Interface – A Journal for and about Social Movements

Call for papers

Transnational repression and social movements

What is the issue about?

In a highly interconnected world political movements have become ubiquitous. Movement activists, particularly in authoritarian regimes, have sought refuge in more liberal states. However, a decline in liberalism and innovations in response to local oppositional challengers by the state beyond its geographical borders requires serious attention.

Freedom House defines Transnational Repression (TR) as governments reaching across borders to silence dissent among diasporas and exiles through methods such as assassinations, illegal deportations, abductions, digital threats, Interpol abuse, and family intimidation. TR practices by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are well documented. Falun Gong activists in Western countries face coercion from the Chinese state through threats to family members in Mainland China. Similarly, activists from the Khalistan and Balochistan movements residing in North America have been targeted in assassination campaigns allegedly orchestrated by Indian and Pakistani state agents.

While TR is often associated with authoritarian governments, liberal democracies have also played a role, through direct collaboration with repressive regimes (e.g., INTERPOL red notices) or indirectly via initiatives like the War on Terror. With authoritarianism rising in countries such as Israel, India, and the United States, it is critical to examine how democracies traditionally seen as champions of human rights are implicated in these practices. Because TR projects domestic political control into international spaces (Lewis, 2015), it raises urgent questions about its impact on global activism and the responses of activists. Palestine solidarity activists face harassment, deportation, and arbitrary detention, particularly in the U.S. and Germany. Information workers in the “global fact-checking movement” (Graves, 2018) are also pursued in ways that challenge the relevance of national borders. The case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the systematic and unprecedented assassinations of journalists in the ongoing Gaza War (Turse, 2025) further highlight the global reach and consequences of a different kind of movement repression.

Why is it important?

The May 2011 issue of Interface focused on “movement repression,” but the scale and complexity of repressive practices with global consequences suggest revisiting this topic. While repression of dissidents, exiles, and émigrés from authoritarian states is well documented, the phenomenon of transnational repression represents a distinct and ever evolving challenge. It involves diverse regime types employing increasingly sophisticated technologies to extend their reach beyond borders. These transnational repressive repertoires warrant fresh theoretical formulations. For instance, Earl and Braithwaite (2022) argue for a “layered framework” of social movement repression that can account for up-stream and down-stream effects of political repression; how systematic repression of entire populations significantly impacts specific protests, and how specific movements become pivotal in pushing transnational human rights regimes and the state’s commitment to civil rights. Such a formulation shifts, although not necessarily, from a common rational-choice explainers for movement repression to a pervasice Foucauldian account of power.

The role of media censorship and global information flows in transnational repression (TR) requires particular examination. In the digital age, regimes exploit cyberspace to suppress transnational solidarity, particularly through online surveillance and harassment, as in the #MilkTeaAlliance in Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Big tech is directly implicated in censorship, surveillance and suppression of activists as the case of Facebook approval of ads promoting assassination of Pro-Palestine activists (Intercept, 21st November 2023) demonstrates. It is understood that certain protests are politically convenient and media scholars have typically demonstrated this through questions of news representation, suppression and cooptation of political events (see Gamson 2004; Cottle 2008; Tufekci 2014). But less is understood about the outcomes, and in particular consequences for social movements, of selective media spotlight. This requires new ways of thinking of media repression, transnational acticvism and activism in the peripheries.

The end of the Cold War and the emergence of a multipolar order is accompanied by movements and populist formations that often lie outside neat ideological binaries. In this area Moss et al. (2022) highlight specific attention to be paid on how host country contexts, bilateral alliances, and regional security arrangements shape the contours of transnational repression. Greater understanding is also required on the motivations behind repression beyond calculated deterrence to notions of fury, revenge, perceived injustice or even as a performance (Earl and Braithwaite, 2022).

Some key questions the issue will address

This issue seeks to examine the forms, causes, and consequences of transnational repression (TR) across regimes, and how activists resist or adapt to reshape the legitimacy and resilience of their movements. It invites reflection on how repertoires of contention respond to digital surveillance, cyberattacks, and information control, and under what conditions they succeed or fail. Contributors are encouraged to consider how movements can draw from global strategies of resistance amid evolving censorship and repression. We invite in-depth empirical, historical and theoretical analyses, case studies and regional explorations, reports, opinion pieces, relevant interviews and other significant material, short contributions centred on transnational repressive repertoires from around the world. We also welcome toolkits, cheat sheets, tutorials and repositories that promote open source information sharing and fact-checking. They can address questions that are not limited to the following:

