Most Powerful

• #1 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
  Tunisia Party State ControlPolitical World Wars and Midcentury State Power Power: 100
  Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1936-2019) was the Tunisian president who turned a security background into one of the Arab world’s most durable late twentieth-century authoritarian systems. He came to office in 1987 through a bloodless palace coup that removed the aging Habib Bourguiba in the name of national stability and constitutional procedure. At first he presented himself as a modernizing corrector who would soften repression, widen political participation, and restore confidence in government. For a brief moment that image held. Soon, however, his regime settled into a familiar pattern of managed elections, centralized police power, curtailed opposition, and patronage networks that converted state access into private advantage.Ben Ali‘s Tunisia was often described abroad as orderly, secular, and economically pragmatic. Those qualities were real enough to attract investors, tourists, and diplomatic approval, but they were sustained by a dense apparatus of surveillance and coercion. The presidency, the ruling party, the interior ministry, and the security services formed an interlocking system that could monitor journalists, neutralize Islamist and secular opposition, and reward loyal business interests. Over time the gap widened between the regime’s narrative of modernization and the lived reality of corruption, youth frustration, regional inequality, and political suffocation.His fall in 2011 gave Ben Ali an importance beyond Tunisia. The uprising that drove him from power after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi became the first major breakthrough of the Arab Spring. Ben Ali therefore belongs not only to Tunisian history but to the broader history of how apparently stable police states can unravel when fear erodes faster than the institutions built to enforce it. He exemplified an authoritarian model that looked technocratic from the outside while depending internally on intimidation, elite favoritism, and control of information.
• #2 Carlos Marcello
  ItalyTunisiaUnited States CriminalCriminal Enterprise World Wars and Midcentury Illicit Networks Power: 52
  Carlos Marcello (1910–1993), born Calogero Minacore, was an Italian‑American organized crime leader who dominated the New Orleans underworld for decades and built influence through gambling, labor coercion, corruption, and control of regional smuggling and vice routes. His power rested on the ability to enforce discipline within his organization while maintaining working relationships with political intermediaries and with larger criminal networks elsewhere in the United States. Marcello’s career illustrates how a locally rooted criminal enterprise can persist by embedding itself in port economies, cash businesses, and patronage structures, even when national enforcement campaigns target the broader syndicate.