor said during his resignation, before being escorted out of the country by Ghana’s president. Mr. Taylor left the country for Nigeria, where he had been offered asylum. “I have accepted this role as the sacrificial lamb.”

But things did not turn out as Mr. Taylor had hoped.

For a time, he lived in exile in Nigeria with dozens of relatives, financing his lifestyle with money believed to have been stolen from the Liberian treasury. But pressure grew for him to be arrested, and he ended up standing trial in an international court for war crimes for his role in neighboring Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, charged with murder, sexual slavery and using child soldiers.

Mr. Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison. It was the first time since the Nuremberg trials that a former head of state was convicted by an international tribunal.

Hosni Mubarak, Egypt