Short Abstract

This panel explores how African states project authoritarian control beyond their borders, examining state and non-state actors’ efforts to control diasporas, digital spaces, and cross-border security, and how targets resist transnational repression.

Long Abstract

The theme of ECAS 2027, African Prisms, invites us to bend singular narratives into a multi-coloured spectrum of methods, histories, and political realities. This panel applies this perspective on the growing phenomenon of extraterritorial authoritarianism and transnational repression: the ways authoritarian regimes reach across international borders to silence critics, control diasporas, and manipulate transnational institutions.

While mainstream political science has often presented transnational repression as a uniform strategy exported by large global actors, seeing it through an African prism reveals a complex, multi-directional spectrum of long-distance control conducted by a variety of smaller state and non- state actors. How do African governments exert transnational coercion over exiled journalists, activists, opposition, and diaspora communities in Europe and neighbouring African states? And conversely, how do target populations resist against or mobilise in support of these cross-border manoeuvres?

This panel invites contributions from political science, anthropology, digital sociology, and legal studies to investigate, inter alia, the institutional and informal mechanisms (embassies, intelligence networks, proxies) used to monitor citizens abroad, the role of digital authoritarianism (online surveillance and digital harassment), and localised lived experiences of fear, self-censorship, and political agency among African diaspora communities navigating European host states.

By looking at extraterritorial authoritarianism through diverse regional and scholarly lenses, this panel moves beyond the binaries of ‘free host’ versus ‘repressive home,’ uncovering instead a nuanced spectrum of transnational power struggles.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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