Targeted Digital Threats and Cross-border Cooperation: Understanding the Evolution of Digital Transnational Repression in Autocracies and Democracies

At the dawn of the Internet age, cyber-optimistic interpretations of digitalisation saw Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as liberation technologies for collective mobilisation. However, ICTs can devolve into instruments of control when wielded by oppressors. To advance scholarship on these countervailing forces, I investigate Digital Transnational Repression (DTR). Repression is a broad concept that historically includes actions or policies that are meant to, or do, raise the costs of activism. Digital Transnational Repression (DTR) projects political control across cyberspace and is designed to escalate the costs associated with online and offline activism and deter dissident activities and beliefs. The DTR toolkit comprises (i) threatening and persecuting proponents of dissent, their families and their sympathisers online; (ii) surveilling and tracking online activities, communications and social media profiles; (iii) countering net activism by hacking and filtering the information they produce and (iv) manipulating the information they consume. In the paper, I present the Digital Transnational Repression Dataset (DTRD) and use yearly directed dyads to analyse the phenomenon's distribution from 2011 to 2024. This paper underscores a transformative trajectory of political repression in autocracies and democracies – not always violent and overt, yet achieving the outcome of silencing opponents.