This is the golden age of transnational repression, or the targeting of exiles and diasporas by the states they left behind. Freedom House research shows that people were targeted with direct, physical transnational repression in 103 host states by 48 origin states from 2014 to 2024. The number of host states, origin states, and incidents has grown each year since Freedom House started publishing data in 2021. This “golden age” is due to a convergence of multiple factors: growing impunity for authoritarian actions abroad; the spread of powerful information and communications technologies (ICT) that have increased the relevance of diaspora politics and the capacity of states for transnational repression, both digital and nondigital; market forces that have lowered the financial cost of transnational repression and created new models of surveillance and subversion; and increased migration globally, which has increased the pool of potential targets and spurred efforts in many host states to make migration more difficult and more dangerous. Finally, the essay identifies reasons to expect that the problem has not peaked. The consolidation of modernized, globally integrated authoritarian states; the subversion of international norms against extraterritorial violence; the pace of technological change; and a backlash against migration in democracies all make it more likely than not that transnational repression will continue to grow as a problem.
This is the golden age of transnational repression. More states now have more tools to target more exiles and diaspora communities in more countries for fewer resources than ever before. Since 2021, Freedom House has published an annual dataset on global incidents of transnational repression. The latest edition, covering 2014 to 2024, catalogs 1,219 direct physical incidents perpetrated by 48 origin states in 103 host states. At least a quarter of the world’s governments are pursuing emigrés in more than half the world’s countries.1 Each year that Freedom House has published these data, the number of host states and origin states has grown, with increasingly dramatic incidents becoming regular occurrences — whether the murder of a Sikh activist by Indian agents in Canada, bounties placed on Hong Kong activists by China, or plots by Russian intelligence services against exiled journalists and others in the United Kingdom.2
Transnational repression shapes how activists, journalists, and regular people living abroad express themselves, associate, and assemble. It is among the practices reshaping global governance in favor of the states that practice transnational repression, carving pathways to suppress dissent and keep regimes in power, even when they are faced with mobilization outside their borders.3 Transnational repression is one component of an emerging illiberal international order, in which states cooperate to create webs of surveillance and control that span the globe. People who cross borders, who are already subject to extra scrutiny and precarity, are especially vulnerable to this new order.
The drivers behind transnational repression’s increasing prevalence are global. First among them is the growing impunity for authoritarian practices.4 A decadeslong shift in the global balance of power away from the United States and its allies has emboldened China, India, and Turkey. Smaller states, too, such as Rwanda and Tajikistan, have found ways to leverage their position within the system to pursue targets abroad. At the same time, the influence of governments most likely to raise human-rights concerns has weakened, as has their willingness to do so. This turn away from commitments to liberal democracy and international human rights — together with the open use by the United States and Israel of extraterritorial tactics such as assassinations or kidnappings — has undermined norms against such actions and made it harder to hold states accountable for them.5 A new crop of rising middle powers, including India and Turkey, has taken note of this lack of consequences and adopted such tactics themselves, often justifying them as part of their own “war on terror.”
The second driver is technological change. Digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) have increased the relevance of diaspora politics, as the speech of those abroad can be more easily transmitted back into their origin states. But ICTs have also increased states’ capacity for transnational repression. They now have digital means to silence citizens living abroad. Diaspora groups and exiles, especially those who are politically active, face constant surveillance and harassment through social media and messenger accounts.
Technology underpins other forms of transnational repression as well, as origin states use information they have gathered to identify people’s locations and target them for physical violence. It is also how states most commonly employ “coercion-by-proxy,” communicating via digital means threats against exiles’ family members or loved ones who are still in the origin country. Lastly, ICTs enable faster and more efficient information sharing among states about wanted individuals, whether on bilateral, regional, or global bases. As technology has grown not only more sophisticated but also cheaper and easier to use, more states are able to deploy it transnationally.
Third, a growing marketization of authoritarian services has increased the number of states that can carry out large-scale, highly sophisticated transnational-repression operations. By working with organized criminal groups and others as proxies, states trade the efficiency of more professionalized operations for volume, obfuscation, and reduced risk. “Outsourcing” espionage operations, including those related to transnational repression, builds upon means of hiring, paying, and communicating with workers that are part of the global shift toward “gig economies.” And the private spyware market has made powerful remote-surveillance capabilities that were previously the domain of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence services available to any state willing to pay. In other words, thanks to technological advances and marketization, more states are able to do more outside their borders with fewer resources.
