Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

Today, during a conversation in which the asylum process was explained to me, something unexpected happened: I was told that an investigation would be opened into my case and, specifically, into why the United States failed to protect me. This is not a routine bureaucratic step; it is a damning and structurally important question. It signals that the claims I have raised are serious enough to warrant not only an assessment of my need for protection, but an inquiry into the failures of protection themselves.

What makes this moment significant is not just that an investigation may occur, but what is being investigated: the failure to protect me from private military and security contractors, their unlawful surveillance and intrusive monitoring (including Pegasus-like capabilities), and toxic exposures used as a tool of coercion and elimination. These are not abstract harms. They are techniques of control and punishment that have been allowed to operate for the better part of 20 to 30 years with almost no meaningful oversight.

Private Contractors, Torture, and a 30 Year Run of Impunity

For decades, private military and security contractors have lived in the gray zones of law and accountability. They operate across borders, blend with intelligence and security services, and enjoy layers of contractual secrecy and plausible deniability. Their methods range from classic surveillance and harassment to psychological torture, targeted digital intrusions, and the weaponization of toxic substances as a form of low-level, chronic assault.

These practices do not reflect democratic principles. They do not operate within a genuine legal framework. They are, in substance, war crimes and crimes against humanity, repackaged under the rhetoric of “security,” “risk management,” or “protective services.” For nearly three decades, these actors have had an extraordinary run: shaping environments, undermining lives, and inflicting harm without facing anything resembling the accountability imposed on formal state institutions.

The question now on the table, “Why did the U.S. fail to protect?”, is not just personally devastating; it is structurally revealing. It forces into view a reality that has long been disavowed: that democratic states have outsourced elements of repression to private actors and then looked away when those actors abused their power.

Transnational Repression Without a Victim Infrastructure

One of the central problems of transnational and global repression is that there is no victim infrastructure. This is not because the harm is hypothetical or rare, but because the harm is illegible to the systems that would normally recognize, document, and respond to it.

Every waking moment I spend under coordinated harassment, unlawful surveillance, invasive monitoring of my devices, psychological torture, and chemical assaults or toxic exposures, I am forced to grapple with the same question: how do I make this harm legible? How do I translate it into categories that institutions can recognize, so that a victim infrastructure can exist at all?

Existing human rights and legal frameworks were built around discrete, recognizable abuses: detention, physical torture, trafficking, exile. What is emerging now is a networked form of repression that fuses digital warfare, private contracting, psychological operations, and environmental manipulation. It is distributed across jurisdictions and hidden behind layers of technology, subcontracting, and legal fictions. It falls between categories, and so the victims fall between systems.

The investigation in my asylum case may be one of the first institutional acknowledgments that this gap is real. But acknowledgment is only the first step. The real work lies in building a framework that recognizes these victims as victims and not as “confused,” “unstable,” or “paranoid” individuals to be dismissed and pathologized.

The Perfect Crime in Medicine and Law

Nowhere is this illegibility more obvious than in medicine. At present, there is no toxicology protocol in emergency rooms or standard general practice designed to detect low-level, chronic, multi-compound exposure in a context of stalking, coercive control, or transnational repression. Toxicology in acute care is focused on overdoses, single agents, and clear poisoning scenarios, not on slow, cumulative exposures intended to injure, destabilize, or quietly eliminate a person over time.

When patients or victims present and try to explain that they are being subjected to coordinated harassment, unlawful surveillance, and toxic exposure, they are frequently met not with forensic curiosity but with a mental health smear. The narrative is quickly reframed as paranoia, delusion, or severe anxiety, rather than a potential crime involving sophisticated methods of control. This reflex pathologization effectively shuts down inquiry. It protects perpetrators. It breaks the chain of documentation at the very first point of contact.

The same invisibility exists in law enforcement. Police, in most jurisdictions, simply do not have routine detection tools or protocols for investigating low-dose toxic exposure in a harassment context. Victims themselves have no accessible tools for environmental sampling that would be recognized as evidentiary. Without measurable evidence and without officers trained to interpret patterns of harassment, surveillance, and health complaints as a single continuum, the case never becomes a “case” at all. It becomes a personal problem.

