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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the People Power Politics podcast, brought to you by cedar, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the People Power Politics podcast. I'm particularly delighted today to be joined by Ned Schenken, an independent human rights researcher who was formerly senior Director of Research at Freedom House. He has written a particularly interesting, and I think some of you will find shocking article called the Golden Age of Transnational Repression. Nate, thanks so much for joining us on the show. Why were you so motivated to write this particular piece at this particular time?
- [00:48]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me. And thanks for asking. Transnational repression is something I have been working on extensively since about 2017, 2018. And there's been during that time, on the one hand, just some enormously important events that have taken place in this space that, you know, we now call transnational repression. So the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the kidnapping of Paul Ruses, of Gina, the threats against Masiyal Nejad, an Iranian journalist in Brooklyn, a whole slew of different events that have taken place that we now kind of fold under this area. And so, on the one hand, it's just stuff that's been pressing on our community of people working in human rights, in democracy. And I think that's the urgency is there. I think the other part of it is that for a long time, I've wanted to write something for Journal of Democracy or somewhere about kind of the bigger framework within which this is happening, because it really has become something that happens every day all around us. And I think that we need to fit it into this larger picture that we are all developing kind of as a community of experts, researchers, activists, around the way that authoritarianism is now integrated into a global order. I'm old enough that I still think in terms of blocks a bit by default, kind of one side, this side, that side. And I think clearly what we've seen and what we're seeing is that those block orders that we keep in our mind, these frameworks, they break down, you know, they're more permeable. Things cross back and forth between them, especially authoritarian practices in this case. And so that's what's really interesting to write about, to try to figure through, is where does transnational repression fit within this bigger framework around contemporary authoritarianism in particular, kind of the global elements of authoritarianism.
- [02:24]
A
Yeah, I think that's a great question. Just before we get there now, we started talking. It strikes me that, you know, quite a lot of people listening might not have a clear understanding of exactly what we mean when we say transnational repression. You just referenced a few issues and points and developments that people might be more familiar with. But maybe we should actually just start by kind of fleshing this out. So what are we talking, what are we ranging from. I mean, you were talking there about, in some cases, murder. So we're talking, I guess about one state killing one of its citizens or a critic of it in another state. But what is the sort of full spectrum here? When. When does it kind of begin and end for you? What. What is included under this heading?
- [03:01]
B
So this is a debate that's taking place as well within the community of people working on the topic. But in general, there's a big agreement on 80 to 90% of it. This is when states reach across borders to try to silence people. That's really the very basic. Everyone agrees on that. You can find publications now by the UN about it. You see UN special rapporteurs talking about it. You see a G7 statement this summer where they talk about it this way. There's a discussion, and I'm on one side of this discussion, so let me flesh it out. There's a discussion about whether this includes people who don't have what we call a national connection back to the origin states. And does it include people like me I have no national connection to, like Turkey? So if Turkey were to threaten me from Turkey, would that be transnational repression? I'd say no, because I don't. I'm not a diaspora or exile. I think that it's important that when we talk about transnational repression, we're talking about states going after these diasporas or exiles that we kind of need to constrain the subjects of it in order to identify the parts of it that are unique, that are not the same as other kinds of foreign interference that we're all talking about all time now. Within that. Yeah, the scope of tactics is very broad. The scope goes all the way from these very physical, direct attacks, so things like assassinations and assaults, even kidnappings, all the way over to things like digital threats, threats against people's families who remain back in the origin country and are threatened in order to silence people. It's a very well identified tactic. Mobility controls, controlling people's access to their documents, passports and these kinds of things when they're outside the country, or even financial transnational repression, manipulating their ability to access bank accounts, systems. And then a lot of stuff that takes place, which I hope we'll talk about later. Within migration systems. So manipulating host state migration systems in order to have people detained or deported. So it's a very broad spectrum. I think that it's pretty well articulated though, at this point among the people working on it full time or whatever. Seriously. And with policymakers, I think we're reaching a point where there's a pretty good conceptual understanding of the broad range.