Finally, increased global migration has expanded the number of potential targets for transnational repression, and the political turn against migration has made interstate cooperation in transnational repression more likely. Most physical transnational repression takes place through cooperation between states to detain and return people unlawfully to their origin countries, and the most common means of doing so is through migration systems. As major political parties and populations in popular destination democracies have turned against immigration, these states have aggressively expanded immigration-enforcement operations and weakened safeguards against abuses in migration systems, such as measures to prevent origin states from influencing asylum procedures. When emigrés get caught in the system, opportunities for transnational repression by origin states multiply.
As a modernized form of authoritarianism consolidates globally, technological advances accelerate, and the safest host states enact increasingly hostile migration policies, transnational repression will become an ever-greater problem.
Everyone Does It. The first factor facilitating the global emergence of transnational repression — impunity for authoritarian practices — is built on the backdrop of a radical transformation in the global balance of power over the last three decades. Following a brief period of U.S. hegemony after the end of the Cold War, the relative economic and diplomatic power of other states has risen rapidly, pushing the world toward a more multipolar (or apolar) order. As the relative power of the United States and its allies has declined, the liberal normative frameworks that they traditionally promoted have become less influential — in part because these states have simultaneously retreated from promoting their vision of democracy as a universal norm.
The most marked transformation during this period of global rebalancing has been the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a global power — and the one behind the world’s largest and most sophisticated campaign of transnational repression. Through 2024, the PRC accounted for 272 of 1,219 total incidents in Freedom House’s dataset. China’s use of transnational repression ranges from coercing other states to carry out mass deportations of Uyghurs, as happened in Thailand and Egypt, to conducting renditions and disappearances, to the “everyday” transnational repression of digital harassment and coercion-by-proxy that dissidents from China experience globally. China has continued to press its pursuit of dissidents abroad even as the issue has become a major irritant in its bilateral relations around the world. In November 2023, when Xi Jinping visited San Francisco for a summit with then–U.S. president Joseph Biden, consulates bused hundreds of supporters to the summit, where they boldly attacked anti-CCP protesters in the streets around the summit.6
It is not only large powers, though, that have become more active in transnational repression. Rwanda is an example of a small country that has leveraged its relative regional weight to exert outsized influence in world affairs. President Paul Kagame’s government uses that influence to prevent consequences for Rwanda’s well-documented campaign of assassinations and intimidation of dissidents abroad.7 Despite its small population and aid-dependent economy, Rwanda takes advantage of the international community’s anemic commitment to enforcing liberal norms to suppress the opposition abroad as severely as it does the opposition at home.
Tajikistan is another small country exploiting the international environment to get away with transnational repression — though with a very different logic from Rwanda’s. Deeply impoverished and notoriously poorly governed, Tajikistan is not even a regional heavyweight in Central Asia. For decades, the Muslim-majority country’s largest source of national income has been remittances from people working abroad. Thus the government expends considerable effort policing and controlling its diaspora — aided in part by fears of the host states. Because many Tajik dissidents abroad are associated with an Islamic political party and Tajikistanis have committed several prominent international terrorist attacks in recent years, some host states are skeptical of protecting people from the country against transnational repression. Tajikistan and Rwanda are two sides of the same coin: small countries that can engage in transnational repression with impunity, because the methods have become less resource-intensive, and there are essentially no consequences.
Lastly, the emergence of regional organizations as tools of transnational repression is another sign that the new international order is creating more space for transnational repression. Regional organizations, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Gulf Cooperation Council, and Arab Interior Ministers Council (a body within the Arab League), are becoming increasingly institutionalized and help to facilitate transnational repression through information sharing, border-notification systems, and wanted-notice dissemination. Because most people who flee authoritarianism stay in neighboring countries (sometimes by choice, but often because they cannot get permission to enter safer countries farther away), regional organizations provide crucial forums for authoritarian governments to work together on suppressing dissent. In Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam operate what Human Rights Watch has called an informal “swap mart” in which they exchange dissidents.8 These regional mechanisms rest on a bedrock of impunity, operating to suppress dissent in open violation of putatively universal international norms because there are no consequences for such violations.
