Transnational surveillance is a powerful tool in the arsenal of autocrats the world over. Despite its pervasive use in extraterritorial coercion, the systematic study of surveillance of regime opponents beyond national borders remains underdeveloped in political science, primarily due to limited data availability. To help fill this gap, we constructed the Latin American Transnational Surveillance dataset, a micro-level dataset based on declassified foreign surveillance reports produced between 1966 and 1986 by autocratic Brazil. Latin American Transnational Surveillance records the identity, locations, social ties and political activism of 17,000 individual targets of transnational surveillance, the vast majority of whom were tracked in neighbouring countries across Latin America. Drawing on these abundant data, we empirically explore existing theoretical insights about the motivations, methods and consequences of transnational surveillance, a task that would be difficult to do using other sources. We also leverage social network analysis to showcase potential applications of Latin American Transnational Surveillance in the testing of collective-action theories of transnational political violence.

中文翻译：

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拉丁美洲跨国监测 （LATS） 数据集简介


跨国监控是全世界独裁者武器库中的有力工具。尽管它在域外胁迫中得到了普遍使用，但对跨国界对政权反对者的监视的系统研究在政治学中仍然不发达，这主要是由于数据可用性有限。为了帮助填补这一空白，我们构建了拉丁美洲跨国监控数据集，这是一个基于1966年至1986年巴西独裁者制作的解密外国监控报告的微观数据集。拉丁美洲跨国监控记录了 17,000 个跨国监控目标的身份、位置、社会关系和政治活动，其中绝大多数是在拉丁美洲的邻国被追踪的。利用这些丰富的数据，我们实证探索了关于跨国监控的动机、方法和后果的现有理论见解，这是一项使用其他来源难以完成的任务。我们还利用社交网络分析来展示拉丁美洲跨国监控在测试跨国政治暴力的集体行动理论中的潜在应用。