THE SILENCING EFFECTS OF TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION Even though they reside outside the immediate reach of repressive state authorities, diaspora activists remain exposed to a number of threats from their home regimes. But to what extent do practices of extraterritorial repression actually constrain diaspora activism? The interviews conducted for this report revealed that state authorities are able to pressure activists into self-restraint, undermine their ties to the home country, and put them under tension and stress negatively affecting their mental health. By targeting dissidents and critics across borders, authoritarian regimes thus succeed to impose additional costs on the activities of transnational civil society. The effects of repression depend as much on how targets perceive the risk of state interventions as on the actual repressive practices experienced by activists.78 Repressive regimes often try to obscure or exaggerate their capacities, for instance by setting examples through selected cases of drastic or carefully publicized measures against dissidents, so as to scare and silence others. The case of Jamal Khashoggi had such effect even beyond the context of Saudi Arabia: several Egyptian respondents brought up the possibility of Sisi’s government engaging in similar targeted assassinations of opponents abroad, especially given the limited international consequences the Saudi government had to face for the implication of its highest officials in the murder of a journalist. The effects of surveillance, in particular, build on activist uncertainty regarding the capabilities of monitoring authorities. This uncertainty creates an unequal power relation between the watcher and the watched, “giving the watcher greater power to influence or direct the subject of surveillance.”79 When regime agents successfully gather open source intelligence or compromise the email accounts of activists, the threat of continued surveillance expands and morphs into a means of control in and of itself. The knowledge or suspicion of ongoing surveillance can thus have a “chilling effect,” constraining the capacity of targets to exercise their fundamental human rights. In particular, “interference with privacy through targeted surveillance is designed to repress the exercise of the right to freedom of expression.”80 Honari, A. (2018). From ‘the effect of repression’ toward ‘the response to repression.’ Current Sociology, 66(6), 950-973. 78 Richards, N. M. (2013). The dangers of surveillance. Harvard Law Review, 126(7), 1934–1965, p. 1953. 79 United Nations Human Rights Council (2019). Surveillance and human rights. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promo- 80 tion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, p. 7. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/ GEN/G19/148/76/PDF/G1914876.pdf. 24