Key democratic states have also played a crucial role in undermining accountability for authoritarianism abroad through their own actions, which established a large and ongoing zone of exception to international human-rights norms around self-identified national-security threats and terrorism.9 The United States’ global war on terror, launched in the wake of 9/11, provided a repertoire of tactics and a visual vocabulary that have become standard in transnational-repression operations. This includes the disappearance, rendition, and torture of individuals by state agents in undeclared operations, and the use of drone strikes and other methods of targeted assassination against individuals abroad. Israel’s longtime use of extraterritorial killing as a tool of the state also provides inspiration and justification for other states to do the same.
Following the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the country’s government embraced the war-on-terror repertoire both rhetorically and tactically, first through a global campaign of renditions against more than a hundred people associated with the Gülen movement in countries around the world. In these operations, individuals were abducted in public, from workplaces, or from their homes by unidentified local officials apparently recruited by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The abductees were disappeared and held incommunicado, sometimes for weeks, before being transferred without any due process into Turkish custody and spirited out of the host state on private planes hired by the MİT. The most recent mass kidnapping targeted suspected Gülenists in Nairobi, Kenya, in October 2024.10
Turkey’s rendition campaign explicitly referenced the U.S. precedent, with the progovernment English-language Daily Sabah reporting renditions under the section heading “War on Terror.”11 Individuals illegally disappeared and returned to Turkey are displayed in state media, often with visible signs of torture. Despite harsh criticism by UN bodies, these kidnappings have continued without pause and without consequence.12 In another sign of learning from war-on-terror methods, Turkey has increasingly adopted the extraterritorial use of drones and assassinations as core elements of its fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in northern Iraq and northern Syria, with both civilians and armed militants falling victim.13
India, too, has apparently learned from war-on-terror examples, and increasingly engages in extraterritorial operations with impunity. In seeking to curb what it considers terrorism in Pakistan and in Indian diasporas in the West, the Indian state has engaged organized-crime groups as proxies to conduct assassinations. The government’s support for these operations is well documented; rote denials of specifics are accompanied by bold statements of responsibility. After a detailed report in the Guardian on Indian assassinations in Pakistan last year — ten months after Indian agents murdered a Sikh separatist in Canada, causing a crisis in bilateral relations — Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a campaign speech, “Today, India no longer sends a dossier [to request extradition], it kills enemies inside their house.”14
The paradigmatic case of impunity for transnational repression is, of course, Saudi Arabia’s murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate in 2018. Turkey, as the host state, pressed top Saudi officials for accountability for the murder — in a continuation of the frozen conflict between Ankara and Riyadh over differences around the Arab Spring and the Syrian Revolution. But like other major powers unwilling to break relations with Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi’s killing — including the United States under Joe Biden, despite his 2020 campaign pledge to make Saudi Arabia “pay a price” for the deed — Turkey eventually reconciled with the Saudis and dropped the case for justice.
Global Surveillance and Digital Repression. The second major facilitator of transnational repression is technological change. The ICT revolution has made access to personal digital devices and the global internet nearly universal, empowering states to monitor and act transnationally at a scale, speed, and level of efficiency unthinkable a few decades ago and shrinking the traditional barriers to action created by time and space. As the cost of digital tools with a global reach has dropped, their availability and accessibility to any state has risen.
Not just states but also transnational activists have greater reach at lower cost than ever before due to the global, instantaneous nature of modern digital communications: Rather than arduously smuggling printed materials across closed borders, activists and opposition leaders post on social media and publish their own news online. Everyone can instantly issue samizdat (“self-published”) material; now the concept of tamizdat (“published over there”) has become almost quaint.
But with this potential influence also comes an enormous increase in risk. Because activists abroad can communicate quickly and easily with citizens back home, states perceive exiles and diasporas as dangerous and expend more effort to target them. Even more important, the tools that exiles and diasporas rely on to communicate are also vehicles for surveillance and intimidation. States use social-media posts to identify exiles’ locations and map their supporters; threaten them with streams of calls, messages, and violent images at all hours of the day; or hack into their devices to obtain their communications.
