Extraterritorial authoritarian practices: a framework

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Authoritarian rule of populations abroad’ develops a new theory to better understand how authoritarian rule is exercised over populations abroad and to connect this extraterritorial dimension to the character and resilience of contemporary authoritarian rule. Authoritarian states today have various motivations for tolerating or even sponsoring their population's mobility, and they have learnt to manage and offset the risks population mobility poses to them. The key to understanding the particularities of authoritarian mobility management is that it does not approach its populations, abroad or at home, as citizens with rights. The authoritarian state can adapt to the specific assets and insecurities of populations abroad with policies to include or exclude them as subjects or outlaws, as patriots or traitors, or as clients. The article concludes that authoritarian rule should not be considered a territorially bounded regime type, but rather as a mode of governing people through a distinct set of practices.

KEYWORDS:

• authoritarianism
• diaspora
• globalization
• migration
• mobility

Introduction

One of the defining features of the rule of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War was the ‘Iron Curtain’: with rare exceptions, citizens were not free to travel or migrate to democratic countries. At the same time, sending dissidents into permanent exile was also an important element of the suppression of dissent by communist regimes and right-wing dictatorships alike. Nowadays, authoritarian states are much more likely to allow citizens to travel or migrate, but also return freely, and citizens of, for instance, Russia, China, or the Gulf states make ample use of these freedoms. Some authoritarian states positively encourage their youth to study abroad, while others rely on remittances. Contrary to the common-sense logic of the Soviet era, authoritarian regimes are seeing neither an unsustainable exodus nor a democratic transformation as a result of the increased mobility of their populations. Why not?

Building on challenging original research, this Special Issue develops new theory, transcending the separation between the study of migration and the study of authoritarianism, to better understand how authoritarian rule is exercised over populations abroad and to connect this extraterritorial dimension to the character and resilience of contemporary authoritarian rule.

The Special Issue presents six country case studies: on the response to political dissidents abroad by Iran and by Syria; on the handling of large-scale migration and remittances by Eritrea and Morocco; on the sponsorship of study abroad and the governance of their return by Kazakhstan; and on the Russian distribution of passports to help stabilize its rule over Crimea. It brings together the work of country specialists on the authoritarian rule of populations abroad, in order to facilitate comparison and conceptualization of this overlooked phenomenon. As such, it seeks to redress the ‘fragmented, case-study oriented and a-theoretical nature of most existing work’ on state–diaspora relations recently decried by Délano and Gamlen (2014, p. 43) as well as the lack of attention to extraterritorial dimensions in the literature on authoritarianism.

The articles eschew the methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Schiller, 2003) of authoritarianism studies, showing how authoritarian practices today rest on a conception of the state as a collection of people to be governed, more than as a territorial entity. They also challenge the liberal bias of the migration literature, showing that citizenship is not an appropriate lens for understanding the authoritarian emigrant state. Instead, it will be argued below, the authoritarian state approaches its populations abroad, and includes or excludes them, as subjects to be repressed and extorted, as clients to be co-opted, or as patriots to be discursively manipulated. The theoretical framework presented here intersects the ‘authoritarian pillars of stabilization’ repression, co-optation and legitimation (Gerschewski, 2013) with the ‘state controls of transnational space’ theorized by Collyer and King (2015), and the concepts of inclusion and exclusion commonly used in migration and citizenship studies. This typology helps us understand how authoritarian states rule populations abroad, and how their practices may contribute to authoritarian sustainability.

In the next section, both empirical developments and the evolution of the academic literature in the field of authoritarianism on the one hand, and on globalization, migration, and diaspora studies on the other hand will be briefly discussed, in order to pinpoint the anchors and gaps in our knowledge at the intersection of these fields. The third section will introduce the articles in this Special Issue, discussing case-study selection and methodological contributions. The fourth section will develop the theoretical framework, first outlining the challenges to authoritarian states by means of the concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty, then elaborating the response of the authoritarian state in terms of five types of extraterritorial authoritarian practices. The fifth section will concretely illustrate the five types of practices with findings from the case studies. The conclusion outlines several implications and further avenues of study.

Authoritarianism and population mobility policies in historic perspective

Most polities in history have been under authoritarian rule. Since the concepts of constitutional responsibility to the people, and free and equal citizenship, were largely unknown both in theory and in practice until at least the eighteenth century, and still exceptional and contested in the nineteenth century, it is unsurprising that authoritarianism does not have a long pedigree as a concept. At the same time, as both Hirschman (1978) and Herbst (1990) have remarked, individuals used to exit from ‘primitive societies’ with relative ease, and sometimes en masse, before the advent of the modern state.

With the birth of the modern state came the aspiration, though not always the ability, to control both inward and outward migration flows (Brubaker, 2010; Herbst, 1990; Vigneswaran, 2013). In the post-war era, at the height of the symbolic self-assertion of the national state, a comparative literature on authoritarianism, posing it as democracy's ‘other’, came into fruition. After a host of country case studies, Linz (2000) published the first extensive conceptual treatment, and Eckstein and Gurr (1975) provided the basis for the Polity data sets. This literature, comparative and domestic in orientation, paid scant attention to the migration policies of authoritarian regimes during the Cold War.

Nonetheless, we can discern three broad tendencies. The first, particularly salient in relation to the Soviet bloc, was to strictly curtail exit in general (Hirschman, 1993, p. 179). The second, often simultaneous tendency was to get rid of known dissidents by sending them into exile (Hirschman, 1993, pp. 183–184; Hoffmann, 2010). In the context of Latin America in the same era, Hoffmann writes that ‘exile was an omnipresent feature of intra-elite political competition’ (Hoffmann, 2010, p. 62), even though, contrary to the hopes of the regimes pursuing such policies, triumphant re-entry was sometimes either a cause or a consequence of regime change. The third tendency, particularly manifested in the Mediterranean, was to actually encourage large-scale labour emigration for the sake of relieving rural poverty and injecting remittances into the economy (Brand, 2006; De Haas, 2005). The advantages of sending these poor and low-skilled workers abroad, initially intended on both sides as temporary and without consequences for citizenship, presumably outweighed the political risks of sending them into democratic contexts.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the climax of the third wave of democratization and resulted in a paradigmatic preoccupation with democratization in political science. The end of the Cold War also fuelled a quite separate literature across the social sciences, preoccupied with the depth and meaning of globalization processes. It focused on the transformation of state sovereignty, and corresponding changes in international law and regulation, norms and identity formation. Since the early 2000s, political scientists have shown a renewed interest in the endurance of authoritarianism, but the orientation is still overwhelmingly domestic and comparative. While there is increasing attention to how states influence each other (Brownlee, 2012; Levitsky & Way, 2010; Tansey, 2016), the contemporaneous research on consequences of globalization has been almost entirely ignored in this new authoritarianism literature.

Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton's concepts of extensity, intensity, and velocity of global flows and networks (1999, p. 16) help us to consider the changed context of physical exit from an authoritarian-ruled territory. Extensity refers to the distances covered by flows and networks. The latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed the movement of Africans, Asians, and East Europeans to Australia, North America, and Western Europe, comparable to the great migrations to the Americas a century earlier. The increase in extensity of communication flows has been even more revolutionary. Today, the cost of communication is typically unaffected by the number of miles it travels. Cross-border migration has steadily increased in intensity too, ever since the Second World War. At the level of individual authoritarian countries, reliable figures are hard to come by, but our contributions suggest that emigration from all countries discussed in this collection has similarly increased very significantly in the last decades. Increased velocity of people movement makes exit a much less definitive break with the polity: instead of a one-way journey of many months, cheap air travel has enabled frequent circular migration, sometimes to the point that it might be difficult to pinpoint a single polity in which an individual resides. This has gone hand in hand with the increased velocity of communication flows, to the point that instant dialogic communication via the Internet or mobile phones is now ubiquitous.

These developments have had inevitable consequences for the idea of a public sphere. While no single global public sphere may have emerged, a national public sphere need not be co-terminous with territorial boundaries, and hence physical exit no longer necessarily implies exit from the national public sphere. Intensity and velocity of communication have been relevant particularly to the migrant's option of voice: the more and the faster she receives information from home, and is able to instantly relay information and opinions back, the more she can exercise her voice. But conversely, more intense and speedy communication may also provide new ways for the government to suppress voice from abroad. Finally, these developments explain the increasing development of designated policies for populations abroad (Gamlen, 2008). If emigration is a marginal phenomenon in terms of numbers and impact, it is not particularly important to have a policy relating to emigrants. If a substantial part of the population has moved out, or if sojourns abroad become a normal practice, some form of response is required.

Indeed, as recent research on diaspora politics attests, due to these developments, populations abroad may now have significant ‘voice’ in the politics of their states of origin (Burgess, 2012; Caramani & Grotz, 2015; Gamlen, 2008). From the government's side, the:

discrepancy between residence and citizenship now looks more like an opportunity than a problem. From this standpoint, the politics of belonging is about maintaining ties with emigrants; making it easier for them to retain their citizenship, even when they acquire citizenship elsewhere; and facilitating home-country involvement in such matters as voting, property ownership, and remittances. (Brubaker, 2010, p. 73)

As argued by Gamlen (2008, p. 842), attempts by the emigrant state to ‘govern’ its diasporas should now be considered as a ‘normal form of political organization’.

But the focus in the diasporas literature has been on identities and on the nature of the extraterritorial population's participation in the home society and polity, not on the perpetuation of non-democratic rule via populations abroad (see Shain, 2005, pp. 145–162; Brand, 2006, 2010 for exceptions). There is an emerging literature on diaspora politics vis-à-vis the home country, but it has focused largely on new democracies and conflict situations (Adamson, 2006; Koinova, 2014; Ragazzi, 2014).

Authoritarianism research, conversely, continues to maintain a very traditional perspective on state–citizen relations, and has not generally considered whether or how the residence of part of the citizenry abroad might affect such relations.

Evidence suggests that many governments, including authoritarian governments, have developed, and continue to adapt, a range of policies to govern their populations abroad. There are some country case studies analysing such policies relating to, for instance, China (To, 2014), Egypt (Tsourapas, 2015), Eritrea (Bernal, 2014), Russia (Kosmarskaya, 2011), and Uzbekistan (Lewis, 2015). But there is no comparative or conceptual work that analyses the specific benefits and challenges of managing overseas populations from the point of view of authoritarian regimes.

The next section introduces the subject matter, definitions, and methodological strategies of the articles in this Special Issue. Building on these contributions, this article then presents a new theoretical framework, transcending the separation between the study of authoritarianism and the study of migration and diasporas, in order to better understand how authoritarian rule is exercised beyond borders and to connect such extraterritorial strategies to authoritarian persistence.

The case studies

Approach and definitions

Definitions of authoritarianism fall into a Schumpeterian camp, which considers democracy to be a ‘free competition for a free vote’, and authoritarianism therefore to be the absence of free competition (Geddes, Wright, & Frantz, 2014; Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi, & Przeworski, 1996; Schumpeter, 1943, pp. 260, 271), and a Dahlian camp, which places more emphasis on violations of freedom of expression and access to information, and freedom of association, in addition to a shortfall in the fairness of elections, as constituting authoritarianism (Diamond, 1999, pp. 7–15; Levitsky & Way, 2010, pp. 5–6; Linz, 2000; McMann, 2006). In order to simplify our task, wading into new theoretical territory, this collection focuses exclusively on home states whose governments are uncontroversially characterized as authoritarian according to either definition. At the same time, the Special Issue aspires to deepen our conceptual understanding of authoritarianism, conceiving of authoritarianism as a substantive phenomenon rather than a mere absence of democracy, and capturing its character when no longer exclusively embodied in and exercised by national governments within territorial states. The analysis presented below will suggest that authoritarianism is best understood as constituted by a distinct set of practices, rather than exclusively as a – residual – regime type characterised by a lack of free and fair elections. Practices are understood as ‘patterned actions that are embedded in particular organized contexts’ (Adler & Pouliot, 2011, p. 5; for a definition of authoritarian practices, see also Glasius, in press).