How do targeted activist communities reconfigure their activism, alliances, and security practices in response to TR? How do movement activists protect, resist and adapt to challengers from abroad, and in liaison with local partners?
How do South-South dynamics complicate the standard authoritarian-liberal binary in movement repression? How to explain TR within regional hegemonies or security communities?
Do we require new theoretical or methodological approaches to examine repression, in particular TR? Is there a need to rethink the meaning of TR given its diverse, interdisciplinary and cross cutting manifestations? What conceptual integration would that entail with social movement theory?
In what ways are liberal democracies complicit in repressing movements—through passive mechanisms (e.g., surveillance technology exports, data sharing with hostile states) or active complicity (e.g., deportations, red notices)? What are the emotional, affective, and performative dimensions of repression beyond strategic deterrence—e.g., revenge, humiliation, or sovereign assertion?
How do host country legal systems, intelligence cooperation, and bilateral security arrangements enable or resist TR practices? How do legal frameworks—such as international human rights law, asylum law, or extradition treaties—constrain or facilitate the reach of repressive states?
How are the various dimensions of TR intersectional and gendered? Are some forms of movements and movement actors under heightened risk of repression?
To what extent do global media platforms act as both sites of exposure and instruments of suppression in TR campaigns? What lessons can movements draw from the experience of TR victims with regards to media awareness, media coverage and representation?
How does media coverage, or lack thereof, movements in the peripheries by societies in the core impact their legitimacy and success? What is the discursive, symbolic, and representational nature of this impact for activists, their actions and targets? How can movements respond to these reflexive interventions in their practice? Is there a potential for substantive outcomes from performative activism?
How does digital repression, including cyber harassment and algorithmic censorship, restructure global information flows and activist ecologies? What are some of the ways activists can protect themselves from censorship and surveillance in the digital realm?
Are there best practices, movement and/or community-led initiatives, for fact-checking and truth seeking, specially in the digital realm? What are the ethics and limits of journalistic, fact-checking, or whistleblowing labor under sustained transnational surveillance and threat?

Submission information and important dates

All contributions should go to the appropriate regional editors listed on our website. The deadline for initial submissions to this issue, to be published in October/November 2026, is 30 March 2026. We encourage authors to submit a 250 to 500-word abstract to help us engender a coherent conversation between the various contributions to this issue. For non-standard academic contributions (interviews, audio-files, toolkits, literary writings, social movement and activist notes, etc), we recommend you provide us with a short description of the content and form of your submission. This is not mandatory for your submission to be accepted, but it will also help you prepare your submission.

Anonymous submissions:

To support researchers at risk of repression, we are happy to publish articles with a pseudonym where necessary. We have set up a secure ProtonMail address for submissions, interface_submissions@proton.me, where you can let us know both your official name and the one you want to publish under. We can then confirm the authenticity of your claim as author of the article, if repression eases or if you move to another country etc. To submit your work securely, please create your own ProtonMail account and use it to send your submission to our email address. When creating your account, do not provide a recovery email or phone number – select “skip” if asked. Set strong passwords and enable two-factor authentication for added protection.

Timeline and deadlines:

Abstracts and descriptions of submissions: 30 January 2026
Deadline for all submissions: 30 March 2026
Review and production process until publication: October/November 2026

Please see the guidelines for contributors for more indications on content and style. Submission templates are available online via the guidelines page and should be used to ensure correct formatting. Interface is a completely voluntary effort, without the resources of commercial journals, so we have to do all the layout and typesetting ourselves. The only way we can manage this is to ask authors to use these templates when preparing submissions. We can accept material in Bengali, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Spanish.

References

Cottle, S. (2008). Reporting demonstrations: the changing media politics of dissent. Media, Culture & Society, 30(6), 853–872.
Earl, J., & Braithwaite, J. M. (2022). Layers of Political Repression: Integrating Research on Social Movement Repression. Annual Review of Law and Social Science. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-050520
Facebook approved an Israeli Ad calling for assassination of pro-Palestine activist. The Intercept. 21st November 2023.
Gamson, W. A. (2004). Bystanders, Public Opinion and the Media. In D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Graves, L. (2016). Boundaries Not Drawn: Mapping the institutional roots of the global fact-checking movement. Journalism Studies,19(5), 613–631. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1196602
Lewis, D. (2015). Illiberal Spaces”: Uzbekistan’s extraterritorial security practices and the spatial politics of contemporary authoritarianism. Nationalities Papers, 43(1), 140–159.
Moss, D. M., Michaelsen, M., & Kennedy, G. (2022). Going after the family: Transnational repression and the proxy punishment of Middle Eastern diasporas. Global Networks, 22(4), 735–751. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12372
Turse, 2025. News Graveyards: How Dangers to War Reporters Endanger the World. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Brown University.
Tufekci, Z. (2014). Social Movements and Governments in the Digital Age: Evaluating a Complex Landscape. Journal of International Affairs, 68(1), 1–19.

A PDF version of this call can be downloaded here.

Interface Statement of Solidarity

Justice for Gaza,

Freedom for Palestine

We, the editorial collective of Interface, stand in steadfast solidarity with the Palestinian people in their enduring struggle against elimination, apartheid, and dehumanization. We denounce the current genocidal belligerence being faced by Gaza at the hands of the Israeli Occupying Forces as not only acts of physical eradication and crimes against humanity, but systemic forms of hostile aggression that are facilitating the cultural and epistemic erasure of Palestine. As a non-commercial open access academic journal committed to critical education, we also remain deeply concerned and condemn Israel’s orchestrated campaigns of scholasticide, educide, and epistemicide, which have targeted universities, schools, research institutes, scholarship, and the right all Palestinians should enjoy to collectively imagine and co-create liberated and life-affirming futures through their education system.