- [04:59]
A
Thanks, Jan. I think that connection and migration policy is going to fascinate people. So we're going to get there fairly soon. But before we get there, I think it's worth focusing in for a minute on this phrase that you use, which I think is going to be, you know, influential and strike people, which is the golden age of transnational repression. And of course, if you say it's the golden age, you're suggesting to us that it's more, you know, it's more of a problem now than it was maybe 10, 15 years ago. So can you walk us through a little bit exactly what you think has changed to make this possible? Is it that states now have more capacity, you know, resources, intelligence to act abroad? Is it that we have new technologies that make it possible? Is it that the international norms that maybe once constrained this kind of behavior have weakened? Which of these things would you see as kind of a real driver and which of them might be more the kind of enabling factors?
- [05:48]
B
I think that the biggest factors, and these are the ones where I think we start in the essay and start in the discussion, are the structural factors. So there have been these enormous structural shifts at the global level we have after the Cold War. Use that as a marker though. I think it probably started before that. But we have this transformation in global balance of power, the redistribution of economic development, or the shifting patterns of economic development that have led to. Obviously China is kind of emblematic of it all, but it's happened more broadly. There just is a broader distribution of wealth and a broader distribution of power at the global level. I know there's a deeper argument here about inequality, like how it's distributed within that. But regardless, at the level of states you see, it is. It has really shifted quite a lot. There's a kind of convergence taking place among incomes and among in the development trajectories over time. And with that you have states feeling more empowered to act. They feel less intimidated, particularly after initial response following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. You have states feeling more empowered, more emboldened, less fearful of punishment or exclusion by the Western dominated liberal international order. So that's One. The other one is the technological shift, which is a. I would say it's just a structural shift in this massive transformation globally, where we've gone through a revolution in how information is stored, transmitted, used. And obviously, we're all familiar with what that means. We all have phones, and we all use them all the time. They're always in our pockets. And that has enormous implications for transnational repression because of the ability to communicate, of course, which works both ways. It works for the diasporas or people who are abroad and their ability to influence events or to communicate about events back in their origin country. So it gives them kind of the opportunity to influence whether they do or don't states perceive that, origin states perceive that, and as. In result, they see them as more of a threat. At the same time, those states also gain, through those devices a lot of opportunities for surveillance, for intimidation, for threats. So there is a lessening of the resources required at the same time to engage in these activities. So really, the resource question, I think, goes both ways, Right? Like you have states that, at a basic level, are less poor than they used to be, more states are less poor than they used to be, and the tools that they need to do this have become much cheaper and more available. Then there's a couple of other factors I do talk about in the essay around norm erosion, around the market for authoritarian services. I believe those are kind of downstream of those first two.
- [08:23]
A
Thanks. Yeah. And I think one thing that people don't always think about is the global shift in power. Right. So if you look at VDEM and other reports, we can see that the number of countries in the world are authoritarian has obviously increased. The proportion of the world living under authoritarian states has increased, but also their economic power. So if we go back to the early 1990s, authoritarian states made up roughly a quarter of global GDP. So today they make up a majority. So it just really underpins your point that, of course, if you're moving to a world in which authoritarian states are now worth a half of global GDP rather than a quarter, their power, their capacity, but also, I think, to some extent, their safety in numbers, their ability to coordinate within international arenas, all of that is much greater now than it used to be.
- [09:10]
B
And their ability to court other patrons, I would add, or to be less afraid of punishment if they. If they run afoul.
- [09:16]
A
Right, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So in terms of giving our listeners, you know, a sense of the scale here, I mean, you talk, I think, in the piece about something like 1,200 incidents, these are more direct incidents across something like 103 countries, perpetrated by kind of 48 states between 2014, 2024. So that's a decade. I guess an important question is those numbers are pretty striking already, but do you think that's the tip of the iceberg in that quite a lot of stuff might not be reported to us, or do you think that's basically a good representation of where we are in terms of how much this is happening today?
