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ABSTRACT
Authoritarian regimes frequently reach across borders to repress against exiled dissidents. Existing scholarship has investigated the methods and effects of transnational repression. Yet, we lack knowledge of the role that the political context of a host country and its relations to the origin country of diasporas play in incidents of transnational repression. Addressing this gap, we use a Freedom House dataset on physical acts of transnational repression (2014–2020) to study how the regime type of the host country and the regional ties between the host and origin country influence the likelihood and type of transnational repression incidents. Conducting a logistic regression analysis with yearly directed dyads, we find that to target exiles in autocratic host states perpetrators primarily rely on the cooperation of authorities, whereas in democratic host states they resort more often to direct attacks. We also show that authoritarian cooperation on transnational repression is regionally clustered: it often occurs when home and host state are situated within the same authoritarian neighbourhood, and partly also when they are members in the same regional organization. Our article reveals some of the host state conditions and relational dynamics that shape the decisions and strategies of transnational repression perpetrators.
Acknowledgements
The authors express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, whose constructive comments played a pivotal role in enhancing the quality of this paper. Special thanks are owed to Ursula Daxecker and Philipp M. Lutscher for their invaluable feedback. Johannes von Engelhardt deserves appreciation for his guidance in data analysis. Additionally, the authors acknowledge and thank Nate Schenkkan and Yana Gorokhovskaia for generously sharing the Freedom House dataset on transnational repression and for their constructive input on earlier drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Glasius, “Extraterritorial Authoritarian Practices”; Michaelsen, “Exit and Voice”; Moss, “Transnational Repression”; Schenkkan and Linzer, “Out of Sight”; Tsourapas, “Global Autocracies.”
2 Dalmasso et al., “Intervention,” 95.
3 Anstis and Barnett, “Digital Transnational Repression”; Cooley, “Authoritarianism”; Milanovic, “Murder of Jamal Khashoggi”; Michaelsen, “Exit and Voice.”
4 Eccles and Sheftalovich, “Inside the Control Room.”
5 Dukalskis, Making the World Safe; Furstenberg, Lemon, and Heathershaw, “Spatialising State Practices”; Lemon, Jardine and Hall, “Globalizing Minority Persecution”; Lewis, “Illiberal Spaces.”
6 Schenkkan and Linzer, “Out of Sight.”
7 Lemon, “Weaponizing Interpol.”
8 Al-Jizawi et al., “Psychological and Emotional War”; Michaelsen, “Silencing Across Borders”; Moss, “The Ties That Bind”.
9 Moss, Michaelsen and Kennedy, “Going after the family.”
10 deMeritt, “Strategic Use.”
11 Dukalskis, Making the World Safe.
12 Dukalskis et al., “Long Arm.”
13 Chenoweth, Perkoski, and Kang, “State Repression,” 1952.
14 deMeritt, “Strategic Use,” 6.
15 Davenport, “State Repression,” 4.
16 Gerschewski, “Three Pillars”; See also: Josua and Edel, “Regime Survival Strategies.”
17 Shain, The Frontier of Loyalty, 161.
18 Bank and Edel, “Authoritarian Regime Learning”; Bank, “Authoritarian Diffusion”; Tansey, International Politics.
19 Davenport, “State Repression and Political Order,” 1. See also: Cingranelli, Political Terror Scale.
20 Dukalskis et al., “Transnational Repression.”
21 Gorokhovskaia and Linzer, “Long Arm.”
22 Gorokhovskaia and Linzer, “Turkey.”
23 Schenkkan et al., “Perspectives.”
24 Koinova, “Beyond Statist Paradigms.”
25 Moss, “Voice After Exit.”
26 Dukalskis et al., “Long Arm,” 7.
27 Schwirtz and Barry, “A Spy Story”; Committee to Protect Journalists, “Exiled Azerbaijani Blogger.”
28 Consider the example of Ruhollah Zam, an exiled Iranian journalist, who fell for a trap set by Iran's Revolutionary Guard and travelled to Iraq from where he was rendered to Tehran and later executed. Peltier and Fassihi, “Iran Executes Dissident.”
29 Heydemann and Leenders, “Authoritarian Learning”; Koesel and Bunce, “Diffusion-Proofing.”
30 Bader, Grävingholt, and Kästner, “Would Autocracies Promote Autocracy?”
31 Kneuer et al., “Playing the Regional Card,” 3.
32 Ibid., 9; Tansey, International Politics; Schmotz and Tansey, “Regional Autocratic Linkage.”
33 Cooley and Heathershaw, Dictators Without Borders; Furstenberg, Lemon, and Heathershaw, “Spatialising State Practices”; Lewis, “Illiberal Spaces.”
