Why do some states assist other countries to reach across national borders and repress their diaspora, while others do not? Transnational repression involves host countries (including democracies) working closely with origin states (typically autocracies) to transfer their citizens living abroad into their custody and silence dissent. We expect international cooperation on transnational repression to rely on a host country’s domestic rule of law (opportunity to repress) and economic ties with the origin country (leverage to cooperate). To measure international cooperation on transnational repression, we present new data containing 608 direct physical cases of transnational repression from 2014 to 2020 involving 160 unique country dyads (79 host countries and 31 origin countries). We test our hypotheses using a dataset of 33,615 directed dyad-years that accounts for refugee flows between pairs of countries and find empirical support for our theoretical argument. Autocracies are better able to elicit cooperation on human rights violations from states that have shared economic interests and a weak rule of law. Our findings provide one of the first quantitative accounts of foreign complicity in extraterritorial repression and have policy implications for civil society activists that seek to prevent governments from committing future human rights abuses against foreign nationals living abroad.

中文翻译：

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跨国镇压：国际合作压制异见


为什么有些国家协助其他国家跨越国界并镇压其侨民，而另一些国家则不然？跨国镇压涉及东道国（包括民主国家）与原籍国（通常是独裁国家）密切合作，将居住在国外的公民移交拘留并压制异议。我们期望跨国镇压方面的国际合作依赖于东道国的国内法治（镇压机会）以及与原籍国的经济联系（合作杠杆）。为了衡量跨国镇压方面的国际合作，我们提供了包含 2014 年至 2020 年 608 个跨国镇压直接实际案例的新数据，涉及 160 个独特的国家组合（79 个东道国和 31 个原籍国）。我们使用 33,615 个定向二年数据集来测试我们的假设，该数据集解释了成对国家之间的难民流动，并为我们的理论论证找到了实证支持。独裁政权能够更好地争取拥有共同经济利益和法治薄弱的国家在侵犯人权问题上的合作。我们的研究结果提供了对域外镇压中外国共谋的第一个定量描述，并对寻求阻止政府未来侵犯居住在国外的外国人的人权的民间社会活动家具有政策意义。