Understanding And Interrupting Authoritarian Collaboration

Pro-democracy civil society groups and domestic political opponents present obvious challenges to authoritarian regimes. When pro-democracy civil society groups are embedded in--or inspired by--transnational advocacy networks, their capacity to exert pressure for change on authoritarian governments grows.²⁴ The spread of Color Revolutions across Central Asia and Eastern Europe followed by the Arab Spring underscored that transnational collaboration and learning among pro-democracy groups enhances their threat to authoritarian stability.²⁵ In addition to raising concerns about emulation within authoritarian "neighborhoods," these uprisings intensified autocrats' concerns about Western governments encouraging pro-democracy civil society in autocracies. Autocrats often responded by limiting the space for civil society, creating new challenges for the democracy support community's practitioners. Even when citizens from autocracies "exit" domestic politics in response to heightened repression by migrating abroad, their ability to criticize authoritarian regimes from the diaspora remains problematic for autocrats.

Autocracies increasingly incorporate democracy prevention--deliberate efforts to disrupt pro-democracy groups and reduce prospects for democratization--in their foreign policies. Authoritarian collaboration to stymie pro-democracy civil society takes several forms. First, authoritarian regimes share knowledge about effective policies to disrupt pro-democracy and opposition movements. This practice has been referred to as authoritarian learning, whereby authoritarian governments learn to emulate each other's best (worst) policies and administrative arrangements.²⁶ Authoritarian learning may occur in meetings and informal communication, including on the sidelines of summits. Efforts to promote authoritarian learning are more readily observable when authoritarian regimes send officials to other autocracies to conduct trainings. These authoritarian peer-to-peer exchanges have produced "legal harmonization" in the authoritarian post-Soviet region.²⁷ Government security agencies in post-Soviet countries share information regarding which laws and technologies are most effective for internet surveillance and control; this causes diffusion from Russia to other post-Soviet countries of legal, technical, and institutional approaches to digital repression.²⁸ Autocrats in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa have also copied each other's legislation requiring civil society groups to register as "foreign agents" and submit to oversight boards, learning from each other's efforts to cut off funding between pro-democracy groups.²⁹

Collaboration between authoritarian regime officials below the level of heads of state and government is an under-studied area of increasing importance. Although cross-national data on authoritarian party or bureaucratic exchanges is not, to the author’s knowledge, widely available, case studies and new data collection efforts focused on particular authoritarian parties suggest that these exchanges matter for authoritarian learning and coordination. Notably, the International Department of the Communist Party of China (ID-CPC) maintains contact with more than 400 political parties in more than 160 countries.³⁰ The ID-CPC holds meetings, provides training, and sponsors "party schools" abroad.³¹ Through these exchanges, the ID-CPC aims to spread favorable perceptions of China's governance and development model, increasing authoritarian regimes’ willingness to repeat Chinese talking points on the South China Sea and One China policies, among other issues.³² Whether exchanges between authoritarian regime officials often drive direct policy transfers – whether at the stage of writing or implementing legislation--is less-well understood.

Authoritarian regimes also share information about whereabouts of pro-democracy actors through collaborative surveillance practices. One goal of collaborative surveillance is to limit citizens' abilities to escape control by their home government by migrating. Cooperating to share information about dissidents becomes habitual as authoritarian regimes, particularly within the same region, develop information-sharing channels and routines over the course of decades. Latin American dictatorships' security services extensively shared intelligence from the 1960s through the 1980s, tracking leftist dissenters. Such intelligence-sharing continues to enable surveillance of exiles by Latin America's remaining autocracies.³³ Similar practices persist in states formerly part of the Soviet Union, which rely on traditions of collaboration developed between their intelligence services during the Cold War.³⁴ Researchers have also described how autocrats tolerate governments using embassies within their countries as operating bases from which they monitor the activities of diaspora communities and activists in-exile.³⁵

Finally, authoritarian regimes with high technological capacity have launched cyber attacks on their allies' opponents. Throughout 2017 and 2018, Chinese hackers targeted opponents of Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen, a fellow autocrat and an ally of China, in the run-up to Cambodia's elections.³⁶ Although scholars have a reasonably good sense of which states collaborate on surveillance and share information about regime opponents intensively, the scale of authoritarian information-sharing and the uses of shared data are hard to monitor.