Within the universe of authoritarian emigrant states, this Special Issue has opted for maximum diversity, to sustain the argument that regardless of the vast differences between them, distinctly authoritarian patterns can be discerned in their treatment of their populations abroad. The collection consists of studies on Eritrea, Iran, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Russia, and Syria. It includes royal, military, theocratic, personalized, and one-party regimes; ranges from superpower Russia to small and resource-poor Eritrea; and takes in the Middle East and North Africa, the post-Soviet sphere and sub-Saharan Africa. Through a focus on relations vis-a-vis political dissidents abroad by Iran and Syria, regulation of students abroad and their return by Kazakhstan, the handling of large-scale migration and remittances by Eritrea and Morocco, and the absorption of a new population on authoritarian terms by Russia, the articles show the deeper commonalities between the policies of these authoritarian states towards their populations outside the borders, beyond their obvious differences. In doing so, the authors do not make the tautological assumption that whatever these governments do in the way of governing populations abroad is, therefore, an authoritarian policy. On the contrary, part of their contribution here is to carefully examine what should and what should not be considered to be ‘authoritarian’ about the aims and the means of their policies governing populations abroad. Conversely, if they characterize a policy or practice as authoritarian in nature, this does not imply that formally democratic states could never be observed engaging in such a practice, or being complicit in it.

There are extensive discussions in the literature on migration and diasporas on who is a migrant, who is a refugee, and what constitutes a diaspora. These are not just academic debates, the categories are also constructed, indeed politicized, by governments (Brubaker, 2005; Ragazzi, 2012). In this Special Issue, in order to avoid rehearsing these debates, the authors refer to ‘rule of populations abroad’ as encompassing the formal or informal regulation of exit itself, first- and second-generation populations who have exited, those who have returned, and those who have been nationalized at distance. The empirical material focuses on specific sub-sections of this very large group that are of particular interest to the authoritarian home country government. Many of those discussed in this collection are recent, and in some case very temporary, migrants. The Kazakhstani students investigated by Del Sordi are a case in point. Her contribution considers the ‘whole journey’, from selection for exit to policies regulating what happens after return. Other contributions, such as Dalmasso's investigation of Morocco, or Hirt and Mohammad's study of Eritrea, consider multiple generations of emigrants, some of whom have dual nationality. Wrighton's research on Russian passport policies in Crimea considers a population that has been absorbed into an authoritarian polity without physically moving.

Methodological strategies

Investigating the relations between authoritarian governments and populations abroad is empirically extremely challenging. Empirical research on authoritarian rule requires extensive contextual knowledge, risk management, and trust-building (Glasius et al., 2017; Goode & Ahram, 2016; Koch, 2013). Inferentially, it often rests on indirect evidence, triangulation, and interpretation of the strategies and aims of its primary object of investigation. For these reasons, the contributions, while cross-referencing each other, each focus on just one home country government, and are written by experts on the politics of that government.

At the same time, the case studies take in multiple host country environments, reflecting the literal meaning of ‘diaspora’ as dispersedness. This side of the empirical research comes with its own challenges (see contributions by Gallo, 2016; Horst, 2016; Van Liempt & Bilger, 2009). Risk to the researcher is not usually a problem, but trust-building and knowing to what extent respondents are revealing private preferences can be just as challenging as inside the authoritarian state. It also raises a practical problem: if populations abroad are typically dispersed over numerous host countries and cities, how many sites must be examined to allow for meaningful interpretations of state–diaspora relations?

The contributors to this Special Issue have tackled these challenges in different ways. In most of the cases presented, the empirical research took the form of interviews and observation either within the authoritarian home country, or in host environments, or both. Dalmasso's contribution denotes the most comprehensive effort at two-sided fieldwork in both the territory of the sending state and the diaspora. She interviewed those most closely involved in the diasporic involvement with constitutional reform, including the most significant officials in Morocco, as well as relevant Moroccans abroad in the capital cities of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Del Sordi interviewed former state-sponsored study-abroad grantees in Kazakhstan, after their return, taking a backward look at their stay abroad, as well as current students at various locations, and officials in charge of the scheme. Hirt and Mohammad, Michaelsen, and Moss, whose work focuses on repressive aspects, necessarily chose to take their information primarily from diasporic and other outside sources. Michaelsen took a pragmatic approach to the dispersedness of Iranian dissidents: conducting a number of his interviews via Skype or telephone, he could reach them in seven different host countries. Moss has concentrated on just two host environments, the UK and the US, but has conducted the largest number of interviews, so as to include men and women of different ages, first- and second-generation migrants, people who left for political reasons and those not previously politically active. Wrighton also selected and interviewed respondents via Internet, in his case because the Crimean region remains disputed territory and practically very difficult and potentially dangerous to enter.

The papers also display necessary tensions between transparency and protection of respondents. Not only do many of our contributors anonymize some or all of their interviewees, sometimes they need to go further. Both Dalmasso and Michaelsen disclose a list of countries in which their anonymous respondents reside, but not the location of individual interviewees, because this would make them too easily identifiable and potentially put them at risk.

But interviews are not the only viable source. Official documents and statements can be a valuable source of information in the study of authoritarianism, and most of our authors rely in part on official speeches, press statements, and interviews with officials. These cannot usually be taken at face value; they often require an additional layer of expert interpretation. Thus, Hirt and Mohammad open their article with a press statement by the Eritrean Foreign Ministry, in which it condemns criticism of the government's human rights record as an ‘attack on a civilized people and society’, and go on to explain this counterintuitive response in the context of the regime's discursive legitimation. Dalmasso interprets the ostensible and actual functions of a panoply of ‘consultative’ institutions, typically answerable to the King rather than to Parliament, in the Moroccan context.

The type of research presented in this Special Issue is characterized by rich empirical findings, but typically has a problem with generalization. By putting together and theorizing from six authoritarian country case studies, this Special Issue presents a rare attempt at overcoming the generalization problem without losing the unique insights that stem from close observation of the authoritarian state. In the following section, I will present a theoretical framework for understanding how authoritarian states rule their populations abroad, resulting in the delineation of five types of authoritarian practices.

