Transnational Repression Grew in 2025—and It Will Only Get Worse

Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Annabel Richter is a research associate for Southeast Asia and South Asia at CFR.

In 2025, incidents of transnational repression—efforts primarily by authoritarian governments to intimidate, harm, or even kill people they consider threats to their states, typically members of their diaspora, outside their borders—increased substantially worldwide. More powerful authoritarian states including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others have stepped up digital and in-person transnational repression worldwide, including in developed states in Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom.

Some of these developed states clearly want to minimize the issue of transnational repression to boost trade ties to countries like China, India, and Russia, among others. These wealthy states wish to do so because global economic uncertainty and U.S. tariffs even on close partners are forcing richer countries to build economic resilience requiring less dependence on trade with the United States.

For its part, the United States appears less concerned with pushing back against this deadly trend. President Donald Trump did not raise these types of abuses at an October summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and Trump hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman—whom U.S. intelligence concluded approved the murder of Saudi exile journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in 2018—at a White House black-tie dinner. The administration’s recently released National Security Strategy explicitly does not focus on rights and democracy. And in August the administration dismantled the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, which had been a bulwark against transnational repression inside the United States.

The global spike in transnational repression has gained particular traction in Southeast Asia, among other parts of the world. According to UN experts, Southeast Asia has seen an “escalating wave of transnational repression [of activists, other dissidents, and refugees] by or linked to authorities in China and several Southeast Asian countries.” Thailand has become a hub of such acts this year. Human Rights Watch in 2025 called the kingdom “a ‘swap mart’ of dissidents from other regional states, who pay Bangkok back by targeting Thai critics living in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.”

The result of these policy changes, economic concerns, and unchecked human rights abuses has created a vacuum in which bad actors and authoritarian nations can punish dissidents, critics, and members of their diaspora outside their own borders. If this trend is not challenged, both developed and undeveloped countries can expect a continued spike of transnational repression in 2026.  

The biggest offenders driving the trend

There has been a string of violent incidents involving Southeast Asian dissidents repressed outside their borders, but within the region. A recent investigative report from Human Rights Watch notes that since the 2014 Thai coup and even after the military handed back power in 2018 to a series of quasi-civilian governments, “refugees and asylum seekers in [Thailand] have faced surveillance, violence, abductions, enforced disappearances, and forced returns facilitated by the government of Thailand.” 

I have written about the gruesome incidents involving Southeast Asian dissidents across borders, including Thai activists who were found handcuffed and dead in the Mekong River, with their stomachs opened and concrete poured into their bodies in what appeared to be an assassination in Laos. The Human Rights Watch investigation found that other Thai anti-monarchy activists have disappeared or been detained in Vietnam, or secretly deported back to Thailand, while other activists have disappeared in Cambodia and Laos, their cases conspicuously unsolved. The report also shares instances of other nationals going missing, killed, or abducted in Thailand, such as the disappearance [PDF] of Laotian democracy and human rights advocates and a Malaysian transgender LGBT rights influencer who was repatriated.  

As I have previously pointed out, an October report from the United Nations’ Human Rights Council also notes that a major reason that transnational repression across borders has increased is because of “a significant number of cases of Chinese transnational repression.” For instance, an April report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) showed that Chinese transnational repression had recently become so omnipresent that it is effective in at least twenty-three countries, as well as at the United Nations. China is by far the biggest user of transnational repression in the world.

The United States is not unaffected by China’s efforts and transgressions. In fact, Chinese transnational repression inside the United States—of exiled dissidents and critics, of Chinese national students studying in the United States, and many others—is skyrocketing. The 2025 edition of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China report, released December 10, reports: “Beyond China’s borders, transnational repression reaches into diaspora communities in America and abroad—covert ‘overseas police’ activity, harassment of dissidents with bounties placed on their heads and cyber operations aimed at critics and journalists, often employing pressure on families back home.”

Developed states drop enforcement standards

The United States, Europe, and many other developed states are devoting fewer resources to addressing the problem, despite warnings by some lawmakers and attempts to pass legislation about transnational repression as well as surveillance by major autocratic powers. (Congress introduced the Transnational Repression Policy Act in 2025, but it has not passed, and Canada has begun to take steps to combat transnational Chinese repression.)

In part, this decline in enforcement and highlighting of transnational repression is because, as mentioned above, many developed countries have refocused their human rights policies on other issues. While some states have pushed back against such repression in the past, many countries are now prioritizing closer ties to authoritarian economic powers and downplaying repressive and even fatal actions by their authoritarian counterparts.

In one of many examples of this trend, in June 2025 Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Canada. They agreed to a reset in relations, including re-establishing high commissions in Delhi and Ottawa. This reset came following two years of significant bilateral diplomatic tensions after Justin Trudeau, who was then Canada’s prime minister, publicly accused India of orchestrating the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar—a Canadian citizen and prominent Sikh separatist—outside Vancouver in 2023. (India denied involvement and the two states then engaged in a tit-for-tat diplomatic battle.)

Other global leaders have taken the same approach as Carney toward China, India, Russia and other autocratic states. Germany and Vietnam have in recent years rapidly expanded their strategic and economic links, even though Germany accused Vietnam, one of the most authoritarian states in the world, of abducting a Vietnamese businessman from Berlin in 2017. French President Emanuel Macron recently visited China and held warm meetings with Xi, even though Beijing has stepped up intimidation of critics of the Chinese regime in France. China has even tried to use French laws to silence Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities living in France.

There will likely be more instances of these kinds of efforts in the future, especially since there appear to be fewer efforts to defend against human rights abuses. Having sent the message to China, India, Russia, and others that there are fewer safeguards against autocrats’ power beyond their borders, developed countries—and the world—will likely have to contend with these types of intimidation tactics and crimes occurring more often within their own.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.