- [09:54]
B
Definitely tip of the iceberg, to answer the question directly. And when we built this data set and this data project at Freedom House, we had to make a lot of choices around how to do this in ways that we thought were ethical and safe and also replicable and sustainable. That purposefully limited the data set. So like you said, it's limited to physical incidents is one limitation. Another limitation is ones we could confirm through open sources that we would feel comfortable sharing with others. So there's a lot of incidents, even when I was at Freedom House, that would come to us that we simply didn't put in a data set because we didn't have a news article or a human rights report or a UN report on them. And so we didn't think it was appropriate because we knew we'd be sharing this data set with other people. And you could wind up identifying somebody who hadn't already been identified and certainly hadn't chosen to be identified. So, yeah, tip of the iceberg, especially around, I would say, just flag for people, this physical idea. So I mentioned some of the tactics before. I talked about digital threats. I talked about family intimidation, sometimes called coercion by proxy. Those tactics, especially, are just so ubiquitous in this discussion. So anytime, if one winds up doing research or talking with activists, exiles around this stuff, you'll find that those elements are going on all the time. They're just going on every day for people who are targeted. And that's one reason why we excluded them at Freedom House from the data set, is there was just no way to really count them that would make sense. Right, because you could just keep counting forever and still not know if that was close to actually the number. But it does mean that the data set only represents one small slice, I would say, of what's going on in transnational repression. And these other tactics, which definitely are a part of transnational repression, they're just happening all the time, and they're happening in ways that are very difficult to observe.
- [11:43]
A
Thanks. Yeah, maybe let's talk a little bit more about, you know, some of the countries that are actually doing this before we then talk about some of the things that are facilitating it. A number of countries are listed in the paper. China, India, Rwanda, Tajikistan and many others. But they appear for very different reasons. Some here at Great Power Reach, some are there for sort of middle power emulation, some are there for regional leverage, some are there because of the willingness to operate with impunity. Is there a kind of common pattern that you see across these countries? Is it actually that each one is operating in a very different sort of set of strategies? You mentioned there one factor that was perhaps common across all these cases, which is that kind of low level intimidation that everybody is getting in the family connections and so on. But I wonder whether there's anything else that's there that's fairly common, other fairly common patterns and combinations of strategy. And particularly, you know, for people who are in the democracy space, working in civil society, what should they be looking out for? If they're in a country that maybe hasn't done this so much in the past, but they're worried about it moving in its direction, Are there any red flags?
- [12:44]
B
Let me start with that question because I think it helps elucidate first the part that can be quite different. And this is one of the things that was very interesting in this research over the years that I did it and have done it. Perpetrator states, origin states do in fact have quite different ways of approaching transnational repression in terms of how they define who they're going after. So you'll see quite a lot of variation even between say Russia and Iran and China in terms of who they define as the target set. And we believe, I say we. You know, my colleagues at Freedom House, other people I work with, I think most people would agree that this really comes down to how that state perceives the threat to itself and how it defines that threat ideologically and practically speaking. So as an example, Russia pre2022, so before the full scale invasion of Ukraine was really interesting in that they really targeted a quite narrow set of people, but very violently. Famously the poisonings in the uk, some armed assassinations in Europe, you know, very high level of violence, but a very small set of people. And the broader Russian diaspora was really ignored. Very different from say a Rwanda or a China in that way. Post 2022 it changes. You know, you have this huge flight of Russians out of the country following Ukraine, and then the partial mobilization when people became afraid they'd all be conscripted. And Russia starts thinking about this diaspora as very necessary to control in A more active way. So that's the big. Just to give a kind of example, then you see Russia taking up these other tactics, like coercion by proxy, which they really seldom did with the broader diaspora. So that's the sort of. I think one of the big differences and things to look for is, you know, how's this regime divining the threat? How do they see the diaspora? Do they see the diaspora as something that needs to be actively controlled