Theoretical framework

The challenge: exit, voice, and loyalty as vocabulary

A fertile avenue into understanding, at the theoretical level, why populations abroad might be a challenge to authoritarian states is Hirschman's classic work on exit, voice, and loyalty (1970, 1978, 1993). Hirschman observes that, in response to ‘quality decline’ of an organization (such as a state) or product individuals often have a choice between ‘voicing’ their concern, or ‘exiting’ from the organization, and organizations may respond to either signal, or to a mix of them. Loyalty is conceptualized not as a third option of quietly ‘putting up’ with sub-optimal conditions, but as an informal barrier to exit. In the latter part of the book, and in later work, Hirschman relaxes his initial assumption that exit and voice are binary, going so far as to state that in relation to some organizations, including nation-states ‘full exit is impossible’ (1970, p. 100) and the choice is ‘between voice from within and voice from without’ (1970, p. 105). Hirschman's work suffers from contradictions, and not all of it is easily applied to population mobility. Interpreting migration as a response to ‘quality decline’ in the emigrant state is a stretch, and even in authoritarian circumstances, ‘overall migration can hardly be modeled as a mere function of the suppression of voice’ (Hoffman, 2010, p. 67).

Nonetheless, Hirschman's concepts of ‘exit’, ‘voice’, and ‘loyalty’ remain useful, not as a coherent theory, but as a fertile vocabulary for theorizing the relationship between the authoritarian state and its populations abroad. Leaving behind the assumption of exit and voice as a binary choice, we can begin to investigate how exit in the form of physical departure from a state's territory alters the nature of voice and loyalty. This is of particular interest in relation to authoritarian governments, because by their nature they suppress voice within their borders.

O’Donnell has elaborated on Hirschman's voice by introducing the distinction between ‘vertical voice’, an individual address to the authorities, and ‘horizontal voice’ between citizens. Transplanting Hirschman's ideas to the ‘deeply repressive and authoritarian context’ of 1980s Argentina (O’Donnell, 1986, p. 1), he posited that the authorities were above all devoted to repressing ‘horizontal voice’: citizens expressing their grievances about the authorities to each other. Horizontal voice could otherwise lead to collective identity formation and collective vertical voice. Preventing such threats to O’Donnell constituted ‘the very core of authoritarian domination’ (O’Donnell, 1986, p. 7). Surprisingly, despite having eventually gone into exile himself, O’Donnell ignores the exit dimension. The articles in this Special Issue take up both Hirschman's work and O’Donnell's extension of it, addressing the workings of horizontal and vertical voice beyond the physical borders of the authoritarian state.

The response: authoritarian stabilization and control of transnational space

The contributions to this Special Issue also reveal the ways in which authoritarian governments have in recent decades come to manage the increased extensity, intensity, and velocity of cross-border movement of people and communication flows. In some cases, the skilful management of population mobility may even bolster authoritarian rule.

Adapting ideas from the migration and citizenship literature allows us to see how the authoritarian state deploys forms of inclusion and exclusion in its management of population mobility. But the key to understanding the particularities of authoritarian mobility management is that it does not approach its populations, abroad or at home, as citizens with rights. In order to further develop how populations are approached and treated in authoritarian mobility management, I take inspiration from the three ‘stabilization pillars’ of authoritarian rule (Gerschewski, 2013) familiar from the authoritarianism literature, and three – regime neutral – ‘strategies of controlling transnational space’ developed by Collyer and King (2015). Building on these texts from the fields of migration studies, authoritarianism, and political geography, I will derive five (not mutually exclusive and not necessarily exhaustive) categories that help us understand how the authoritarian states may handle its populations abroad: as subjects, patriots, clients, outlaws, or traitors.

The migration literature has often cast relations between states and populations in terms of inclusion and exclusion (Hyndman & Mountz, 2007; Isin & Turner, 2002; Joppke, 2005) or a ‘politics of membership’ (Brubaker, 2010). The immigration control literature has particularly focused on the exclusionary tendencies of formally democratic receiving states. The literature on sending states, on the other hand, has noted the increasing tendency to ‘engage’ (De Haas, 2005), ‘claim’ (Ho, 2011), ‘construct’ (Ragazzi, 2012), and in various ways, include its populations abroad as part of the polity.

But the idea of ‘inclusion’ can be misleading when it comes to authoritarian sending states. It tends to be understood in terms of extension of citizenship and rights. Thus, Gamlen, in his seminal contribution on the emigrant state, devotes much discussion to state mechanisms to extend rights, political, civil, and social, to diasporas, and has much less to say about the extraction of obligations, which he deems ‘more difficult than extending rights, because the coercive power of the origin state is severely restricted’ (Gamlen, 2008, p. 850). The contributions to our Special Issue show that on the contrary, the authoritarian state has ample opportunities to extend its coercive power beyond borders. Despite what the veneer of legal terminology might suggest, the authoritarian state does not see its internal population as ‘citizens’ with ‘rights’, and when it facilitates mobility, or recognizes and ‘includes’ populations abroad, this does not imply extension of citizenship rights, or even a balanced package of rights and obligations.

Instead, it is worth considering Gerschewski's useful typology of the ways in which authoritarian governments seek to stabilize their rule – without assuming that they become ever more successful in the endeavour – through repression, legitimation, and co-optation. If we translate this terminology into state–citizen relations, we can say that for stabilization purposes, the authoritarian state includes its citizens as subjects (to be controlled and repressed), as patriots (getting them to buy into legitimation strategies) or as clients (with potential for co-optation). When populations abroad resist being included in these ways, they may be excluded, and treated as outlaws (denied any trappings of legal personality) and/or as traitors (castigated and scapegoated as enemies of the state). While Gerschewski's typology takes the authoritarian regime's domestic setting to be its universe, Collyer and King ‘identify a number of ways in which transnational space can be said to be actively produced by attempts of state institutions to control the activities of individuals beyond the territory of the state’ (2015, p. 187). They distinguish between direct control of physical space, symbolic control of transnational spaces invested with a particular value, and discursive control of imaginative space (2015, p. 194). The two typologies map onto each other in part (Table 1).

Table 1. Theorizing extraterritorial authoritarian practices.

