ABSTRACT
The rise of diasporic power across world politics constitutes a unique challenge for autocracies. As political activism becomes transnational, authoritarian countries develop novel ways of repressive action against their citizens beyond national borders. Aiming to tame empowered diasporic networks of political activity abroad, autocracies devise a range of strategies to control their citizens abroad – from African states’ sponsoring violence against exiled dissidents to Central Asian republics’ extraditions of political exiles, and from the adoption of spyware software to monitor digital activism across Latin America to enforced disappearances of East Asian émigrés. In this chapter, I argue that the rise of diaspora diplomacy has been accompanied by the emergence of a range of transnational authoritarian practices. Bringing work on the international politics of migration into conversation with the literature on authoritarianism, I provide illustrative examples drawn from a range of transnational repression in world politics.