Women activists face an even greater burden, as states bury them in gendered attacks to undermine their credibility within the diaspora.15 Journalists abroad find it harder to cultivate sources as digital transnational repression erodes the trust reporters must build to obtain information.16 Even those who are not interested in dissent still communicate digitally every day to stay in touch with loved ones back home. The very ubiquity and indispensability of digital tools for exiles and diasporas also make them excellent vectors for digital transnational repression.
Commercial spyware — sophisticated tools sold to states for hacking personal devices — embodies the state-of-the-art in digital transnational repression. In September 2021, the Canadian forensic technology hub Citizen Lab analyzed a Saudi dissident’s phone. They identified an exploit they called FORCEDENTRY, which used Apple’s iMessage automated feature for playing GIFs (low-quality animated loops) to execute what Google’s Project Zero would later describe as “one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we’ve ever seen” — a previously unknown vulnerability that required no clicking to give the attacker access to the device.17 Citizen Lab and Google attributed the spyware to the NSO Group, a commercial enterprise founded by Israeli intelligence agents that sells powerful spyware-as-a-service to dozens of countries.
At its most powerful, spyware is capable of exploiting previously unidentified flaws in software to remotely extract a device’s contacts and messages, or to turn on its camera and microphone without the target knowing or clicking on anything (so-called “zero-click, zero-day”). On the technical side, these tools are marvels of software design and deployment, often taking advantage of the tiniest weaknesses in the targeted device to achieve extraordinary access-on-demand. Commercialization of this technology, discussed further below, has vastly increased the availability of these tools.
Digital transnational repression in turn supports all other forms of transnational repression. The ICT revolution has enabled much wider surveillance of far more people through social-media monitoring and hacking. But it has also enabled the much more efficient and effective processing of information gathered through these means and widened the circle of states that are able to engage in mass surveillance. Collecting information on dissidents abroad used to be labor-intensive, specialized work, with a hard ceiling on how many people could be monitored at a given time; today this is something that even low-capacity states, if they have access to basic data-scraping and analysis tools, can do at scale.
Finally, the ICT revolution has transformed interstate information-sharing processes. It is easy to forget how cumbersome cross-border information sharing and retention could be even a few decades ago. Digitization and electronic communication have made it possible for states to rapidly share information with one another, whether informally through bilateral channels or formally through regional mechanisms or Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization). Border crossings are also now digitized and involve biometric data in much of the world. A person on any formal notification list thus immediately triggers an alert when entering or exiting a country; many law-enforcement and migration agencies even within borders will check regional and international watchlists when they encounter a foreign national on another matter. As Edward Lemon has argued in these pages, the switch to a web-based system is likely a major reason the number of Interpol Red Notices (requests to locate and detain someone) has skyrocketed in the last twenty years — it has simply become much faster and easier to request, process, and disseminate notices.18 As the volume of notices and the breadth of their dissemination expand, so do opportunities for abuse or error. The recent UN Cybercrime Convention, with its broad definition of what constitutes “cybercrime,” will further expand the legal remit for interstate cooperation against dissidents around the world.