Repression: subjects and outlaws

The first mode, or strategy, is what Gerschewski calls repression. He uses Davenport's (2007, p. 2) definition: ‘actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities’ (italics mine). Take away the italics, and the definition maps neatly onto Collyer and King's definition of ‘direct’ or ‘physical’ state control of transnational space. Collyer and King (2015, pp. 194, 199) are primarily concerned with immigrant states’ exclusionary use of repression in the form of ‘expulsion and detention’, but also include extraterritorial authoritarian practices, such as overseas assassinations of opposition figures, in their discussion of direct control. Lewis (2015) expands on this, documenting how the Uzbek authorities control their populations abroad through surveillance, intelligence and informal control, extradition, and assassinations and attacks beyond their borders, often unhindered and sometimes aided by host country and multilateral authorities. These kinds of practices clearly rest on the authoritarian emigrant state's inclusion of its population abroad within its own imagined jurisdiction, but inclusion in this sense can hardly be associated with the usual notion of citizenship. Instead, this category of practices is best referred to as inclusion as subjects: in a range of repressive policies, the authoritarian government asserts its authority ‘as if’ the subject were still on its territory. These policies attempt, not always successfully, to minimize the sense of autonomy (Koinova, 2012) and freedom that may be experienced by populations abroad in the host country.

However, inclusion in the authoritarian polity, even in these terms, is not a stable or predictable condition. It is always precarious, conditional both on the exile's good behaviour and on the whim of the regime. Yossi Shain in his classic text on political exiles writes:

A home regime's distinction between insiders and outsiders as an indication of national loyalty and disloyalty serves the regime's political ends. But the regime's demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ does not necessarily stop at the borders of the state. It alters with the regime's changing definition of the national interest and of the behavioral criteria it prescribes for national loyalty. Thus people who have left their country (for whatever reasons) to reside abroad are sometimes included in, and sometimes excluded from, the regime's definition of the national community. (2005, p. 165)

Exclusive repression or exclusion as outlaws is equally at the repressive end of extraterritorial authoritarian practices, but it is a very different type of practice. Here, the authoritarian state tries to exclude populations abroad from participation in the polity even as subjects, disrupting or destroying ties with the home country. Exclusion can take the form of cutting intimate ties, by forcing friends or relatives at home to repudiate those abroad and severe connections. But it can also take a legal form, withdrawing citizenship, refusing consular services or refusing re-entry. For Collyer and King, control over individuals via legal status falls under symbolic control, as one of the ‘key institutions which are neither imagined nor completely physically grounded’ (2015, p. 195). Hannah Arendt famously considered withdrawal of nationality a loss of ‘the right to have rights’. Unless people made stateless are admitted into another polity, their ‘plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that no one even wants to oppress them’ (Arendt, 1958, pp. 298, 296). Withdrawal of nationality can either prevent those already abroad from returning, or precipitate their exile. Gulf states such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates have regularly revoked the citizenship of political dissidents (Human rights in the Gulf, 2014; Protest and lose your passport, 2016). On a much more dramatic scale and more reminiscent of Arendt's description, Myanmar's military regime stripped hundreds of thousands of Rohingya of Burmese citizenship in the 1980s, precipitating waves of violence and displacement and creating a situation of statelessness that persists until this day (Cheesman, 2017).

Legitimation: patriots and traitors

Legitimation, in Gerschewski's terms, ‘seeks to guarantee active consent, compliance with the rule, passive obedience, or mere toleration within the population’ (2013, p. 18). By defining legitimation in this manner, Gerschewski side-steps both normative debates about legitimacy and empirical difficulties in measuring discursive success, i.e. identifying whether a government is genuinely experienced as legitimate, in authoritarian circumstances. It simply refers to legitimation practices with the intent to help stabilize the regime, without pronouncing on their degree of success. While Gerschewski distinguishes between performance legitimation (based on actual or perceived track record) and discursive legitimation, I will focus purely on the discursive element, the better to distinguish this type of practice from co-optation. Transported into the transnational realm, this corresponds to Collyer and King's idea of governments ‘placing themselves in the symbolically powerful position of guardians of “home” [which] can draw on loyalties of resident and nonresident citizens alike’ (2015, p. 194), but also the ‘discursive control of imaginative space’ (2015, p. 193), exerted particularly in cyberspace and through media representations. Such strategies fit within the general trend of sending states’ increasing discursive recognition of populations abroad as part of the nation-state, but again in the authoritarian state this takes on a particular inflection. What authoritarian discourses aimed at populations abroad do may be termed ‘loyalty conflation’: they are adept at eliding the differences between people, nation, state and government and conflating these different loyalties in discourses of ‘national loyalty’ (Shain, 2005). Populations abroad are particularly susceptible to this because their physical location has denaturalized their belonging. I refer to this set of practices as inclusion as patriots.

As noted by Shain, inclusion as patriots is precarious, dependent both on the population abroad's ‘good behaviour’, and on the regime's interest. Whenever it suits, populations abroad can be discursively excluded as traitors, as deserters, cultural degenerates or tax evaders. Just as loyalty to the nation is conflated with loyalty to the regime, actual or potential opposition to the regime is broadened out to reflect badly on patriotism. The act of physical exit makes populations abroad more vulnerable to this type of critique than opponents within, although today it no longer means that they cannot speak back to domestic audiences.

Co-optation: clients

Co-optation, in Gerschewski’ framework, is ‘the capacity to tie strategically-relevant actors (or a group of actors) to the regime elite’ (2013, p. 22). This mechanism is very familiar to the student of authoritarianism: personal perks are promised, and sometimes disbursed, to specific population groups in return for support. It is, as it were, ‘inclusion within inclusion’: those targeted are made part not just of the polity, but of its elite. While Gerschewski mentions business and military elites in particular, populations abroad may also be ‘strategically relevant’, and coopting them may be mutually beneficial: fortunes and careers are tied, not just to the home country, but more specifically to the home regime (see Dalmasso, 2017). Again, this practice does not map neatly onto liberal ideas of inclusion as citizenship: in its material benefits, it is something more, but in its informality and precariousness it also something less. An appropriate term for these practices is inclusion as clients. This practice, it must be noted, is not accounted for in Collyer and King's categorization, which does not speak to the idea of binding populations abroad by means of material incentives.

By intersecting the practices of repression, legitimation, and co-optation with the ‘regime's demarcation’ (Shain, 2005) or ‘politics of membership’ (Brubaker, 2010) of the authoritarian state, I have derived five (not mutually exclusive, and probably non-exhaustive) types of practices at the disposal of the authoritarian state for ruling populations abroad: inclusion as subjects, patriots or clients versus exclusion as outlaws or traitors. The next section will discuss how these practices manifested themselves in the contributions to this Special Issue. Each article focuses on a very particular subgroup or issue; so their identification of particular practices should not be considered as a general and exhaustive discussion of how the authoritarian government in question governs its population abroad.