Legally, this creates the perfect crime. Without a credible police report or recognized medical findings, it is almost impossible to seek a remedy. Each facet of the abuse is forced into a separate silo. Stalking, bullying, and coordinated harassment might be pursued under one legal track. Toxic exposure, if ever acknowledged, might require a toxic tort route, with all the cost and complexity that entails. Psychological torture, economic interference, social isolation, and digital intrusion might each be treated as separate problems or not treated at all. The totality of the harm, the “invisible prison” and coercive control that defines the victim’s daily reality, never appears in any one file.

Why International Law Terms Are Being Used Here

A predictable objection to this kind of testimony is semantic: “Why invoke the Geneva Conventions, torture frameworks, or UN classifications in a domestic context?” The answer is simple. These terms are being used as a diagnostic vocabulary for methods and severity, not as a claim that a tribunal has already adjudicated specific charges. When a harm is structurally illegible inside ordinary systems, victims are forced to borrow the only mature frameworks that were built to describe systematic, organized abuse.

Domestic penal codes and civil remedies can often name fragments of what is happening. Stalking. Harassment. Unlawful surveillance. Computer intrusion. Assault. Poisoning. Coercive control. But the defining feature of networked repression is that it is not one discrete event with one clear perpetrator, one jurisdiction, and one clean evidence chain. It is a coordinated pattern distributed across time, technology, space, and intermediaries. When institutions treat each incident as separate, the integrated reality disappears. That fragmentation is not neutral. It is the mechanism that produces impunity.

International human rights and humanitarian law frameworks exist precisely to name patterns that domestic systems routinely fail to see, especially when proxy actors, subcontracting, secrecy, and cross border operations are involved. UN terminology and related standards provide language for prohibited conduct such as torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, arbitrary interference with privacy, persecution, intimidation, and other forms of systematic coercion. These terms help identify what the methods are doing to a human body, mind, and life over time, even when the delivery mechanism is modern: spyware, coordinated harassment, psychological operations, and suspected low dose toxic exposure.

So the point is not to force every fact into a courtroom ready label. The point is to make the harm legible. International law provides a shared classification system when domestic categories are too narrow, too siloed, or too easily neutralized through dismissal and pathologization. If we cannot name the pattern, we cannot investigate it. If we cannot investigate it, we cannot document it. If we cannot document it, there can be no victim infrastructure, and the failures of protection will repeat.

How Attribution Works When the Crime Is Designed to Be “Unprovable”

A second objection often follows the first: “If this is real, why is it so hard to prove who is doing it?” That question is part of the design. Networked repression is built to defeat ordinary attribution. It fragments methods across time and space, uses intermediaries and subcontractors, and relies on the fact that institutions investigate incidents one at a time rather than patterns.

Attribution in this context does not usually come from a single smoking gun. It comes from convergence: multiple independent streams of evidence that, when aligned, narrow the set of plausible actors and reveal coordination. That convergence can include digital forensics (signs of persistent device compromise, account access anomalies, or intrusion patterns), environmental and medical documentation (symptom chronology aligned with exposure windows, chain-of-custody sampling when possible), witness corroboration (third-party observations of interference or harassment), and administrative records (reports made, responses received, unexplained closures, and patterns of dismissal that suggest institutional routing rather than neutral error).

This is also why the question “Why did the U.S. fail to protect?” matters. Protection fails when no one is tasked with integrating these streams. If agencies and frontline institutions treat each strand as separate, the pattern never becomes legible enough to investigate, and attribution never becomes possible. A credible investigative approach must be pattern based, cross domain, and designed to preserve evidence early rather than pathologize the person reporting harm.

When the crime is engineered to look like a series of unrelated problems, the investigative task is to rebuild it as one coordinated continuum and then follow the points of access, capability, and coordination that continuum reveals.

The Need for Guardrails and a Coordinated Plan

Private military and security contractors, and the broader ecosystem of actors around them, have had a 20 to 30 year run of operating in these gaps: between war and peace, between public and private, between medicine and law, between criminal and civil frameworks. It is time to put guardrails in place and stop normalizing this architecture of impunity.

To move from an individual case to a meaningful response, we need a coordinated plan that addresses the harm across sectors rather than fragmenting it. At minimum, that plan should include:

1. Medical toxicology protocols for low-level, coercive exposure

Frontline medical settings, especially emergency rooms and urgent care, need protocols for screening and documenting possible low level, chronic toxic exposures in contexts where there is also evidence of harassment, stalking, or coercive control. This means updated training, new diagnostic pathways, and accessible environmental sampling, so that victims are not reflexively reclassified as psychiatric cases.