34 Electronic Frontier Foundation, “AlHathloul v. DarkMatter.”
35 Msalmi, “Ahvazi Swedish Leader.”
36 Kneuer et al., “Playing the Regional Card.”
37 Debre, “Dark Side.”
38 Libman and Obydenkova, “Understanding Authoritarian Regionalism,” 153.
39 Schenkkan and Linzer, “Out of Sight,” 7.
40 Debre, “Dark Side,” 404.
41 Schenkkan and Linzer, “Out of Sight,” 33.
42 Acharya, “Democratisation.” By including ASEAN, we aim to extend the focus of Freedom House on the SCO and GCC and further qualify their arguments on these regional organizations as platforms for cooperation on transnational repression. However, we exclude other regional organizations with significant authoritarian membership such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) or the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America (ALBA) because the number of transnational repression incidents involving their members is insignificantly low in the dataset. The Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) counts some persistent perpetrators of transnational repression among its members, but the organization's focus is primarily on economy and trade and its members largely overlap with the SCO which is more security-oriented.
43 See note 6 above.
44 See note 20 above.
45 Ibid.
46 Earl, “Political Repression,” 265.
47 Lemke and Reed, “Politically Relevant Dyads.”
48 Schenkkan and Linzer, “Out of Sight,” 2.
49 Attempted murder means attacks with the obvious intention to murder the targeted individual which ultimately failed or a murder plot that was foiled by the host country authorities
50 Coppedge, “V-Dem Dataset 2021.”
51 Gorokhovskaia, Shahbaz, en Slipowitz, “Freedom in the World 2023.”
52 Due to missing variation on our dependent variable (i.e. no TR incidents) for Western Europe and North America, South Asia, The Pacific and The Caribbean, these regions are excluded from our tables.
53 Singer, Bremer, and Stuckley, “Capability Distribution.”
54 International Monetary Fund, “Direction of Trade.”
55 Oneal and Russet, “Classical Liberals.”
56 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “International Migrant Stock.”
57 Here too, because of the interpolation, some scores are just below 0 for some years.
58 Bennett and Stam, “Research Design.”
59 VIF score above 12.
60 Carter and Signorino, “Back to the Future.”
61 Tomz, King, and Zeng, “Logistic Regression.”
62 Firth, “Bias Reduction.”
63 Except for model 6, which can be due to a reduced sample.
64 Freedom House Dataset 2021. The activity is not necessarily the main occupation of the individual in question. Asylum seeker refers to a person who has applied for but not yet been granted asylum in the host country; a refugee is someone who has been granted asylum in the host country. A former insider is someone who was part of the elite in the origin country but fell out with authorities. This can include former government officials, major financial or business figures and high-ranking defectors. A political activist is a person engaging in political activity relevant to the origin country, typically of an oppositional nature. Journalists can also include individuals publishing content on social media for a substantial audience, in contexts where traditional media are restricted. A human rights defender engages in the defence of and advocacy on behalf of the rights of a targeted individual or community.
65 Schenkkan and Linzer, “Out of Sight,” 15.
66 Blake, From Russia with Blood.
67 Harris, Mekhennet, and Torbati, “Iranian Assassination.”
68 Wrong, Do Not Disturb.
69 Schenkkan and Linzer, “Out of Sight,” 51.
70 Ellis-Petersen, “Murder on the Mekong.”
71 Lamb, “Thai Government.”
72 The same applies to South Asia which is not even included in the model due to a lack of variation in the dependent variables (i.e. no transnational repression incidents).
73 Eurasianet, “Tajikistan.”
74 Mohyeldin, “No One Is Safe.”
75 Ellis-Petersen and Haas, “How North Korea Got Away.”
76 Levitt and Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity.”
77 Lührmann and Lindberg, “Third Wave”; Hellmeier et al., “State of the World.”
78 Safeguard Defenders, “101 Overseas.”
79 Weiser and Rashbaum, “Iran and China.”
80 Weiser and Thrush, “Justice Department.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marcus Michaelsen
Marcus Michaelsen, PhD, is a researcher studying digital technologies, human rights activism and authoritarian politics. He currently works as a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab focusing on digital transnational repression. Previously he was a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) research group of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a Senior Information Controls Fellow with the Open Technology Fund. From 2014 until 2018 he was a post-doctoral researcher in the project Authoritarianism in a Global Age at the University of Amsterdam. His work on transnational repression has been published in Globalizations, Global Networks, the European Journal of International Security, and Surveillance & Society.
Kris Ruijgrok
Kris Ruijgrok, PhD in political science, studies the information and communication environments that shape, and are shaped by, authoritarian politics. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the KITLV in Leiden on a project investigating online influence operations in South-East Asia. Previously he was an Information Controls Fellow with the Open Technology Fund conducting research on internet shutdowns in India. His PhD research (2014-2018) was part of the ERC funded “Authoritarianism in a Global Age” project at the University of Amsterdam and studied the effect of internet use on anti-government protest under authoritarian regimes, including in-depth fieldwork in Malaysia. The book based on his PhD dissertation was published with Palgrave Macmillan, while articles from his hand appeared in Contemporary Politics and Democratization.