This Workshop seeks to advance scholarly debates on the intersection of offline and digital authoritarianism, while providing junior researchers with the opportunity to consolidate and refine their projects. Although existing studies have examined authoritarian practices in isolation, less attention has been paid to the interdependence between traditional, offline mechanisms of repression and their digitally mediated counterparts. By foregrounding this nexus, the Workshop will highlight how authoritarian strategies evolve across political systems, including democratic and authoritarian regimes. The Workshop will focus on developing novel theoretical frameworks, addressing methodological challenges, and identifying comparative approaches for systematically analysing these dynamics.
There is a substantial body of research on authoritarianism and the use of physical control, and in recent decades, a growing literature has examined digital authoritarianism (Kermani, 2025; Earl et al., 2022; Polyakova & Meserole, 2019; Roberts & Oosterom, 2024). Despite significant overlaps between the two domains — for example, in the deployment of propaganda and the ways in which digital propagandists adapt lessons from offline practices — scholarship has rarely addressed them in a combined manner. Authoritarian regimes and other non-democratic forces routinely employ suppressive tactics offline and online simultaneously, yet our understanding of how these spheres intersect and reinforce one another remains limited. Given the risks that such hybrid suppressive campaigns pose to democratic movements and values, their systematic investigation is necessary and timely.
Equally important are the theoretical and methodological challenges inherent in studying these phenomena. Although offline and online spaces are now deeply intertwined, each retains specific settings and logics that complicate the task of analysis. Research on authoritarian practices must therefore account for these differences while also striving to develop a unified framework capable of integrating both domains. For example, while digital authoritarianism in restrictive contexts can be examined through digital methods, access to the field and participants often remains limited and risky. At the same time, systematic approaches to studying offline suppression are constrained by the infeasibility of surveys or interviews with citizens in such contexts. This Workshop will address these gaps by advancing novel theoretical perspectives and methodological strategies to guide future research.
Earl, J., Maher, T. V., & Pan, J. (2022). The digital repression of social movements, protest, and activism: A synthetic review. Science Advances, 8(10), eabl8198. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abl8198
Kermani, H. (2025). The art of delirium: Social media suppression in authoritarian regimes. Communication Theory, qtaf006. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaf006
Polyakova, A., & Meserole, C. (2019). Exporting digital authoritarianism: The Russian and Chinese models (Policy Brief, Democracy and Disorder Series).
Roberts, T., & Oosterom, M. (2024). Digital authoritarianism: A systematic literature review. Information Technology for Development, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2024.2425352
1: How are physical and digital authoritarianism connected, and how can we study such hybrid repressive campaigns?
2: What are the main similarities and differences between offline and online repression (e.g., in actor/practices)?
3: Which theoretical and methodological challenges arise from the nexus of offline and online repression for research?
4: How can we combine traditional and digital methods to understand the nexus of offline and digital authoritarianism?
5: How do platform algorithms shape repression, and how do links to offline authoritarianism differ?
| Title |
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| Digital Authoritarianism and Democratic Backsliding: The Political Economy of Exploitation Surveillance |
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| Wiring the Leviathan? How State Capacities Shape the Digitalization of Information Control in Central Asian Authoritarian Regimes |
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| Digital Capacity and Digital Authoritarianism: A Comparative Examination of South Asia |
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| Authoritarianism Without Authoritarians: Generative AI and Intersectional Harm in India’s Election |
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| Infrastructures of repression: Exploring regime variations in the architecture of digital connectivity |
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| Technologies for Liberation and Repression under Autocracy: Exploring the Cat-and-Mouse Dynamics in ICT Adoption in Belarus |
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| Under the Algorithmic Regime: How Digital Activists Navigate Platform Censorship in Finland |
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| To block or not to block: Pathways to blockchain-based digital authoritarianism in the Global South. |
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| E-Governance as Authoritarian Infrastructure: Hybrid Repression and the Reporting Ecosystem in Turkey |
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| Surveillance Technology and Political Mobilization in Hybrid Regimes: Evidence from Serbia |
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| From Affect to Action, Street to Screen: The Emotional Cycle of Feminist Resistance in Iran |
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| Destination unreachable – but for how long? The utility of Internet shutdowns in an increasingly digitalized world |
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| Digital Authoritarianism and Migration Governance: A Comparative Perspective |
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| How analogue legacies shape the use of digital tools in autocracies |
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| Challenging the discord dividend |
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| From Online Speech to Physical Sanctions: Digital–Physical Authoritarianism under Indonesia’s ITE Law |
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