as a class? Do they see certain groups as needing to be controlled? The second part of the question about, you know, how the states choose their tactics or how they establish their patterns, really, I think that this mostly comes down to states are trying to solve a problem, the origin states. They see a problem, and they engage with that problem through the framework and the structure that is available for solving it. So if they have the resources to go after people unilaterally, to go after people without any host state cooperation, they may do that. If they think that they can get away with it or if they think they don't care about the consequences. If they want to go after those people and they can get host state cooperation, they often will. It's cheaper, it's easier, it's less likely to create a diplomatic incident as well, if they have the leverage, right, to do it, to coerce that host state cooperation. And so a lot of it is about looking at and understanding the ways in which these systems can be manipulated or the states can interact with those systems. And that's kind of what brings together, say, a Tajikistan and a China, which I think I kind of contrast within the essay, because that they're at such poles in terms of geopolitical leverage and kind of their purpose. But Tajikistan is extremely active in this space, despite being a very poor country with, I would say, most would agree, a very low level of state capacity in terms of international comparisons. But they figured out ways within the international system that they can basically accomplish the same ends. And I think a lot of that in their case, comes down to there's a lot of host states that aren't particularly interested in Tajik migrants, Tajikistani migrants. They don't really care about these people, about Tajikistani diasporas. It's very, very low down the list for everyone. And so part of what Tajikistan is able to get away with is people just aren't that interested. They're far more. Tajikistan is far more interested in those people than the host states are. There's not really a constituency for protecting them. And it doesn't help, of course, that Tajikistan is a Muslim, 99% Muslim country, that there have been terrorist incidents associated with Tajikistanis abroad a number of times in the last years. And so it's very easy to label the Tajikistani opposition and diaspora abroad as extremists, as violent extremists. And that leads a lot of the time to deportations and facilitation of other tactics against the Idaho state.
- [16:53]
A
That sort of chimes with me with some of the other points you make that maybe we want to get onto now, in terms of a big part of your argument, as you foregrounded a little bit earlier, is that hostile migration policies can also play into this. Right. And we're talking here about hostile migration policies in democracies themselves because they actually enable transnational repression, because origin states can weaponize issues such as asylum, deportation, and watch lists, which is something where allegations of criminality or allegations of terrorist activity and so on can play such an important role. So maybe tell us a little bit about, you know, how the argument is built in the paper around hostile migration policies, what role you see them playing, and then, you know, what would a kind of better, more responsible migration policy with regards to transnational repression actually look like?
- [17:41]
B
So at its core, I mean, when we talk about a hostile migration policy, which I think it's important for listeners, these are words that are sometimes now used by politicians advocating for these policies. Right. You talk about creating a hostile environment. Hostile environment policies. If I were to kind of sum them up, I hope without being prejudicial, you know, basically prejudicial against them, although clearly one can tell I'm opposed to them. They they take as a presumption that people have come irregularly and they have come with ill intention, and that the goal of the policies should be to make it hostile, to make this environment unwelcoming, and so they should leave. That entails treating these people with suspicion, making the process by which their claim, whether it's an asylum claim, any other kind of claim, it doesn't necessarily have to be asylum by the mechanisms by which it's adjudicated, far less likely to result in a positive outcome for them in terms of them being able to stay in a regularized fashion. So when you do that, you create a system that's kind of tilted toward that negative outcome. Part of what you do as well is you admit into it more factors that allow an outside state to influence that adjudication. And a lot of that can involve information sharing. It can involve getting knowledge from the origin state. So to take some of These examples, say around Tajikistan or around Russia in Europe, that are well documented, what you have is you have people who've come, they've entered the euro irregularly, perhaps, perhaps not, but they're seeking asylum or they're seeking some other kind of status. And when their identity is checked or when their information is checked, it's checked back with the origin state, and the information that is shared is prejudicial against them. So in Tajikistan's