INTRODUCTION In October 2018, Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered inside the Istanbul consulate of Saudi Arabia. The prominent journalist and vocal critic of the Saudi government had emigrated to the United States in 2017 to evade increasing restrictions in his home country.1 Khashoggi’s assassination served as a shocking reminder of the great lengths authoritarian governments will go to silence dissent abroad. Yet Saudi Arabia is not alone in such actions. Other like-minded regimes consistently target political emigrants and stifle criticism outside their territory.2 Though their practices of repression across borders are not always as drastic as in the Khashoggi case, such regimes nevertheless engage in widespread and systematic attempts to interfere with civic activism and freedom of expression in diaspora and exiled communities. This report investigates the forms of transnational repression used against political activists, human rights defenders, and journalists from Egypt, Syria, and Iran. Recent movements for social justice and political freedom in the Middle East and North Africa have been quelled by an authoritarian backlash and sweeping repression. Severe constraints for opposition, civil society, and media have pushed numerous activists and journalists into exile. From abroad, however, many of these emigrants continue to advocate for human rights and political change by creating new initiatives or integrating into existing civil society organizations. In doing so, they act as important relays in transnational advocacy networks, expose human rights violations, and circumvent the information controls of their home regime. Unfortunately, this work often makes them targets of repression for governments willing to reach beyond their borders and into the environments of host societies. Transnational repression is not a new phenomenon: in 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico; in 1991, Shapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister of Iran under the Shah, was killed near Paris by assassins of the Iranian regime.3 Today, however, both the scale and the scope of extraterritorial control and repression have been enhanced by digital technologies. Social media and digital communication allow civil society activists to maintain close relations across borders and access global news and advocacy cycles. Yet the use of these technologies creates multiple points of exposure that state actors can exploit for surveillance, malware attacks, online harassment, and disinformation campaigns. And these digital threats are often combined with more traditional methods of repression, such as pressure on in-country relatives and slander in state media.4 1 Kirkpatrick, D., & Cumming-Bruce, N. (2019, June 19). Saudis Called Khashoggi ‘Sacrificial Animal’ as They Waited to Kill Him. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/world/middleeast/jamal-khashoggi-Mohammed-bin-Salman.html. 2 Hirt, N., & Saleh Mohammad, A. (2018). By way of patriotism, coercion, or instrumentalization: How the Eritrean regime makes use of the diaspora to stabilize its rule. Globalizations, 15(2), 232-247; Hug, A.(ed.). (2016). No Shelter: The harassment of activists abroad by intelligence services from the former Soviet Union. Foreign Policy Centre, London; Schenkkan, N. (2018, January 29). The Remarkable Scale of Turkey’s “Global Purge.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2018-01-29/ remarkable-scale-turkeys-global-purge. See also the Central Asian Political Exiles (CAPE) database of the University of Exeter Central Asian Studies Network. https://excas.net/projects/political-exiles. 3 Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (2011). No Safe Haven: Iran’s Global Assassination Campaign. New Haven. https:// iranhrdc.org/no-safe-haven-irans-global-assassination-campaign; Shain, Y. (2005). The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State. University of Michigan Press. 4 Michaelsen, M. (2018). Exit and voice in a digital age: Iran’s exiled activists and the authoritarian state. Globalizations, 15(2), 248-264; Moss, D. M. (2018). The ties that bind: Internet communication technologies, networked authoritarianism, and ‘voice’ in the Syrian diaspora. Globalizations, 15(2), 265-282. 5