Findings

The challenges of population mobility

The articles by Moss and by Michaelsen in this Special Issue, which concern the authoritarian government's relations with declared government critics abroad, represent precisely the challenge of ‘horizontal voice’ described by O’Donnell, transposed into the transnational realm. Michaelsen reminds us of the long and momentous pedigree of transnational horizontal voice in relation to Iran, starting with Ayatollah Khomeini's own deployment of mass media from exile, but also points out how digital media have revolutionized the scale, speed and reach of transnational horizontal voice. These media have allowed Iranian diaspora dissidents to maintain daily contact with people and debates inside their country of origin, as well as building networks with international media, NGOs, and foreign governments.

Moss and Dalmasso focus on a crisis period for the Syrian and Moroccan regime, respectively: the Arab revolts of 2011. As Moss describes, when the revolt took hold in Syria, diaspora activists received and relayed mobile-phone generated video's attesting to the peacefulness of the protests and the brutality of regime repression, for domestic as well as international consumption. Given the heavily controlled digital environment in Syria itself, these activists abroad were of crucial importance in the early stages of the revolt, both in coordinating horizontal voice inside Syria and in making it heard by global audiences.

Dalmasso shows how, while it has received relatively little international media attention, Morocco too faced a challenge in 2011, both at home and abroad, but instead of concentrating on repression, the King almost immediately announced a constitutional reform. Within the framework of this reform, transnational horizontal voices were offered an apparent opportunity to convert into collective vertical voice via an official participatory process. Diaspora activists engaged in the process, in particular, in the hope that this would be a means of achieving the right to vote in Moroccan elections from abroad.

In the case of Eritrea, described in the article by Hirt and Mohammad, the nature of the challenge to the regime is different: it is not just about dissidents raising their voice from abroad. The sheer number of Eritreans residing outside the country, an estimated one-third of the population, raises questions about the sustainability of the polity. This was very much the sort of challenge Hirschman had in mind when he wrote about the German Democratic Republic in the context of exit and voice: how can a state, and more specifically, a government, survive when it is hemorrhaging residents? Hirt and Mohammad show that, in the twenty-first century, building a wall is not the only answer to this question for an authoritarian regime.

The Kazakhstan case study by Del Sordi is almost the polar opposite of that of Eritrea. The government of resource-rich Kazakhstan would probably be capable of prohibiting exit, more specifically exit by young, educated people, if it wanted to do so. Instead, it not only permits increasing numbers of young people to pursue an education abroad, but has actually designed a program sponsoring study abroad. Despite having increasingly high-quality educational institutions of its own, Kazakhstan still seeks to import skills and build human capacity for the future of the country via study abroad. However, such policies do raise potential threats for an authoritarian government: students may not return; they may exercise transnational voice criticizing the home government during their stay abroad; or they may learn democratic values and seek transformation after their return.

The Crimea case study presented by Wrighton is unique in the framework of this Special Issue because the relevant population is not recognized as being ‘within Russia’ by most other states. The mass issue of Russian passports to Crimeans took place in the context of annexation. While many Crimeans embraced the possibility of becoming Russian with enthusiasm, it also had its local critics, and Wrighton shows that passport distribution was carried out in a manner that appears to have been in part intended to deal with these critics.

Iran and Syria: dealing with political exiles

The contribution by Moss investigates the Syrian regime's response to mobilization online by Syrians abroad after the onset of the Arab Spring revolution in Syria. She finds that because agents of the Assad regime used ICTs to monitor dissent on a global scale, ‘net activism’ placed members of the diaspora on the regime's radar and facilitated transnational repression. Through surveillance and infiltration online, pro-regime agents hacked their websites and Facebook pages, or complained about supposedly offensive content to prompt site administrators to shut down sites or delete content. They threatened activists and their relatives at home, successfully deterred some members of the diaspora from voicing their dissent via social media, and eroded networks between Syrians abroad and their family members at home. She concludes that while the use of ICTs facilitated mobilization from abroad, the very mechanisms that make activists in the diaspora vital members of transnational advocacy networks also expose them to transnational repression.

Michaelsen comes to very similar findings regarding Iran's dealings with exiled activists after the Green Revolution: the same media that allows for the daily expression of transnational horizontal voice has also greatly increased the state's capacity for transnational repression. On the one hand, it increased their vulnerability via social media hacking, data theft, and digitally delivered death threats. On the other hand, it seeks to weaken ties between Iranians in the country and dissidents in exile by engaging in online slander, threats to the latter's family members and compromising their lines of communication with regime critics inside the country.

Iran and Syria's practices exemplify inclusion as subjects: they interfered with exiled dissidents’ digital communications and sent death threats, treating them and making them feel as if they were still at home. These policies had limited success with veteran activists: while presumed government agents can disturb and distort transnational communications from time to time, they are unable to censor the dissidents as effectively as they might do within the borders. Similarly, they can make physical threats, but while decades ago Iran has been known to resort to assassinating dissidents abroad, today's exiled dissidents remained safe from the physical force of the home state. However, Moss shows that newcomers to protest were more likely to be effectively deterred.

Iran and Syria also, and more successfully, excluded their dissidents abroad as outlaws: forcibly cutting their ties with home. By making threats against the in-country relatives, friends of transnational activists, they confronted the latter with a binary choice: either they had to stop their online activism, or they had to repudiate – or be repudiated by – and break off all contact with their relatives. Moss reports her respondents inevitably taking either one of these choices. Michaelsen's professional activists describe how, the more their activist profile is raised internationally, the more they risk endangering their contacts in Iran who provide them with vital information.

Michaelsen also shows how Iranian dissidents were discursively excluded, as traitors, by the regime. They are accused of working against their country with foreign powers, but also of being morally corrupt or against Islam. These representations are made in domestic media, but also in directly to in-country contacts, reinforcing the cutting of intimate or professional ties (Table 2).

Table 2. Extraterritorial authoritarian practices in the case studies.

