Abstract

Autocratic regimes often treat emigration as a safety valve. Allowing dissidents to leave the country eases domestic pressure. However, these exiles can pose a threat from overseas, for example by challenging the legitimacy of autocratic incumbents. Therefore, authoritarian states are extending their reach beyond their own borders to monitor and silence their critics. Such transnational repressive practices affect not only exile communities, but also the politics and security of host societies. They bring intimidation and violence to host countries, fuel societal polarisation lead to the securitisation of migration, create diplomatic tensions and stifle free speech and civic participation within diasporas.
Taking an actor-centred approach, the project maps the repertoire of transnational repression as experienced from below, showing which concrete repressive practices most strongly reshape activism in exile. This pilot project asks: How do exiled activists experience transnational repression, and what strategies do they employ to resist it? It specifies what different actors perceive as ‚threats‘ and compares organisational and individual responses.  Moving beyond ‚top-down‘ accounts of state-lead tactics, the project takes a ‚bottom-up‘ approach to documenting the perceptions of risk, coping mechanisms and collective resilience of Russian-speaking civil society actors in exile.
Adopting a comparative approach, the project explicitly considers the political context of host societies. By contrasting the experiences of exiled civil society actors and Russian-speaking diaspora members in consolidated democracies (e.g. Germany and France) with those in non-democratic regimes (e.g. Georgia and Armenia), the project demonstrates how host environments influence the perception of threats, risks, and opportunities for protection, mobilisation and counterstrategies.
The project employs a qualitative, multi-methods design combining document analysis and semi-structured interviews. In the preliminary phase, the analysis of public statements and social media content by exiled individuals is used to map how threats are framed. The next step involves conducting semi-structured interviews with various participants. Interviewees are selected through purposive sampling based on their experience of exile and threats of transnational repression, and then the pool of interviewees is expanded via snowballing to capture diverse networks and organisational tiers across countries. The analysis employs a systematic coding strategy that blends theory-driven concepts of transnational repression and authoritarianism with inductive insights gained from civil society actors. This enables cross-context comparisons and the tracing of the evolution of repression and resistance in different contexts over time.