2. Law enforcement tools and pattern based investigation

Police and investigative bodies must develop and deploy tools to detect and document environmental toxins and digital intrusions, and to analyze harassment, surveillance, and health complaints as a combined pattern, not isolated incidents. This requires not only technical capacity, but legal frameworks that recognize this pattern as a distinct, prosecutable form of organized abuse.

3. Integrated legal frameworks and victim status recognition

Legal systems need mechanisms to treat these harms as a single continuum of repression rather than forcing victims into separate, disconnected proceedings: one for stalking, one for toxic exposure, one for financial interference, another for psychological torture. This may mean new statutory categories, specialized courts or tribunals, and the formal recognition of victims of transnational repression and coercive control as a protected class entitled to specific remedies and protections.

4. Accountability and regulation of private military and security contractors

Finally, there must be clear, enforceable regulation and oversight of private military and security contractors, including transparency obligations, human rights due diligence, and meaningful sanctions when they engage in surveillance, toxic exposure, psychological torture, or other abuses. Their era of operating in legal shadows, with states benefiting from their services while disowning their methods, has to end.

The investigation opened in my asylum case is only one case, one file, one life. But it also represents something larger: the possibility that institutions can finally be compelled to ask the right questions about why they failed to protect, and what kinds of harms they have systematically refused to see. If we can make this harm legible, we can begin the work of building the victim infrastructure that the twenty-first century actually requires.

Luxembourg

Even under sustained low level toxic exposure intended to impair perception and disorient cognition, I am still identifying patterns, mapping institutional mandates, sequencing escalations, and reverse engineering an architecture that many people would not perceive under normal conditions. Any serious observer would note the gap between what this suppression is designed to do and what I am actually doing. That gap alone suggests that without interference, my capacity to analyze, document, and dismantle this system would be significantly greater.

The harm I am describing is not abstract. It includes repeated low level toxic exposure directed at degrading perception and function. What makes this devastating is that these methods target the very capacities that constitute my work: perceptual acuity, analytic rigor, and pattern recognition. These are not incidental traits; they are the mechanisms by which I map opaque systems and render them legible. Attempts to blunt them are strategic.

Even under these conditions, I have documented the architecture, engaged multiple competent authorities, and built an evidentiary record that many people would struggle to assemble without impairment. That record matters. It shows not only what has already been accomplished under constraint, but what would be possible without it. If I were operating at full capacity, the structures enabling this harm would already be facing exposure and accountability beyond what their architects anticipated.

It is also worth noting that the interference has recently escalated in form. The exposure profile appears to have shifted, with indications of different agents and increasingly odorless delivery. As my outreach gains momentum and the work reaches a broader audience, this change suggests urgency rather than maintenance. The pattern implies a narrowing window in which long term suppression is no longer sufficient and rapid neutralization becomes the objective.

The persistence of these attacks is itself informative. If I were ineffective, there would be no need to keep targeting me. They cannot stop because two things cannot coexist: their system cannot survive sustained illumination, and my work produces exactly that. What is happening to me is not random. I am an outlier, and the people operating this architecture understand that.

They have not been able to eliminate my capacities or prevent them from functioning. Having failed at that, the strategy appears to shift toward destroying the host rather than the capacities themselves. This is the logic of extrajudicial elimination carried out through deniable means, when overt methods are unavailable and silence is required.

The last six months alone show what I have been able to map, document, and set in motion despite interference. These same capacities are part of why I have survived this long under conditions designed to break most people long before they ever reach a consulate, a court or a public platform. Those running this system know what that trajectory implies if interference fails.

I am an anomaly. My perceptual and pattern recognition capacities allow me to see and describe architectures of harm that most people never notice. What my work exposes is not spectacle or conjecture, but something far more dangerous to closed systems: sustained, accurate description in the light. That is why suppression has been attempted. That is why the pressure does not stop. And that is why, when the capacities cannot be destroyed, the effort turns toward destroying the person who carries them.