Targeted group	Repression		Legitimation		Co-optation
	Inclusion subjects	Exclusion: outlaws	Inclusion: patriots	Exclusion: traitors	Inclusion: clients
Moss Syrian activists abroad	Digital surveillance, hacking or reporting websites, threats to self and in-country relatives	Preventing return home; disrupting communications; cutting off intimate ties
Michaelsen Iran's exiled activists	Digital surveillance, personalized phishing, threats to self and in-country relatives	Preventing return home; disrupting communications; cutting off professional and intimate ties		Accusations of cooperation with foreign powers and moral corruption
Hirt and Mohammad Eritreans abroad	Tax enforced via consular services; state-sanctioned people-smuggling; critics sued abroad		Patriotism mobilized via youth organizations, satellite tv, websites; letter of regret	New migrants must sign ‘letter of regret’; critics are traitors
Dalmasso Moroccans abroad	Voting from abroad prevented – remittances as taxation without representation
Del Sordi state-sponsored Kazakh students	Secret service pursues non-returnees; surveillance of academic performance; peer monitoring of critical speech		Guided patriotic cultural activities in Kazakh student societies; study abroad scheme source of gratitude and loyalty		Better career prospects, but must work for government
Wrighton Crimeans after occupation		Difficulty getting passport for late appliers; no basic services without passport	Propaganda for Russian project; mass adoption of passports in turn legitimates annexation		Promise of better financial prospects, specifically doubling of pension with Russian passport

Eritrea and Morocco: dealing with mass migration

In the case studies by Dalmasso on Morocco and by Hirt and Mohammad on Eritrea, the home government has experienced mass migration. Two mechanisms, not at all unique to authoritarian settings, may be presumed to be playing a primary role in explaining why the governments in question permit the mass migrations in the first place. First, we should not assume that the state actually has the capacity to stop these migrations, and second, economic needs, in terms of offloading unemployed citizens as well as subsequently receiving remittances, make it attractive to allow or even encourage migration. What is specifically authoritarian about their management of remitting populations abroad is that this – direct or indirect – form of taxation must be prevented from leading to representation.

Hirt and Mohammad investigated how the authoritarian government of Eritrea manages to thrive in a situation where at least one-third of the population lives outside its borders. It sustains itself with funds from its citizens abroad, directly through a diaspora tax, as well as indirectly by delegating social welfare tasks to diaspora Eritreans who support their relatives at home. The article further analyses how the government survived a political crisis in 2001, when a mandatory military and national service without time limit caused large numbers of Eritreans to flee the country. The regime initially tried to stem the flow by a ‘shoot-at-the-border’ policy, but gradually learned to regard the new exiles as a financial opportunity. The military now actively gets involved in lucrative people-smuggling or human trafficking, and finds many ways of taxing the subsequent exiles. Finally, the regime now appears to be making use of the European Union's reluctance to accept more refugees, making overtures to receive them back, along with funds for reintegration.

The Eritrean government's enforcement of diaspora taxation can be seen as a form of inclusion as subjects: the population abroad is treated as a source of predation, both in the act of departure itself, through the involvement of high military officials in people-smuggling, and afterwards through the 2% diaspora tax. The tax needs to be paid (with back payments from the moment of departure) in return for any consular transactions that relate to remaining ties with the home country, such as a passport, birth certificate, or property deeds.

Hirt and Mohammad also show the Eritrean government's adeptness at including the diaspora as patriots, which helps with the tax collection as well as silencing critics. For decades, it has perfected practices of ‘loyalty conflation’: the people, the nation and the leadership are one, and duty to the homeland is equated with duty to the home government. Through diaspora associations, festivals, seminars, and satellite TV broadcasts it keeps a tight grip on the population abroad, appealing to its sense of nationhood, and conflating loyalty to the nation with loyalty to the government.

But there is always the threat of exclusion as traitors. If they are not outright opponents of the regime, Eritreans abroad may be particularly susceptible to fear of discursive exclusion because of the sense of betrayal (of family/community/nation) they themselves may feel because of having left. Having been ‘disloyal’ by leaving, they need to repay their loyalty in different form, which nowadays literally takes the form of having to sign a ‘letter of regret’, and undertaking to pay the 2% tax. Open critics of the regime abroad are automatically labelled as traitors.

Dalmasso's contribution examines how the Moroccan government, with a smaller but still substantial (ca. 10%) expatriate population, responded to political demands from Moroccans abroad following the Arab revolutions. It demonstrates how, paradoxically, the creation of an emigration-related consultative institution has hindered Moroccans living abroad from obtaining meaningful democratic representation. After the onset of the Arab Spring, the King appeared to issue an open invitation to its population abroad to become involved in proposals for constitutional reform, to be channelled via the Council for Moroccans Living Abroad. Ostensibly, Morocco was including its population abroad as citizens. But the Council, which has nebulous ‘advisory powers’, only served to co-opt potential critics at a time of crisis, sidelining them afterwards. In the interaction between the constitutional reform commission and the Council, policed by one person close to the King, the main demand, for extension of voting rights, dropped out of sight. Hence, the Moroccan diaspora were left in the same situation as before the revolts of 2011: people born abroad of Moroccan descent automatically attain Moroccan nationality, but they do not have voting rights: they are included into the Moroccan nation as subjects of the King.

Kazakhstan: dealing with student mobility

Del Sordi shows how Kazakhstan's style of sponsorship of study abroad not only pre-empts any threat of democratic transformation, but indeed strengthens the stability of the regime. It does so by investing in the loyalty of a young, educated elite to the regime. The Bolashak scheme can be considered as an officially sponsored form of co-optation, or inclusion as clients: returnees have access to better jobs and career opportunities than others. Thus, their fortunes and careers are tied to the home government, and the time spent abroad is valued as an individual as well as a national asset at home. Study abroad is sponsored for the express purpose of a government career.

But the government's relation to its Bolashak students is not just a materially motivated patron–client contract. Before, during, and after their stay abroad, Bolashak students are included as patriots, grateful to and proud of their government/nation. During the period of study abroad, exposure to alternative views of the home government is minimized by keeping students together as a close-knit community, engaging in state-guided cultural activities. Having had mixed experiences with Bachelor's students, who stayed away longer and were more likely to return transformed, Kazakhstan now limits the scheme to Master's degrees. The effects appear to be as desired: Del Sordi finds that the few students who did report having had friends outside the Kazakhstani community were also the ones most critical of the Kazakhstani government and society after their return, but they were a small minority.