As a step beyond collaborative surveillance, collaborative repression entails the use of the host state's security forces and courts to harass or detain individuals from a partner state’s pro-democracy and opposition groups when they travel abroad. Collaborative repression can also entail a host state allowing exiles’ home state to directly target them within the host state’s territory. This is the cooperative version of transnational repression--efforts to track and repress citizens across borders. In recent years, organizations like Freedom House have raised the alarm about increasing transnational, often collaborative repression resulting in "forcing people either to flee further afield or to silence themselves."³⁷

Coercing the return of exiles is one of the common goals of collaborative repression. Authoritarian host governments are, unsurprisingly, more willing than democracies to coerce exiles’ return by kidnapping and extraditing dissidents on their home state’s behalf.³⁸ In contravention of the principle of non-refoulement, authoritarian regimes in China,³⁹ Egypt,⁴⁰ North Korea,⁴¹ Saudi Arabia,⁴² Thailand,⁴³ Turkey,⁴⁴ and the United Arab Emirates,⁴⁵ to name a few examples, have cooperated with fellow autocrats to forcibly return dissidents.⁴⁶ When exiles reside in democracies, autocrats are more likely to send their own agents to covertly attack them.⁴⁶

Authoritarian regimes coordinate transnational repression through a combination of multilateral and bilateral channels, casting a wide net against opposition actors. Studies find that states that belong to the same authoritarian-dominated ROs are more likely to cooperate on transnational repression.⁴⁷ The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is widely recognized as one such venue for authoritarian regimes to collaborate on policies targeting democratic oppositions under the guise of countering what Chinese officials described as the "three evils:" terrorism, ethnic separatism, and religious extremism.⁴⁸ SCO members agree to automatically extradite all individuals identified by fellow members on a black list of terrorists and extremists, regardless of whether the individuals are political targets.⁴⁹ In 2012, a report from the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) documented numerous instances of SCO members automatically extraditing refugees on the SCO blacklist accused of "extremism, separatism, or terrorism" to co-members in violation of the principle of non-refoulement.⁵⁰ Examples included Kazakhstan’s extradition of a Uyghur journalist with refugee status and China and Kyrgyzstan's extradition of refugees who faced persecution in Uzbekistan without notifying the refugees’ lawyers or UNHCR.⁵¹ In the Middle East, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) also facilitates information-sharing and the maintenance of blacklists of exiles for their member states.⁵²

Though it can be more difficult to prove inter-state cooperation on covert, enforced disappearances of dissidents in their host states, some of the same states that cooperate on extradition also appear to tolerate enforced disappearances by hit squads within their territories. Collaboration to "disappear" dissidents is hardly a new phenomenon; in the 1970s and 1980s, Latin America’s military dictatorships-- Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay--famously collaborated on Operation Condor, causing the enforced disappearances of hundreds of political exiles. These military regimes surveilled each other's exiles; undertook join covert actions to disappear, torture, and extralegally deport each other’s exiles; and collaborated in teams to assassinate exiles in various countries.⁵³

In recent decades, autocrats have abused the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) system of red notices--requests that countries issue for police forces worldwide to arrest wanted persons. Rather than exclusively targeting criminals, autocrats attempt to issue Interpol red notices for regime opponents who flee abroad to avoid persecution.⁵⁴ Autocracies that have extensively abused Interpol include Russia⁵⁵ and the United Arab Emirates.⁵⁶ In a worrying sign for those hoping that Interpol will continue to undergo reforms, Major General Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi of the United Arab Emirates was elected to serve as Interpol's president from 2021-2025.⁵⁷ Various human rights groups campaigned against General Raisi's candidacy, accusing him of overseeing unlawful arrests and torture of human rights campaigners from the UAE.⁵⁸ While some autocrats buy software and services that they use to surveil and repress civil society from companies based in democracies, there is growing concern about autocracies exporting digital tools of repression. Authoritarian regimes at the frontier of innovation on biometric data collection have collaborated with like-minded autocrats to help set up similar systems. China has signed agreements with several African governments, for example, to roll out biometric data collection and facial recognition software in those countries.⁵⁹ Beyond mimicking surveillance practices and software adoptions of fellow autocracies, authoritarian regimes have proven willing to share their algorithms and exchange data. For example, state-owned technology companies from China and the United Arab Emirates have worked together to produce surveillance software.⁶⁰ In November 2023, the world's leading AI powers announced their willingness to develop frameworks to regulate AI technology, though it is not yet clear whether these will meaningfully deal with export of AI surveillance technology or biometric data between authoritarian regimes.⁶¹ Authoritarian-led IOs have also coordinated joint operations of their member states against oppositions online. In December 2010, concerned with democratic contagion from the emerging Arab Spring, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) claimed to have shut down 2,000 websites in member countries that it described as politically damaging to member states.⁶² The CSTO justified the coordinated regional take-down of opposition websites by claiming these sites supplied information to terror groups.⁶³