In Gaza, universities have been bombed and schools obliterated while students, teachers, professors, poets, artists, cleaners, journalists, scientists, nurses, farmers, doctors, and children alike have been harassed, assaulted, and imprisoned—if not killed. Public libraries, hospitals, health centres, historical archives, refugee shelters, community gardens, and indigenous food systems—key sources of collective memory, cultural heritage, and communal health—have been razed and reduced to ashes. The premeditated attacks by the Israeli state and settlers are intentionally aimed at annihilating the intellectual foundations, land relations, conditions of life, and warranted resistance of subjugated Palestinians who have been fighting for survival and self-determination for generations. As we write, a professional army bankrolled by imperial power is uprooting and murdering defenseless civilians. Enough is enough.

Globally, the appalling yet blatant complicity—if not active participation—of governments and universities in accelerating the Gaza genocide is as conspicuous as it is unconscionable. Financial investments, research contracts, and collaboration agreements with arms companies that commercially benefit from the horrific machinations of war, demolition, and dispossession all starkly reveal academia’s role in perpetuating the systematic destruction of Palestine. Simultaneously, the repression of pro-Palestinian student movements and peace encampments—through surveillance, censorship, smear campaigns, police brutality, and state violence—casts critical light on the bitter lengths to which university leaders will go to vindictively silence students, punish dissent, and suppress critical consciousness as a means of shielding their vested interests and pathological commitments to shamelessly maintaining “business as usual”.

This complicity is an indictment of university managers and senior leadership teams who, whilst hiding behind closed doors and futilely attempting to absolve themselves via equivocation and obfuscation, continue to prioritise profit, superficial PR campaigns, concentrated power, and their own outsized and unearned salaries over empathy, compassion, and ethical practice. More broadly, it lays bare the failure of universities worldwide to uphold their purported commitments to equity, inclusion, serious inquiry, and producing and protecting the “socially conscious global citizens” they so frequently pride themselves on. Across academia, the bottom line, obsessive fixations on growth, and individual career ambitions must not take precedence over international solidarity, supporting student mobilizations, and the wholesale decimation of Palestine’s education system. For any university staff member who claims to value, perform, and see merit in diversity, carework, and mutual aid—now is your time to act.

On these points and in light of the ongoing occupation of Palestine and merciless siege on Gaza at present, we reject all empty rhetoric and hollow appeals to “complexity”, as well as any deceptive narrative that attempts to elide empire, omit historical context, or cunningly diminish the genocide of Palestinians as merely a “humanitarian crisis”. We further repudiate any feckless assertion suggesting institutional silence vis-a-vis complicity with Israeli settler colonial atrocities is the best way forward. Equally, we deplore any glib argument that education, classroom content, and research agendas should be “neutral” and “objective.” Such fraught contentions are at once oblivious fictions and tacit recourses to inaction, abandonment, and disavowal—not to mention deliberate political decisions taken and choices made to uncritically reproduce an oppressively racist and ruthlessly lethal status quo.

With respect to higher education, university managers, administrators, researchers, professors, students, and service staff comprise a global community. We are accountable to others, regardless of difference or distance, and bear the responsibility of being guided by this reality and offering sanctuary accordingly—borders be damned. Apathy, indifference, acquiescence, and denial in the face of deracination and genocide is unacceptable and must be refused. Education is either a means to critical discernment and collective liberation—or it is nothing. We stand with Palestinian colleagues, students, and communities in their fight for freedom, justice, and self-determination. The extermination of their loved ones and erasure of their knowledge, voices, stories, songs, and dreams cannot be met with contemptuous silence, liberal bystanding, and cynical lip service. This is a matter of life and death.

As a scholarly journal committed to collective ethics, global solidarity, and principled action, we therefore call for the following:

An immediate end to investments, research partnerships, and funding agreements with arms manufacturers, corporations, and subsidiaries complicit in the occupation of Palestine.
The amplification of Palestinian scholarship, histories, voices, and testimonies in defiance of the hostile systems, states, and occupying settlers that seek to erase and eliminate them.
A collective academic boycott of institutions participating or complicit in Israeli apartheid, settler colonial violence against Palestine, and genocidal actions and war crimes in Gaza.
Active support for pro-Palestinian student movements and an end to the repression of activists as a means of ensuring that universities remain places for solidarity and dissent.
An immediate end to all university involvement with or support for civil and criminal cases targeting staff and students who have been involved in opposing the Gaza genocide.

An injury to Gaza is an injury to us all.

For a world where many worlds fit …and a free Palestine,

The Interface Editorial Collective

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