The Market for Authoritarian Services. These technological transformations have been facilitated by and have themselves facilitated concurrent changes in the global economy. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of socialism unleashed a massive wave of international investment and global integration. This opened up new opportunities for the sale of services of all kinds — including those that facilitate authoritarianism. In this regard, the golden age of transnational repression is a part of the emergence of a global market for “authoritarian services” that includes espionage, sabotage, hacking, degradation of information environments, money laundering, and physical attacks.19
Private individuals and networks, including organized-crime groups, are now more than ever carrying out state-backed espionage and have been behind some of the most notable transnational-repression operations of the last decade. India allegedly worked with organized-crime associates in its transnational-repression plots in Canada and the United States, and Iran appears to have used the Hells Angels and other organized-crime groups as proxies to carry out acts of transnational repression in the United States and Europe. In the United Kingdom, a group of Bulgarian nationals working for Russia was recently sentenced to prison for spying on Russian journalists and dissidents-in-exile who were possible targets for kidnapping or assassination. The Metropolitan Police remarked that this represented a new phenomenon of “outsourcing” espionage, presumably because the network’s remote Russian handlers had shifted the burden of espionage onto untrained recruits.20
This may tie into a broader shift, whereby intelligence services, notably Russia’s, are making use of technological and economic changes to contract out subversion — from painting graffiti and taking photographs to planting explosives or committing assault — on a freelance basis, sometimes to unwitting contractors. By paying in cryptocurrencies and communicating on end-to-end encrypted channels such as Telegram or Signal, the contracting party becomes harder to trace. The gains in scale, speed, price, deniability, and offloading of risk more than make up for the loss of professionalism that comes from not meeting with and training a recruited agent. China’s gig-contracting of influencers to spread false narratives in Taiwan around the 2024 election is another example of this “authoritarian innovation.”21
For commercial spyware such as FORCEDENTRY, marketization means that such ingenuity is no longer confined to a few nation-states with deep pockets or deep wells of software talent. The sale of spyware has increased the number of states that can access devices remotely, allowing even less economically developed states to conduct state-of-the-art hacking. The software of the most prominent commercial-spyware firm, NSO Group, has appeared in dozens of countries, and it is only one company among many.22 Moreover, a number of investigations have found intelligence agencies in democracies using spyware to surveil opposition groups or dissidents domestically — a reminder that authoritarian tools, once adopted, do not respect the boundaries between foreign and domestic.
Fleeing Authoritarianism. The final factor contributing to the golden age of transnational repression is the increasingly hostile approach to migration taken by many states, at a time when the absolute number (if not proportion) of international migrants in the world is at an all-time high.23 Many of those crossing borders are fleeing authoritarian regimes, whether because of direct persecution or the economic crises and armed conflicts those regimes have engendered. Additionally, unlike during the Cold War, authoritarian states now frequently both encourage and control migration — as a pressure valve to release domestic social pressures, a means of asserting influence abroad, and a source of revenue from remittances.24
Meanwhile the world’s wealthiest economies are on the wrong end of the demographic curve and need younger labor to support aging populations, creating a powerful economic pull for people seeking a better life. Consolidated democracies are more likely not only to be wealthy but also safer for exiled dissidents — another factor incentivizing people vulnerable to transnational repression to try and reach those countries. Yet policymakers around the world have, by and large, failed to design policies that normalize and regularize migration. The result has not been lower levels of migration but rather large-scale irregular migration, which in turn has fueled surging xenophobia. Acting on that xenophobia, political leaders have hardened borders and made migration systems less responsive — by accepting fewer refugees despite their growing numbers, to name just one example — and more suspicious of migrants, further undermining regularization and spinning the flywheel for ever-harsher responses.25
This dynamic — rising numbers of people fleeing authoritarian states and increasingly hostile migration policies — has direct implications for transnational repression. States seeking to target exiles and diasporas often do so through migration regimes, whether border crossings, asylum processes, or deportation systems; the targets of transnational repression are unlikely to be citizens of the country where they reside. Cooperation is a key and underappreciated dynamic behind most transnational repression. Of the 1,219 incidents in Freedom House’s dataset, 780 (64 percent) involve host-state cooperation. Such cooperation comes most often in the form of detentions, where host-state authorities act on an abusive, fraudulent, or spurious request by the origin state to detain someone. Also common are unlawful deportations, where the host state accepts information provided by the origin state without adequate vetting and deports someone without sufficient due-process protections for their rights. This occurs regularly, even in established democracies, although cooperation between democracies and autocracies happens less than between authoritarian states.26
Take the case of Leopold Munyakazi, a Rwandan linguist and trade-union leader who had sought asylum in the United States after learning he had been placed on a list of opponents of the Kagame regime. In 2006, Munyakazi gave a speech at the University of Delaware in which he claimed the Rwandan genocide was better understood as a civil war. Afterward, the Rwandan government accused him of participating in the genocide. This formed the basis of two Interpol notices against him, which eventually led to his asylum claim being denied. In 2016, Munyakazi was deported to Rwanda and eventually put on trial and convicted of genocide denial — not acts of genocide. A classified FBI report from 2015, however, had found that his asylum process had been manipulated and deportation engineered by a Rwandan intelligence agent.27
Mechanisms such as asylum processing become ripe for origin-state exploitation when migration systems are underresourced and hostile to migrants’ rights. Additionally, the targets of transnational repression, if they lack legal status and fear deportation, are less likely to turn to law enforcement or other authorities who could help to protect them — a dynamic we at Freedom House heard from affected diaspora communities for years. This fear encourages people without citizenship to stay silent and withdraw from democratic participation, alienating them from civic life and creating more room for hostile states to interfere in democratic processes.
