This series of events showcases recent research from across the interdisciplinary field of global governance. They are organised by the Global Governance Centre on behalf of all the partners of the Global Governance Research Centre Consortium.
Authoritarian regimes increasingly cooperate through regional international organisations to counter threats to their rule.
In this talk, Schneider argues that these organisations perform three political functions for their members—pooling material resources, coordinating security, and legitimating authoritarian rule—and that regimes embedded in more authoritarian organisational networks become more resilient to political change.
Drawing on new cross-national data on autocratic cooperation around transnational repression, Schneider shows that the more organisations 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 demobilises diaspora activists, spreads fear, and encourages self-censorship, neutralising a threat that regimes would otherwise struggle to contain.