case, they criminalized and labeled as extremist the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, IRPT. In 2015, this was the main opposition party in the country. It had the second largest number of seats in parliament up to that point, and then it was banned. And so what you'll get back from Tajikistan in that context is you'll get information that says this person's associated with a violent extremist party and this person therefore is an extremist. And what we see repeatedly is that host states are not, especially when they've adopted these hostile environment policies, host states are not particularly interested in scrutinizing that information. And so I do think some of that is simply that they're looking for reasons to deport people, or they're looking for reasons for the. For the process to have a negative outcome, and that gives them an excuse. I think the other part of the reason is, and this is sort of the more conceptual difficulty is that there's a lot of things that take place in the international sphere between states that are premised on good faith and are premised on the idea that states are interacting in regular rule of law ways. This is like a core assumption in legal systems when they interact with each other. And I've seen this in some specific cases, like in the US Legal system when they're interacting with claims coming from Russia. And, you know, you have a US Judge looking at something that took place in the Russian legal system, and they'll say, well, I take that at face value. And you say, but how, how can you possibly take that at face value? You know, like, what are the two things we know about the Russian judicial system? But it's a real problem. There's not good ways. These are not systems that are set up to pass judgment on. Did Tajikistan make the right decision by deciding that the IRPT is a. Is an extremist party? That's a decision I'm super comfortable making. You know, as someone who worked in Central Asia and knows a lot about this and has followed it for my career, but your normal asylum officer or immigration judge or whatever the nuances of that particular system is very uncomfortable, making that decision or even thinking critically about it. So in terms of, yeah, you asked about recommendations or ways to do it better. I mean, I do think that that's a big part of what we've been advocating for. And we have seen states start to think about this critically in the sense of creating information resources for the who are engaged in those interactions or engaged in those processes, whether again, it's an immigration judge or it's an asylum officer, or it's a law enforcement officers encountering people around. Look, transnational repression is a real thing. When you are encountering this person and you've picked them up maybe on an immigration violation or you've just had some law enforcement interaction with them and they say they're being targeted by the Tajik government or the Rwandan government, government or the Chinese government. This is, this is real. One, just on a basic level, it's real. They're not making, they may not be making it up. Number two, when you receive that information. In some cases we've seen states start to provide kind of counter resources, basically official resources like from the Canadian government or from the British government that would say this is what we know about Rwanda's practices of transnational repression. So that it's not, you're not asking me, Nate Jenkin, or you're not asking, you know, some outside civil society expert or something that Rwanda will say is biased. You're asking the UK government. And here's two pages about that. And that's been, I think, productive. I think that's good, that's kind of in the right direction. There's obviously still a long way to go. And certainly a big part of it is that we have to be very careful about when we set up these, if we set up these systems, that they are not just opening the door to be co opted and manipulated.
- [22:54]
A
And one thing I wanted to bring out for our listeners from my own experience, it's happened to some of my own friends and colleagues, is that this isn't just obviously something happening at the state level, it's also happening with international organizations. And here I'm thinking about the manipulation of Interpol and Red notices, for example, but also other forms that we have out there where states are basically targeting as criminals or people to be detained or people whose passports should be held, basically critics, right. Opponents, people who fled the country and so on. And so there's a risk here also that other parts of the international system that were set up for very good reasons and do A very good job can also be hijacked because as you say, if you take at face value what an authoritarian government says, that this person is a criminal, this person must be stopped and detained, then you're also playing into some of these strategies across national repression. Do you think that that sort of process going on at this multilateral institutional level is as significant as problematic? What we're seeing at the state level, have you seen a significant increase in that as well as the increase in the state to state repression processes over the last 10 years?
