36 Diaspora Activism and the Dynamics of Voice threatening activists; and even by assassinating dissidents abroad and harming their family members at home.5 As the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul6 gruesomely illustrated, regimes undertake these acts precisely because diaspora members have the potential to discredit dictators from abroad. The threats posed by transnational repression do not preclude voice entirely, as many of those in exile will have already incurred the costs of activism and accept the risks of continuing to speak out. However, the operation of transnational repression can effectively isolate these exiles in their communities, instill widespread fear and mistrust, and render popular mobilization a practical impossibility. This, in turn, dampens horizontal voice within communities in spite of their shared identities and antiregime grievances. The exercise of “extra-territorial authoritarianism” and “counter-exile strategies” is not a new practice (Dalmasso et al. 2017; Shain 2005[1989]). France’s Bonapartist dictatorship suppressed subversive acts among exiles in England in the 1850s (Shain 2005[1989]); Mussolini’s regime hunted antifascist Italians abroad during its reign of terror (Cannistraro 1985); and countless opposition figures have been murdered, from Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940, to Orlando Letelier, a former diplomat who was killed via car bomb in Washington, DC, in 1976 by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.7 Today, the technologies that make transnational activism ever easier also facilitate transnational repression, as when regimes use spyware to hack dissidents’ cell phones and social media accounts (Al-Jizawi et al. 2020; Michaelsen 2017; Moss 2018). What this means is that the diaspora members who are most likely to be aggrieved by abuses taking place in the home-country are also those most strongly subjected to disincentives to speak out. The operation of transnational repression can therefore mute horizontal voice between diaspora members and hinder efforts to project vertical voice toward authorities. 5 6 7 For academic studies, see Adamson and Tsourapas (2020); Cooley and Heathershaw (2017); Glasius (2018); Lemon (2019); Lewis (2015); Michaelsen (2017, 2018); Moss (2016b, 2018); Shain (2005[1989]); Tsourapas (2020a, 2020b). See these studies for additional references of reports by NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on transnational repression. Jamal Khashoggi (1958–2018) was a journalist, author, and dissident from Saudi Arabia who was lured to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, under the pretense that he would be allowed to obtain a marriage license. Instead, he was strangled to death by agents of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, dismembered with a bone saw, and disappeared. The following year, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report holding the Saudi regime responsible for this premediated, extrajudicial, and extraterritorial execution. I am grateful to my colleague Dr. Samuel Valenzuela, Kellogg Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, for alerting me to this important example of transnational repression. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press