Finally, Kazakhstan's policies to avert students abroad either not returning or engaging in activism when abroad also displays – relatively mild – repressive elements, of inclusion as subjects. Government agents become heavily involved in monitoring academic performance abroad, sometimes even resorting to demanding their university password. Students are also encouraged to report on each other's bad behaviour, including criticism of the home government. Finally, students or their families are asked to put up collateral as an insurance against non-return, and non-returnees are subject to lawsuits and harassment by the secret service.

Russia: dealing with new populations abroad

While western media have tended to cast Crimean enthusiasm for the annexation in ethno-linguistic terms, Wrighton shows that in part, becoming a Russian national was simply made an attractive proposition. There were expectations of increased financial security, and more specifically, pensions would be doubled upon attainment of Russian nationality. More speculatively, some Crimeans may have thought the Russian passport would increase their chances in a much broader labour market. Thus, the adherence of Crimeans to Russia could in part be considered as bought: they were included, through mass co-optation, as clients. At the same time, Russian nationalism and the desire to be a part of the Russian national project undoubtedly played a role too, and Russia's propaganda campaign aimed at Crimea preceded its actual annexation. Thus, Crimeans who wanted to be Russian were also included as patriots. In turn, Russia used its speedy and successful passportization campaign domestically and internationally to help legitimate the annexation.

While there may have been some degree of ethnic discrimination in the passportization strategy, particularly against Tatars, Wrighton shows that enthusiasm for achieving Russian nationality in itself, rather than ethnicity or language, became a hallmark for subsequent treatment by the Russian authorities. Known dissidents as well as people who had not immediately sought to get a passport subsequently found it much more difficult to do so. For those without Russian passports, life in Crimea has become increasingly difficult: they have difficulty getting employment, getting bank loans, they cannot get health care and their children's enrolment in school is threatened. Regardless whether they failed to obtain Russian nationality, or went out of their way to reject it, they have found themselves excluded, as outlaws, from basic services. Many have felt compelled to leave for other parts of Ukraine. Thus, Wrighton describes the Russian passportization strategy as a form of ‘civic cleansing’, pushing those who have not displayed an immediate desire for adherence to Russia out of the Crimea through denial of services.

Conclusion

Authoritarian states today have various, usually not authoritarian, motivations for tolerating or even sponsoring their population's mobility. They have over time developed specific authoritarian stabilization mechanisms for governing their populations abroad. As discussed and illustrated above, repression, co-optation, and legitimation take on a particular inflection in relation to populations abroad. Physical control may be more challenging, but the authoritarian state can adapt to the specific assets and insecurities of populations abroad, with policies to include or exclude them as subjects or outlaws, as patriots or traitors, or as clients.

Albert Hirschman believed that up to a point, emigration of actual or potential troublemakers would favour an authoritarian regime, but there would be a ‘tipping point’ beyond which emigration would become a threat. East Germany's immediate post-war population loss of around 1% per annum appeared to be over the tipping point, which explained the building of the Wall (Hirschman, 1993). But two of our cases, Eritrea and Morocco, have seen much greater numbers exit. Today, the ‘tipping point’ may be expressed not as a proportion of the population abroad, but a function of the policies a regime has devised to deal with and perhaps profit from their exit. If we take our findings from the Eritrean case seriously, the question arises to what extent an authoritarian regime actually needs its citizens to be within its territorial borders. If a considerable proportion of the population can reside abroad without threatening the viability of the state, indeed appearing to bolster it, we must conclude that authoritarianism is no longer a territorially bounded regime type.

Since the framework developed here is exploratory, built on six cases, many more case studies, relating to other authoritarian states or other subgroups of populations abroad could enrich our scant knowledge and test it. The framework may also be fruitfully be extended to related phenomena, such as the immigration policies of authoritarian states, a particularly relevant issue for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, but also for Russia. It may be applied to the policies of hybrid regimes towards their populations abroad or their immigrants. Or, leaving behind the notion of authoritarianism and democracy as regime types exclusively manifested at the state level, the intersection of authoritarian stabilization mechanisms with politics of inclusion and exclusion presented here can be applied to the mobility policies of formally democratic states or of multilateral entities.

The literature on immigration controls has noted how western potential receiving states have ‘externalized’ or ‘transnationalized’ their borders in order to exclude populations from potential citizenship long before they have reached the border. What the authoritarian sending state does is the conceptual opposite of these practices: it seeks to include – and occasionally exclude – populations far beyond the borders, not as citizens, but rather as subjects, patriots or clients. While these two forms of extraterritorial practice may be conceptual opposites, they do not necessarily clash in practice. Authoritarian sending states and democratic receiving states often tolerate the reach into each other's territory and sometimes even facilitate it. In these cases, authoritarian rule may actually take on a multilateral dimension, where the host environment contributes to the authoritarian governing of populations abroad, and hence to authoritarian stabilization.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the research team of the Authoritarianism in a Global Age project, Katrina Burgess, Jean-Michel Lafleur, Myra Waterbury, and editor Barry Gills for their valuable comments. Previous versions of this paper have been presented at a workshop on ‘Authoritarian Governance of Overseas Citizens’ held in September 2015 at the University of Amsterdam, and funded by the IDCAR network at the ISA Workshop ‘Sending States and Extraterritorial Engagement of Diasporas Abroad’ in Atlanta, March 2016 and a workshop on ‘Unpacking the Sending State: Regimes, Institutions, and non-State Actors in Diaspora & Emigration Politics’ at Warwick University, September 2016. The author would like to thank the participants to these events for their inspiring questions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the project ‘Authoritarianism in a Global Age’ at the University of Amsterdam, and received funding from the European Research Council [grant agreement no 323899]. www.authoritarianism-global.uva.nl.

Notes on contributors

Marlies Glasius

Notes on contributor

Marlies Glasius is a Professor in International Relations at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include authoritarianism, activism, and international criminal justice. Glasius holds a PhD cum laude from the Netherlands School of Human Rights Research. She previously worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she was one of the founding editors of the Global Civil Society Yearbook. She is currently principal investigator in the ERC-funded project Authoritarianism in a Global Age, which investigates changes in the nature and sustainability of authoritarianism induced by globalization.