The Bigger Picture
Transnational repression is certain to become more relevant and commonplace for several reasons. First, migration policies are growing harsher and more punitive in major host states. While the United States under Joe Biden (2021–25) worked on countering transnational repression through law-enforcement actions and outreach to vulnerable diasporas, it did not focus on better protecting migrants’ rights. Other major democracies have likewise been taking positive steps to counter transnational repression in terms of security and foreign policy, only to undermine those very efforts with “hostile environment” migration policies — that is, policies explicitly intended to make life difficult for undocumented migrants.
The second Trump administration has gone much further. It has embarked on a full-throated mass-deportation effort that includes revoking temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants; detaining and deporting people to El Salvador and other third countries without due process; revoking student visas en masse; detaining Green Card holders (those with permanent-resident status) and other foreign travelers at the border; and targeting noncitizens for deportation on the basis of their speech, assembly, or association. The administration’s translation of war-on-terror policies into migration policies creates novel legal vulnerabilities for noncitizens and encourages similar actions around the world.28 These policies also open the door to cooperation with authoritarian states seeking to repress dissidents on U.S. territory.
The United States is the worst case right now among democracies, but it is not the only one. In the United Kingdom and Europe as well, many politicians have embraced the rhetoric of societies under siege by uncontrolled migration, and adopted policies and rhetoric to discourage people from coming and encourage them to leave. These hostile-environment policies instill fear in communities that are vulnerable to transnational repression, make them less likely to report transnational repression or raise concerns about it with authorities, and create opportunities for origin states to manipulate migration systems and coerce diasporas and exiles.
Second, the technological balance of power is shifting from individuals to states, whose control over chokepoints in the global economy and information infrastructure provides opportunity for transnational action. While the largest advantages of “weaponized interdependence,” as Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman have called it, have accrued to the United States and to a lesser extent China, small states have also found means to exploit network effects at a global scale, as Tajikistan does at Interpol. In a big enough web, even a small spider can hunt successfully.29
Additionally, the trend toward oligarchic alignment among individual tech-company owners and authoritarian governments may ease the way for those governments to exploit the small number of platforms that dominate global communications. Whereas Saudi Arabia previously had to infiltrate publicly traded Twitter with a state agent to obtain exiled dissidents’ communications,30 platforms whose owners are lobbying states for billions of dollars in investments, protection from onerous regulations, or both might readily hand over such information.
Behind these risks is the inherent disadvantage of civil society struggling against state actors in a digitized environment. As political scientist Thomas Hegghammer has written, “The reason information technology empowers the state over time is that rebellion is a battle for information, and states can exploit new technology on a scale that small groups cannot.”31 The same logic applies to nonviolent civil society mobilization, where informal, dispersed groups of dissidents with limited funding are locked in a daily battle against professionalized state agents whose work is government subsidized. Artificial intelligence promises to act as another ratchet, as states will be able to deploy resources to exploit its information-processing capacities faster and at greater scale than civil society actors can.
Nearly 35 years after the end of the Cold War, global, modern authoritarianism is here to stay. A bedrock set of states, led by China and Russia, have consolidated an avowedly authoritarian model that is technologically sophisticated and fully integrated into global capitalism. Unlike the socialist modes of the Soviet Union and China before its reforms, these features make modern authoritarianism flexible and sustainable. The model privileges the state, and the narrow elite that runs it, against all other interests, is hostile to the idea of individual dignity for all, and seeks to secure the position of a permanent overclass that cannot be removed. Authoritarianism may not be able to outcompete liberal democracy, but it is competitive. Unlike the immediate post–Cold War period, today other states see authoritarian governance as a plausible alternative.
