Why a Tactic Used by Czars Is Back With a Vengeance

Diplomatic tensions are rising here in London. On Tuesday, the British foreign ministry summoned the Chinese ambassador for an official reprimand. The day before, the police charged three men with aiding the Hong Kong intelligence service and forcing entry into a residential address.

In a statement, the Foreign Office criticized “the recent pattern of behavior directed by China against the U.K,” and cited, among other things, Hong Kong’s issuing of bounties for information on dissidents who have resettled in Britain and elsewhere.

I’m not going to speculate on whether the three men are guilty or innocent, as their court case is ongoing. But the arrests have drawn attention to the phenomenon of “transnational repression,” in which autocratic governments surveil, harass or even attack their own citizens abroad. Last month, following a string of attacks on Iranian journalists, Reporters Without Borders proclaimed London a “hot spot” for the phenomenon.

Although transnational repression is an old practice, it appears to be gaining prevalence. Globalization and the internet have made it easier for exiles to engage in activism, and have also increased autocracies’ desire — and ability — to crack down on political activity in their diasporas.

“Everyone is online,” said Dana Moss, a professor at Notre Dame who coedited a recent book about transnational repression. “And we all have tracking devices called smartphones in our pockets.”

Is transnational repression on the rise, or does it just feel like that?

“This is a very old phenomenon,” said Marlies Glasius, a professor of international relations at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “We know that the czarist regimes, for instance, kept tabs on Russian dissidents in Paris.”

The Russian secret police even staged provocations in Paris to make dissidents seem dangerous and persuade French authorities to crack down on them. “The most notorious provocation occurred in Paris in 1890, when Arkadiy Harting (a.k.a. Abraham Gekel’man or Landezen) organized a well-armed team of bombthrowers and then betrayed them to the Paris police,” the C.I.A. historian Ben B. Fisher wrote in a 1996 analysis of the Paris operation.

The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin famously had his political rival Leon Trotsky murdered in exile in Mexico in 1940. In 1976, Chile’s military government killed Orlando Letelier, a prominent opponent of Augusto Pinochet, in a Washington car bombing. In 1984, gunmen from the Libyan Embassy in London opened fire on a protest against Muammar el-Qaddafi, wounding 11 demonstrators and killing a British policewoman.

While we know a lot about the most high-profile attacks, we don’t know how widespread or effective transnational repression has been through history, partly because it was not specifically tracked or measured until recently.

But it is certainly a popular tool today. A Human Rights Watch report published last February documented 75 cases of transnational repression reportedly committed by more than 20 countries, including Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates.

Iranian journalists in London have experienced death threats, online abuse, targeted burglaries, surveillance and even a stabbing. Chinese students have described living in a “climate of fear” while studying abroad in Europe or North America because of threats, stalking, surveillance and other harassment that they believe was overseen by the Chinese government, Amnesty International reported on Monday.

And last year Hong Kong’s leader, John Lee, said that a group of pro-democracy activists living overseas would be “pursued for life” as he issued $128,000 bounties for information leading to their arrest. The dissidents are accused of violating Hong Kong’s so-called national security law.

Why don’t governments just leave political exiles alone?

Centuries ago, sending a difficult political opponent into exile could be an effective way to squash their influence and silence their message. Today, smartphones and social media mean that a dissident abroad can communicate with extraordinary reach.

“It’s become much more possible for people who have moved abroad, whether they did so for political reasons or not, to continue to influence and be part of the public sphere in their home countries,” Glasius said.

To autocrats, that feels threatening. “Because of the Arab Spring,” Moss said, “a lot of them learned the lesson, unfortunately, that what ordinary citizen activists do online or offline can really matter in terms of galvanizing public support.”

Many researchers initially viewed transnational democratic activism as a positive force that would help spread democratic ideas and accountability around the world. But perhaps that was too optimistic: The backlash from autocratic governments has meant more resources than ever are being devoted to repressing activism and dissent abroad.

And over time, autocrats have learned from each other’s techniques. “We do see that regimes are also sharing sort of their so-called ‘best-practices’ in repression, and doing more of this on a collaborative scale, which puts more people at risk,” Moss said.

What, if anything, can host countries do?

Host countries, caught in the middle between activists who have sought refuge on their soil, and another nation intent on pursuing them, face a thorny and sometimes unwelcome challenge.

Will they devote police resources to protect activists, and how much? Do they risk damaging diplomatic relations with the other country to publicly challenge acts of transnational repression?

In the United States, the F.B.I. has created “threat intimidation guides” offering guidance to people who have been victims of transnational repression on U.S. soil about how to seek protection from law enforcement. And there have been multiple federal prosecutions and indictments of people accused of plotting against journalists, activists and others.

“Governments are starting to collect data on it, there’s starting to be bipartisan legislation,” Moss said, “because they’re very worried about China and Iran. But that could also protect dissidents from places like Saudi and elsewhere.”

Experts say one of the most effective forms of defense would be to make asylum, residency and citizenship easier to obtain. “The more secure you are in having residential status, or, better still, citizenship of your host country, that gives you more recourse, makes you feel more secure, makes you less vulnerable,” Glasius said.