Transnational repression refers to authoritarian governments reaching out to silence, hackle and intimidate critics and political opponents. The planned book will shed light on the strategies, tools, and implications of transnational authoritarianism, unveiling its global dynamics and impact on the human rights, politics, and international relations. Since many democracy activists, critics and political opponents of the authoritarian governments persist their work from the cities within liberal democracies after fleeing repressions of their governments, this book will put special focus on how authoritarian governments apply multifaceted pressures within the boundaries of liberal democracies.
Autocratic regimes employ a toolbox of strategies and practices to pursue their challengers and silence critique beyond their own. These techniques include assassinations, assaults, disappearances, renditions and unlawful deportations, abuse of Interpol’s system of “red notices”, digital threats, spyware, passport and document control, and coercion by proxy. Our on-going research has found that a core aim behind the transnational repression of an authoritarian government is advancing fear of retaliation through harassment of family members left back home. Other tools of transnational repression include illegal surveillance through diaspora community, depriving consular services, online bullying and so forth.
China, Iran, and several former Soviet republics including Russia feature among the top perpetrators and tend to get much international criticism. But as the Washington based think tank Freedom House’s 2022 report titled Still not Safe: Transnational Repression in 2022 points out, the 854 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression since 2020 were committed by 38 governments in 91 countries.
In this volume, we also include this broader spectrum of cases.
Through this volume we also wish to focus on how autocratic regimes engage with new forms of repression, how they create apprehension and fear among expats, how they employ new forms of surveillance, how they challenge established boundaries between state apparatus, party activists and individual expats, and additionally how activists, critics and expats in general cope with these forms of repression. We are generally interested in:
- Patterns of transnational repression
- Descriptive case studies
Final chapters may be between 3000-5000 words excluding references and they could be both academic and non-academic in nature.
Please send us an abstract as early as possible, preferably by September 1st. We will consider all the abstracts and notify the authors regarding the acceptance of their abstracts. Final chapters should be submitted by the end of the year 2023.
About the Editors:
Mubashar Hasan is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway
Arild Engensen Ruud is a Professor at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway
Contact for further queries: Mubashar Hasan, email: mubashh@ikos.uio.no