Sovereigns of Sanctuaries: Host State Responses to Transnational Repression

Abstract

While political scientists have long studied nation-states’ domestic repression of anti-government dissent, there is a growing awareness that such coercion extends across international borders. Nation-states pursue and repress their nationals abroad through a predatory process known as transnational repression (TR). Host states, those nation-states in which expatriate dissidents seek refuge, are crucial to the defense against and deterrence of TR. Yet host states’ role in and reactions to TR remains underexplored by scholars. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by identifying the factors that lead host states to defend victims of TR, disregard foreign repression of individuals within their territory, or actively collaborate with predatory origin states. I theorize that host states engage in cost-benefit calculations when responding to instances of TR, and in addition to considering the benefits derived from their relationships with predatory states, host state executives also consider the risk of backlash should they facilitate TR or not respond to public instances of it. This backlash can originate from external actors such as interested third states, as well as internal actors such as civil society or autonomous host state agents. I adopt a mixed methodology to assess the validity of hypotheses derived from these theoretical bases.

First, I leverage new availability of cross-national datasets identifying individual acts of TR. From these incidents, I conduct statistical analyses on which predatory states are most likely to commit TR, which host states are most likely see such TR targeting victims in their territory, and what type of bilateral relationships lend themselves most to TR. From there I build on this merged dataset, collecting original data on host-state reactions to TR through targeted Nexis Uni searches to create the Host Response to transnational Repression Dataset (HRRD). Using the HRRD, I conduct further statistical analyses to assess my hypotheses and identify predictors of host state actions countering TR, as well as active complicity with origin states. I follow this quantitative analysis with a series of comparative case studies, comparing exemplars of my theory in which external and internal backlash to incidents of TR corresponded to responsive host state actions with those where it did not. In doing so I parse through causal mechanisms which are difficult to measure through cross-national statistical analysis. I argue that while host states’ laxity on TR is frequently explained as a derivative of their mutually beneficial relationships with predatory states, scholars would do well take a more expansive view of the factors which lead host states to view certain coercions as assaults to national values and community, and others as peripheral.