Until recently, the bipartisan policy of the United States had been to contest this authoritarian consolidation, as both a matter of commitment to liberal democracy and a strategic imperative, recognizing that American strength lay in its powerful role within a network of liberal international institutions, democratic alliances, and its capacity for innovation powered by a free society. The second Trump administration has discarded this consensus and embraced an illiberal set of policies and has hewed toward a transactional, spheres-of-interest approach abroad. This is sure to have a host of indirect and direct effects that will affect transnational repression: reducing the role of the United States as a safe haven for dissent and dissidents; emboldening authoritarian actors to seek cooperation with the United States against dissidents; weakening multilateral efforts to build new norms against transnational repression within the UN and in other forums; and encouraging new illiberal norms intended to dissuade speech, especially by noncitizens. Meanwhile, stripping the funding of almost all democracy and governance programs has undercut activists around the world, including exiled and diaspora groups that face transnational repression and have been working to counter it.
This pessimistic description of trends should not dissuade states from acting to counter transnational repression, which will continue to plague host states around the world because it is rooted in a very modern dilemma: How can people from many different countries form one polity, at a time when authoritarian governments have more capacity and are more willing to exert control over their nationals beyond their borders? The demand for rights arises from people’s inherent urge to be free — and for those who have emigrated, to free their compatriots who are still at home. The problem will not abate. Ignoring or facilitating transnational repression increases the risk of creating classes of people who are alienated from their civic communities, with compounding damage to civic life and democratic participation. Host states therefore have an obligation, and an opportunity, to address the problem across the full spectrum where it occurs and to protect the rights of everyone in society. 
NOTES
1. Grady Vaughan, Yana Gorokhavskaia, and Nate Schenkkan, “Ten Findings from Ten Years of Data on Transnational Repression,” Freedom House, 6 February 2025. Following Freedom House’s approach, I do not in this essay claim that “transnational repression has increased.” Though there have been year-on-year increases in incidents recorded in the organization’s dataset, because it relies on public sources, the increase could be because the amount of governmental, civil society, and journalistic attention to the topic has grown dramatically, in no small part because of Freedom House’s work.
2. Ruth Comerford and Chris Bell, “Six Bulgarians Jailed for Spying for Russia,” BBC, 12 May 2025.
3. Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis, Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025).
4. I use here Marlies Glasius’s concept of “authoritarian practices” rather than the regime-type classification “authoritarianism” because some of the most prominent practitioners of these extraterritorial measures are democracies or partial democracies. Marlies Glasius, Authoritarian Practices in a Global Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
5. These operations are not coded by Freedom House as transnational repression because they do not target people with a national connection to the origin state, but are commonly cited by states that do practice transnational repression as inspiration and justification.
6. Hong Kong Democracy Council and Students for a Free Tibet, “Exporting Repression: Attacks on Protesters During Xi Jinping’s Visit to San Francisco in November 2023,” July 2024, https://ccpexportingrepression.com/.
7. Human Rights Watch, “Rwanda’s Repression Across Borders: Questions and Answers,” 10 October 2023.
8. Human Rights Watch, “Thailand: ‘Swap Mart’ Targets Foreign Dissidents, Refugees,” 15 May 2024.
9. Kim Lane Scheppele, “Law in a Time of Emergency: States of Exception and the Temptations of 9/11,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law6 (May 2004): 1001–83.
10. Wycliffe Muia, “‘We Live in Fear’ — Forced Expulsions Taint Kenya’s Safe Haven Image,” BBC, 6 November 2024; Irungu Houghton, “Statement on the Abduction and Disappearance of Seven Turkish Asylum Seekers for Immediate Release,” Amnesty International, 19 October 2024.
11. Dilara Aslan, “PKK Disarmament Turning Point for Kurdish Politics in Türkiye,” Daily Sabah, 15 May 2025.
12. UN Human Rights Council, “Follow-up to the Recommendations Made by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances in Its Report on Its Visit to Turkey from 14 to 18 March 2016 (A/HRC/33/51/Add.1),” 28 August 2020, A/HRC/45/13/Add.4, https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/45/13/Add.4.
13. See International Crisis Group, “Türkiye’s PKK Conflict: A Visual Explainer,” https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/turkiyes-pkk-conflict-visual-explainer; Wladimir van Wilgenburg, “Kurdish Female Activist from Konya Assassinated in Sulaimani,” Kurdistan 24, 4 October 2022.