To disrupt authoritarian collaboration on surveillance and transnational repression, democracy and human rights defenders can step up efforts to proactively identify and support individuals and groups which are likely to be targeted based on known predictors of transnational repression. In particular, intensifying domestic repression foreshadows that regime opponents will flee an autocracy to enjoy greater freedom of expression. As dissidents flee, autocracies often respond by targeting them and other exiles with intensified transnational repression.¹²⁵ Democracies and the democracy support community can identify and call attention to early signs of intensifying domestic repression and prepare to support diaspora communities that are likely to be targeted. Support may include digital security trainings for targeted communities; in more extreme cases, different actors could support relocation.¹²⁶ At the same time, the agents involved in targeting exiles should face sanctions and prosecution, which will require providing more resources to agencies tasked with monitoring and sanctions enforcement. The international democracy support community can also learn from instances where civil society groups adapted their practices to try to overcome increasing authoritarian collaboration and policy transfers. For example, in 2014, when illiberal MPs in Kyrgyzstan's parliament introduced legislation targeting all foreign-funded and foreign NGOs working on "political issues" in an effort to copy Russia's Foreign Agents Law, Kyrgyz NGOs and their allies quickly organized broad domestic and international opposition to the bill. By 2016, their pressure campaign convinced parliamentarians to block the proposed foreign agents law.¹²⁷ In spite of consistent opposition, Kyrgyzstan appears poised to pass a revived foreign agents law in 2024;¹²⁸ civil society will need continued support as they face drawn-out legal challenges. Generally, the international democracy support community should widely communicate the stakes of supporting civil society networks most heavily affected by transnational repression. It will be important to make sure that supportive responses and efforts to shore up civil society groups facing transnational repression, are chosen and designed in collaboration with affected groups. As Shein and Emmons (2023) note, local actors are "best situated to understand the threats and articulate their specific priorities."¹²⁹ For IOs like Interpol that have been co-opted in service of transnational repression, civil society groups have long argued that members committed to preventing abuse must insist on – and provide resources to support--more thorough and transparent reviews of the evidence underlying red notice requests.¹³⁰ However, it is important to bear in mind that when Interpol instituted reforms in the past, autocrats adapted. Recently, after Interpol took some steps to prevent rampant abuse of red notices, several autocracies shifted toward abusing Interpol’s Stolen and Lost Travel Document system. Authorities record passports of exiles as lost, stolen, revoked, or invalid in an attempt to have exiles deported by Interpol members without having to issue red notices.¹³¹ This underscores that the potential misuse of IOs such as Interpol should be consistently and vigilantly monitored even after transforming to get ahead of threats, with more effort devoted to instituting comprehensive safeguards and transparency. The international democracy support community can also design educational interventions to increase awareness among law enforcement agencies regarding the limitations and problems associated with Interpol notices. Providing legal support to dissidents targeted with red notices is also critical to preventing wrongful arrests. To disrupt the participation of non-state actors in transnational repression, democratic governments can take up several initiatives. First, democracies can create stricter limits for companies selling surveillance and biometric data collection technologies, as well as companies running PR campaigns for governments deploying this technology. Accountability and reporting requirements for corporations that deliberately collaborate with repressive regimes have, in general, lagged. Some human rights activists and lawyers have proposed the creation of a global court to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations, though there are few signs of progress on this idea.¹³² Second, the international democracy support community can continue to support reporting, civic education, and research on collaboration between non-state actors and authoritarian regimes, bringing the information needed to mobilize policymakers into the public domain.