- [24:01]
B
Interpol is a very specific example where it's very difficult to say from a data perspective because they don't provide the data. So Interpol, there's been a huge amount of campaigning around Interpol for, I would say, the last 15 years, some of it with success in terms of policy changes. But it's hard to say if it's been successful in terms of changing the outcomes because again, so Interpol doesn't make available the data about the number of alerts that are notices that are withdrawn for violating the constitution of Interpol and which states are submitting them. What we do know about Interpol is that one, there are still incidents that happen where it's abused. I mean, just clear abuse. There's been several in the last few years that are just clearly meet the definition of Interpol abuse. And that's despite these new measures that have been put in place to improve vetting. Two is that we know that even in the vetting process. So basically what they've set up is an initial vetting process for submission of notices, and then they have a post facto one. Basically when there's a complaint or when there's been a request. What we know is in that post facto 1, 50% of the ones that are being reviewed are getting overturned, which is a pretty bad number from a vetting perspective. Means that half of the ones that get called up are still getting thrown out. Pretty shocking. It's pretty bad. And that data is very. I recommend a very good site called Red Notice Monitor that's. And specialized Interpol lawyers have recently set up. It's really a great resource for this kind of stuff. Interpol is one for sure. I think that it is. I think it is getting, I guess I don't want to say worse, but it's gotten more. It's gotten easier to access. Ed Lemon has a very good piece in Journal of Democracy as well about this, actually, from, I want to say, four or five years ago, it's got some of the same factors. So you have states, one, realizing that Interpol is available to their use, two, the processes at Interpol for requesting notices digitized. So this is like sort of always a fun fact is that they, if you think about what it was like 30, 40 years ago to submit a notice request at Interpol, I mean, you can imagine if you're old enough, this was a pretty manual process involving paper, involving faxes, involving like a lot of manual processing. And now it's relatively digitized. Just like everything is right. Like, of course it's digitized. It would be absurd if it wasn't. But with digitization, it also becomes much easier to submit the requests. And so states are submitting more notices, which increases the compliance challenge for Interpol to do the vetting without an increase in the budget. It is certainly something that's happening at all across multilateral levels. We see it a lot at the regional level now as well. And something I would highlight is that we see a lot of regional cooperation taking place between states, sometimes on a, you know, so many lateral people would say, right, or. And sometimes that's informal, sometimes it's formalized. So one that came up more recently in the last few years was something called the Arab Interior Ministers Council, which was facilitating some very overt cases of transnational repression within the Middle east, where you had the interior ministers of certain Arab states sharing information among each other. But we see that happen as well within Southeast Asia. We see it happen in Central Asia within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's definitely that kind of regional collaboration and creation of basically regional no go zones for activists is a real concern.
- [27:29]
A
Now, one of the things I like about the paper, in some ways I like the most about the paper which you've already kind of hinted at through the critique of migration policy, is that some of the countries you're actually quite tough on are themselves democracies. You argue that the US And Israeli uses of extraterritorial tactics have eroded the norm against this behavior. And you set out how some of the behavior of, of Western democratic states. All these countries, I guess we would have thought about as being solidly democratic states, maybe less so today, have actually given cover to countries like India, Rwanda and so on. Could you unpack that a little bit for us? I mean, is this just about evidence of hypocrisy of Western states facilitating this process? Is there something else going on? Of course, we also see a lot of worry about transnational connections between aspects of the current US Administration and authoritarian governments around the world, which goes beyond, in some ways, kind of Just the norm issue, and also suggests funding connections. We saw, for example, people like Bolsonaro appealing to Trump to protect them against accusations of being involved in a coup plot in Brazil. So just wonder how far you would push your critique of established democracies in this regard.
