Geneva, Switzerland

Most people have heard, at least vaguely, about “transnational repression”: states or powerful actors reaching across borders to harass, threaten, or silence their critics abroad. That framework assumes a clear sender, a clear target, and a chain of actions that crosses nation‑state lines. What I and others are living is something different.

Current work on transnational repression focuses on states targeting dissidents abroad; Global Repression Studies asks what happens when a repressive architecture is already present wherever the target goes.

What I am calling Global Repression Studies starts from a darker, more unsettling premise: there is already a repression network in place almost everywhere a target can go. It is not just one country exporting fear. It is a distributed infrastructure comprised of ex‑military and private security people with military backgrounds, local “helpers” and deputized civilians, and additional operatives deployed into a region when needed that can be activated wherever a person shows up.

In many large cities, it feels less like someone is reaching in from abroad and more like the machinery is already there, waiting. In smaller cities or towns, it feels like there are people who have signed up to participate formally or informally alongside teams sent in from elsewhere. The message to the target is simple: there is no escape. Movement is reduced to choosing which version of the same architecture you will face.

This is not just about surveillance. It is about being hunted: followed from place to place, surrounded by coordinated actors who can blend into the civilian population but behave like a roaming, modular security apparatus. Ex‑military operators and private security contractors provide the skill set, while civilians from various social and professional backgrounds are brought into the outer rings of the operation. Together, they create a constantly shifting pressure field around a person’s life.

The cruelty of this is doubled by the fact that there is essentially no victim infrastructure for it. There is no standard category for “hunted across jurisdictions by a distributed, semi‑covert network,” no box to tick on a police form, no established protocol that says, “This is how we respond when the harm is everywhere and the actors are layered and deniable.” The result is that the victim carries two impossible loads at once:

• The harm itself: the fear, exhaustion, forced moves, loss of safety and stability.

• The burden of proof: having to somehow “prove” to institutions and professionals that what is happening is real, systemic, and deliberate.

Most people, including many working in related fields, simply cannot grasp what is being described. Their mental models are built on single jurisdictions, individual bad actors, or clearly defined criminal groups. They are not built for a world where a person can travel thousands of miles and meet the same tactics, the same patterns, the same types of actors, over and over again. So when a target tries to explain, they are often met with disbelief, minimisation, or pathologisation.

From the inside, it feels like living in a war zone that only you can see: a war zone where the uniforms have been swapped for street clothes, the bases replaced by rented apartments or ordinary vehicles, and the front line is wherever you happen to be standing. The people around you may look like ordinary neighbours, tourists, commuters. Some of them are. Some of them are not.

Global Repression Studies, as I use the term here, is not an academic luxury. It is a survival need. It is an attempt to name a reality that currently falls between all our existing concepts: between transnational repression, organised crime, private security, counter‑terror paradigms, and crowd‑sourced harassment. Without a name, there is no field. Without a field, there are no standards, no data, no safeguards, and no guardrails.

What is needed is:

• A vocabulary that recognises global repression networks as a phenomenon in their own right.

• Research that maps how these networks are structured, funded, and activated across jurisdictions.

• Legal and policy frameworks that stop placing the entire evidentiary burden on isolated individuals and start recognising patterns of coordinated, cross‑context harm.

• Victim‑centred infrastructure that assumes the harm can be both real and hard to prove, and that offers support without demanding impossible levels of documentation.

This is not just about my case. It is about the others known and unknown who are being pushed from place to place, written off as unstable, or crushed silently under a system that has not yet learned how to see them. If anything happens to me, my hope is that the documents I leave behind will help others investigate this, name it, and build the guardrails that should have been there all along.

Until then, this is my contribution: to say, clearly and publicly, that what is happening is not just transnational repression as we currently understand it. It is something broader, more embedded, and more disturbing. And it demands a field and a response of its own.

For me as well as other victims, this is not hypothetical; it is our daily reality.

Beyond surveillance: extrajudicial elimination

The most damning part of what I am describing is not the unlawful surveillance or device monitoring. Those are serious, but they are not the core. The core is chemical suppression that functions as extrajudicial elimination: an attempt to disable or destroy a person without charges, trial, or acknowledgement.

Within this global repression infrastructure, surveillance is the targeting system. The end point is harm to the body and mind. The methods I am pointing to are not metaphorical “attacks” but the use of military‑grade technologies and delivery methods in open, civilian spaces, in ways that are designed to be deniable and technically hard to prove. The goal is to remove someone as an effective human being, cognitively, physically, socially, while leaving no conventional record of an assassination.

This is why the absence of a victim infrastructure is so catastrophic. There is no clear category for “slow, technologically enabled, chemically mediated elimination by distributed actors.” There is no standard protocol that says, if someone reports these patterns, here is how we test, document, and protect. Instead, the target is left to carry the damage and the burden of proof at the same time, while the operations continue in plain sight.

If this description is even partially accurate for more than one person, then the problem is not just surveillance abuse. It is the existence of an architecture for extrajudicial elimination embedded inside everyday civilian life, and our current legal, medical, and human‑rights frameworks are not built to see it, let alone stop it.

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