Global Autocracies: Strategies of Transnational Repression, Legitimation, and Co-Optation in World Politics
TLDR
The authors argue that the rise of global migration flows has contributed to the emergence of transnational authoritarianism, as autocracies aim to both maximize material gains from citizens' "exit" and minimize political risks by controlling their "voice" abroad.Abstract:
How, when, and why does a state take repressive action against individuals residing outside its territorial jurisdiction? Beyond state-led domestic forms of control over citizens living within their legal borders, autocracies also seek to target those abroad—from African states’ sponsoring violence against exiled dissidents to Central Asian republics’ extraditions of political emigres, and from the adoption of spyware software to monitor digital activism across Latin America to enforced disappearances of East Asian expatriates. Despite growing global interconnectedness, the field of international studies currently lacks an adequate comparative framework for analyzing how autocracies adapt to growing cross-border mobility. I argue that the rise of global migration flows has contributed to the emergence of “transnational authoritarianism,” as autocracies aim to both maximize material gains from citizens’ “exit” and minimize political risks by controlling their “voice” abroad. I demonstrate that governments develop strategies of transnational repression, legitimation, and co-optation that transcend state borders, as well as co-operation with a range of non-state actors. Bringing work on the international politics of migration in conversation with the literature on authoritarianism, I provide illustrative examples drawn from a range of transnational authoritarian practices by the fifty countries categorized as “Not Free” by Freedom House in 2019, covering much of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America. I sketch an emerging field of international studies research around the novel means that autocracies employ to exercise power over populations abroad, while shedding light on the evolving nature of global authoritarianism.read more
Citations
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The Arab uprisings and the return of repression
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Political Control
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Going after the family: Transnational repression and the proxy punishment of Middle Eastern diasporas
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors investigate proxy punishment, that is, the abuse of family members at home as a means to manipulate and subjugate dissidents abroad, using diaspora activists from Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Libya.
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Digitized diaspora governance during the COVID‐19 pandemic: China's diaspora mobilization and Chinese migrant responses in Italy
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TL;DR: In this paper , the authors explore how the Chinese diaspora state during the COVID•19 pandemic in 2020 managed to transform a severe health crisis into a geo-political opportunity for transnational nation-building through di-pora governance based on extensive use of social media technologies.
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Elite Networks and the Transregional Dimension of Authoritarianism: Sino-Emirati Relations in Times of a Global Pandemic
TL;DR: In this article , the authors explore three transregional public-private elite networks as multipliers for the traveling of authoritarian practices and show that authoritarian diffusion under the umbrella of fighting the pandemic is not spatially bound to geographical proximity or other structural similarities but rather a global phenomenon that state and non-state actors reproduce.
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Migration and Development: A Theoretical Perspective
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Book
The Society of the Muslim Brothers
TL;DR: The history of the Egyptian Revivalist Egyptian movement up to the time of Nasser is described in this paper, with a foreword from a leading scholar of Islam in the English speaking world.
Journal ArticleDOI
The three pillars of stability: legitimation, repression, and co-optation in autocratic regimes
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a theoretical framework that seeks to explain the longevity of autocracies by referring to three pillars of stability: legitimation, repression, and co-optation.