Cooperation Against Citizens: Authoritarian International Organizations and Transnational Repression | GGRCC Talk

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COOPERATION AGAINST CITIZENS: AUTHORITARIAN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION
Authoritarian regimes increasingly cooperate through regional international organizations to counter threats to their rule. We argue that these organizations perform three political functions for their members—pooling material resources, coordinating security, and legitimating authoritarian rule—and that regimes embedded in more authoritarian organizational networks become more resilient to political change. Drawing on new cross-national data on autocratic cooperation around transnational repression, we show that the more organizations with policing and counterterrorism functions a pair of regimes shares, the more they cooperate to surveil, detain, and return one another's dissidents. This coordination has consequences: by extending the reach of the home state beyond its borders, it demobilizes diaspora activists, spreads fear, and encourages self-censorship, neutralizing a threat that regimes would otherwise struggle to contain.

About the speaker
Christina Schneider is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, and Co‑Director of the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Her research focuses on how international cooperation and bargaining interact with democratic politics at the national level—particularly in the context of European Union governance, regional organizations, and international development. She is the author of three books with Cambridge University Press. Conflict, Negotiation and European Union Enlargement (2009) analyzes how EU member and applicant states manage distributional conflict to facilitate enlargement. The Responsive Union: National Elections and European Governance (2019) examines when and how EU governments remain responsive to public opinion during international cooperation; it was awarded Best Book in European Union Politics for both 2019 and 2020 by the European Political Studies Association. Her most recent book, Promises Made, Promises Broken? Democratic Politics in a Globalized World (2026), explores how globalization affects democratic representation and political accountability from a comparative perspective.

The GGRCC Talk Series
This Global Governance Research Centre Consortium (GGRCC) Talk Series showcases recent research from across the interdisciplinary field of global governance. It is organized by the Global Governance Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, on behalf of all GGRCC partners.