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Efforts to extend repression beyond national borders have become one of the governance challenges of the current global ‘third wave’ of autocratisation. Countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the People’s Republic of China use techniques that range from digital surveillance to harassment and violence targeting perceived critics and suspects, including but not limited to their own citizens residing abroad. While transnational repression attempts are often framed as attacks on host state sovereignty, a liberal analysis characterizes them primarily as a violation of the human rights of individual repression targets and a systemic attack on the rule of law in the host state. Failure or inability to provide protection against these autocratic governance practices, therefore, challenges host states’ legitimacy. Democracies such as the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union Member States need to consider the unwelcome implications of this effect when making laws and taking other measures to counter transnational repression efforts. To avoid reshaping themselves in the image of the autocracy they are claiming to oppose, they must avoid illiberal regulation and punitive overdrive, as well as complicity with transnational repression.
About the Speaker
Eva Pils is Professor of Law at King's College London, an affiliated scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School, and an external member of the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg. She studied law, philosophy, and sinology in Heidelberg, London, and Beijing and holds a PhD in law from University College London. Her current research addresses autocratic conceptions and practices of governance, legal and political resistance, and forms of complicity with autocratic wrongs. Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law.
Registration is required for the public and CU students, faculty, and staff not affiliated with Columbia Law School to access Jerome Greene Hall. REGISTER