- [28:45]
B
Yeah, so let me start at the beginning, and I would say the primary effect there of the war on terror and as well, Israeli extraterritorial actions is the norm erosion, in my opinion. It is the way in which it demonstrated to a lot of these countries in very high profile ways that you can do these things and still remain kind of a leading or a, in Israel's case, kind of a protected force within international relations, that really, that there were not substantial consequences, at least if you were on the quote, unquote, right side, that people would. Would let you get away with it. So there was very overt norm erosion. I mean, to. To take one example that I always bring up, when Turkey started engaging in very active transnational repression after the 2016 coup attempt, they started this wave of abductions, renditions, literally very similar to war on terror renditions that the US did, except at a larger scale. Hundreds of people. When Turkey started doing that, there's a paper called Sabah which has an English language edition. People can go look it up if they feel like it. Sabah. This was daily Sabah, the English language. They put a section of the paper called the War on Terror. And the War on Terror would feature photos of people they just kidnapped in front of Turkish flags and stuff like this. And it would say, you know, the National Intelligence Organization conducted a successful operation in Sudan to bring back a leading member of this network. I think in that sense, it was a very direct kind of look. This is what states do. I've heard that as well from many people I've talked to, I guess experts and others who I've talked to who work on these issues, who've said, yeah, people in these states, high level leaders in these states, especially intelligence agencies, they look at the US actions and they look at Mossad, the Israeli intelligence, and they say, we should be able to do that. This is what powerful states do. And you've heard some of that rhetoric as well from leaders. This is how Erdogan talks about it. Modi in India has talked about it quite overtly in this way that when a state arrives, when a state becomes reckoned with on the global scene, part of that status involves being able to enact its will over people that it considers under its control extraterritorially. For instance, when there was this assassination in Canada a couple of years ago in British Columbia of a sick, sick Canadian activist, the Indian government pretty explicitly, Modi himself pretty explicitly said, yeah, this is what we do. You know, we don't send dossiers. This was, was the quote, I believe, that he, he gave. We don't send dossiers anymore, meaning, like, we don't request extradition. We don't go through this long process. We go in their house and kill. Well, so I do think that it's just shattered the kind of idea that it's both shattered and then provided a model that they say, this is what we're going to do. I don't think in terms of the tactics they had to learn that much directly from the US Or Israel, because I think a lot of the tactics, like I said earlier, to me, the tactics emerge sort of naturally from structure. I think a lot of times the states are simply looking at the same problem set and the same constraints and saying, okay, this is how we solve that. So I'm sure there is collaboration in terms of certain kinds of sharing information among states that are allied or that have close intelligence relationships, like there always is. But I think for the most part, they just look at it and say, okay, how are we going to do this? In Turkey's case, they said, the Gulen Movement is an international network that we want to dismantle. How are we going to go about it? We've got the National Intelligence Organization, we've got our embassies, we've got close relationships with police and intelligence in these countries. This is how we're going to do it. I don't think they needed anyone to teach them them down. And you asked about the Trump administration. I know it's beating a lot, but let me touch on that. Since this JOD piece came out, the Journal of Democracy piece, I actually have written another piece for Foreign Policy just a couple of weeks ago about the Trump administration's actions within the US Particularly in this regard, because there's been a couple of really large deportations of Russians and Iranians in particular. These were the ones that were very notable and they're publicly confirmed. Nothing new to report there in which the US in my opinion, is simply cooperating in transnational repression. You have people who have fled these countries and are being pursued by the states they left behind. We know in at least one of the, in some of the Russian cases, people were, when they got to Russia, they were imprisoned immediately for opposition or anti war activism. This is, I think, something where the administration nominally and in terms of what they say officially, what I have heard from them officially is that fighting transnational repression remains a priority. But I think in terms of how they define it or how they think about it, I don't think that's the case. I think that in fact, when you put the priorities of the administration, line them up, obviously mass deportation is number one or number two, and they don't see a problem in cooperating with these states if it entails supporting the mass deportation goal. And that's hugely damaging. It's hugely damaging to the people involved. Of course, number one, it's usually damaging to the whole agenda. The US had been kind of a leader globally in trying to push a counter norm here to try to establish a counter norm against transnational repression. And a lot of that work is definitely being threatened by this.