14. Hanna Ellis-Petersen, “India Appears to Confirm Extrajudicial Killings in Pakistan,” Guardian, 5 April 2024; “‘When God Made Me . . . ’: PM Modi on Why He Can’t Think ‘Small,’” NDTV, 30 April 2024.
15. Noura Aljizawi et al., “No Escape: The Weaponization of Gender for the Purposes of Digital Transnational Repression,”Research Report No. 180, Citizen Lab, 2 December 2024, https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Report180-noescape112924.pdf.
16. Jessica White, Grady Vaughan, and Yana Gorokhovskaia, “A Light That Cannot Be Extinguished: Exiled Journalism and Transnational Repression,” Freedom House, December 2023, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2023-12/TNR_Journalism_Report_12.2023_Digital.pdf.
17. Ian Beer and Samuel Groß, “A Deep Dive into an NSO Zero-Click iMessage Exploit: Remote Code Execution,” Google Project Zero, https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero-click.html.
18. Edward Lemon, “Weaponizing Interpol,” Journal of Democracy30 (April 2019): 15–29.
19. Ron Deibert calls this “the age of private espionage,” but I believe the scope of the change should be understood as a much broader epochal shift, because what is for sale goes far beyond espionage, or transnational repression for that matter. See Ronald J. Deibert, “Subversion Inc: The Age of Private Espionage,”Journal of Democracy33 (April 2022): 28–44, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/subversion-inc-the-age-of-private-espionage/.
20. U.S. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Announces Charges in Connection with Foiled Plot to Assassinate U.S. Citizen in New York City,” press release, 29 November 2023; Greg Miller, Souad Mekhennet, and Cate Brown, “Iran Turns to Hells Angels and Other Criminal Gangs to Target Critics,” Washington Post,12 September 2024.
21. Daniela Richterova et al., “Russian Sabotage in the Gig-Economy Era,” RUSI Journal 169, no. 5 (2024): 10–21; “China’s United Front Exposed: Officials’ Leaked Calls and Tactics to Buy Off Taiwanese Influencers,” 6 December 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXndeTRH8tU.
22. Bill Marczak et al., “Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries,” Research Report no. 113, Citizen Lab, 18 September 2018.
23. See https://www.migrationdataportal.org/sites/g/files/tmzbdl251/files/2024-12/EN-17-Dec-Key-Figures-update%20%281%29.pdf.
24. Gerasimos Tsourapas, “The Peculiar Practices of ‘Authoritarian Emigration States,’” British Academy Review32 (Spring 2018): 22–24, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/review/32/peculiar-practices-authoritarian-emigration-states/.
25. Amy Pope, “Migration Can Work for All: A Plan for Replacing a Broken Global System,” Foreign Affairs 104(January–February 2025).
26. Marcus Michaelsen and Kris Ruijgrok, “Autocracy’s Long Reach: Explaining Host Country Influences on Transnational Repression,” Democratization 31 (March 2024): 290–314.
27. Tim Prudente, “Cleared of Murders, Convicted of Speech: Bittersweet End to Case of Accused Goucher Professor,” Washington Post, 6 September 2018; Carlos Mureithi and Kira Zalan, “Rwanda Fed False Intelligence to U.S. and Interpol as It Pursued Political Dissidents Abroad,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, 4 November 2022.
28. Bill Frelick, “Ten Harmful Trump Administration Immigration and Refugee Policies,” Human Rights Watch, 20 February 2025; Brian Finucane, “The Trump Administration’s ‘Wars on Terror’ — Old and New,” International Crisis Group, 15 April 2025, https://www.crisisgroup.org/united-states/united-states/trump-administrations-wars-terror-old-and-new.
29. Thomas Hegghammer, “Resistance Is Futile: The War on Terror Supercharged State Power,” Foreign Affairs 100 (September–October 2021): 44–53; Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2023); Lemon, “Weaponizing Interpol.”
30. U.S. Department of Justice, “Former Twitter Employee Sentenced to 42 Months in Federal Prison for Acting as a Foreign Agent,” press release, 15 December 2022, https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-twitter-employee-sentenced-42-months-federal-prison-acting-foreign-agent.
31. Thomas Hegghammer, “Resistance Is Futile.”
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