The Risks of Complicity in Transnational Civil Society Repression: an Argument for Institutional Responses

Civil society engagement with authoritarian countries is important; yet it also triggers risks of exporting repression and censorship beyond these countries’ borders, and of thus jeopardising the liberal values on which transnational civil society rests. Recent academic discussion of this issue has addressed them as manifestations of ‘sharp power’ and ‘authoritarian advances’ in liberal democracies; these models risk adopting unduly simplistic assumptions of passive victimhood on the part of institutions within liberal democratic societies. I argue that in order to respond to the problems identified in this scholarship, we need to engage with the psychological and ethical complexity of complicity with transnational repression in different settings. I define complicity, here, in consciously broad terms as involvement in wrongdoing that may be willing or reluctant, well-informed or ignorant. As such, complicity with transnational repression does not, or does not necessarily, attract individual moral blame; indeed, an exclusive focus on individual blameworthiness could distract us from the important challenge of developing institutional and political responsibilities to deal with the problem of transnational repression.