- [33:58]
A
Great, thanks. So just to wrap up the question then, of course, is what can we do about this? It's a fairly tragic state of affairs. It seems to be getting worse rather than better. And if we assume that global authoritarianism will expand over the next few years and get more powerful, given some of the countries involved economically, then one of the questions is how do we push back? And in the paper, you know, you end on a sort of strong argument that host states have an obligation to protect everyone in their territory, not just their own citizens. But if you are advising the UK or Canada, United States, Germany, et cetera tomorrow, what would you advise them to do and what do you think that they can do that's politically celibate? Because of course we are in a particular moment when hostility towards migration, particularly within the European Union, is rising, where governments are increasingly being pushed back or challenged by anti migrant parties. And therefore a lot of the arguments you make are going to be particularly challenging to get taken up by governments who are afraid of being defeated by some of these forces. So what do you think is not only the way that we can put to them what they need to do to try and impact transnational oppression, but also the things they might be able to do that they could actually sell politically to their own domestic electorates?
- [35:19]
B
That's a good question. It's something I've been working on a lot for the last several years, continue to work on now, particularly outside the US at this point, given the situation. So number one, and I think this has been an area where I've been, I continue to be pleased by the responses from policymakers and the interest from policymakers. And number one is that, look, this is a threat to your ability to sustain an inclusive democracy. And acknowledging all of this hostility that is rising against migration and migrants, including among social democratic or center left parties. Even acknowledging that that remains a very resonant point, at least outside the US which is that we recognize that our democracies are multi ethnic. They involve a lot of different people from different places. And we need to figure out ways to sustain that democracy over time. They might not phrase it exactly that way, but that's really there. And I think people are interested in that and care about that. They recognize that they don't want people in these communities, these communities, meaning diaspora or exile communities, communities of people with a national connection outside of the country, to feel isolated and alienated. And part of what happens with transnational repression is exactly that, that it is only one factor within that. There's all the socioeconomic sort of elements, but one factor within it is people feeling like I'm being threatened, I'm being excluded, I can't participate in my local, in some cases very local democracy, because I'm afraid so working through that, I think has been very productive. We've seen states start to stand up specific policies around transnational repression. I would say it's largely within a sort of larger framework of countering foreign interference with transnational repression as one element of that, but one that requires dedicated policy resources and solutions because it is very specific and it's not, as I said earlier, it's not the same as some of these other foreign interference things like information manipulation. And so that involves setting up resource centers, the ability for people to communicate with people who know what this is, who know how to investigate it or know how to respond to it, and to support the people who are dealing with it. You know, all kinds of customized policies around it and training and direction for the actual authorities involved. And that continues. That I think is still going on. I think there's still a lot of interest.
- [37:39]
A
Thanks so much. I completely agree and I think it's really great that you've got some really practical suggestions there. Because sometimes when we worry people with some of these stories about what's happening, people can feel, you know, a kind of combination of fear and disempowerment. It's important to remind people that there are things that we can do. And of course, increasingly this is going to rely on individual citizens, civil society, et cetera. As for example, aid budgets fall, as democracy budgets fall, as funding for organizations like Freedom House and others fall. It's going to depend on a broader coalition that's perhaps going to be more diverse than it would have been in the past to raise these issues and bring them out. So it's particularly important I think at this moment to have have work like yours. And just to remind people this paper was the golden age of transnational oppression, available now from the Journal of Democracy website to guide them. So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for the paper and for the conversation today and we look forward to checking in with you. Maybe in a year or so's time we could have a follow up conversation to see how things are developing and also to start thinking about the ways in which transnational oppression and might be evolving. One of the things we didn't have time to talk about today was AI. But I know that one of the things you're particularly concerned about is also the way that AI might create further advantages for authoritarian states who want to undertake these kinds of activities.
- [39:03]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. I'd be loved to come back and discuss.
- [39:05]
A
Brilliant. Thanks so much.
- [39:07]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [39:09]
A
Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by cedar, the center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our center and the exciting work that we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter eadarbham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.
- [39:41]
B
Sam.