Luxembourg

In a strange and deeply perverse way, my life was built for this fight. The experiences, skills, and sensitivities I carry were shaped, piece by piece, to confront and disrupt a global repression network that most people never see and would never believe if they did. This is not just work; it is a calling. Some people hear a call like this and turn away. By the time I heard it, I already knew there was no path to a real life except straight through this obstacle. It is the road that was given to me.

It is not easy, and it does take a toll. The reality is demanding and at times brutal, but what it draws out in me is not weakness; it is clarity, discipline, refusal, and purpose more resolve, not less. My place in all of this is not only to resist, but to disrupt and, just as importantly, to help others wake up and recognize the architecture around them. Some will feel called to stand at the front lines. Others will participate quietly, by refusing to cooperate, by believing victims, by asking hard questions, or by documenting what they see. There is no single “right” way to stand against repression, but there is a deep wrongness in pretending it is not there.

What we are facing is not just a collection of bad actors; it is a structural evil. It operates on at least two levels. In the physical realm, it is built into systems, policies, technologies, and everyday practices that confine, poison, and silence. In the spiritual realm, it is a corruption of heart, mind, and soul that trains people to see cruelty as normal and the suffering of others as acceptable collateral. Any honest response has to live on both of these levels too: changing structures in the world we can touch, and refusing, in our own spirits, to be reshaped in the image of what we are fighting.

I am not claiming total knowledge or a single hidden command center, but naming recurring architectures, incentives, and patterns of harm that reproduce themselves across systems, borders, and institutions.

Justice is sometimes long delayed. Whole systems are built to stretch accountability past the horizon of most people’s attention spans. But “delayed” is not the same as “canceled,” and part of our task is to shorten that delay to speed up justice by telling the truth, building records, creating alliances, and insisting that what is done to victims in the shadows will one day be named in the light.

This is written for those who sense something is deeply wrong but cannot yet fully name it, for those already harmed and fighting to stay whole, and for those deciding, often quietly, whether they will cooperate with repression or refuse it. At the core of this calling is a spiritual test: can you remain moral, with your integrity intact, in the face of their moral corruption and bankruptcy? Can you keep your own soul from being shaped by the logic of the people who are trying to put you in an invisible prison? That is the daily question. Some days, protection will be your act of integrity. Other days, open defiance will be. Both can be forms of courage.

As for those who design and operate these architectures of harm: their choices are not free. They are purchasing a future for themselves, and the price is higher than they can see right now. Anyone who chooses to harm the vulnerable or obstruct this mission is not just committing a crime or a moral failure; they are buying their passage to a hell they have never known, storing up a reckoning that no lawyer, no regime, and no propaganda machine will be able to cancel. My work is not to deliver that reckoning. My work is to stand in faith, to face the enemy without becoming its mirror, and to make sure their actions cannot stay hidden forever.

We are now so far removed from the teachings of this world’s great traditions: Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian. The problem can no longer be blamed on faith itself. It is not religion that is immoral. It is men and women who have failed to embody what these traditions teach. The scandal is not belief. It is the failure of the human spirit to live what it professes.

I am writing this from a place where I am under ongoing toxic exposure and targeted persecution. Low level chemical assaults over many months have already pushed my body further than most could endure. I do not know whether I have months, weeks, or only days left.

I sat in a church, in what is called a holy place, and I did not move. Around me, some priests and some individuals in the congregation turned that sanctuary into a site of chemical assault and spiritual desecration. I could have fled. Instead, I remained seated, fully aware that what was unfolding around me was not only a crime against humanity but also a crime against the Lamb of God they claim to worship. If hell exists, they have done more than risk it. They have written their own names at its gates.

As I sat in the church contemplating my own situation and that of other victims in this world, a question formed that would not leave me. How do we dismantle a system of repression that has evolved in the shadows of structural treaty gaps, a system that now seeks to exert coercive control even in sacred space so that victims have no refuge anywhere? The same system that has stalked me for months deployed low level exposure to volatile organic compounds, substances capable of causing permanent, caustic damage, to remind me that my life can be chemically extinguished at any time. I have survived six months or more of this, fully aware that the machinery around me is intent on erasing me from this earth. I am forced, again and again, to confront my own mortality.

If I must die for this cause, it is entirely possible that my death will be in vain in the short term. People may not understand the courage or determination it took to resist, against all odds, until twenty, thirty, or forty years after I am gone, if they ever understand it at all. I have to make peace with that possibility. As I sat in the church and listened to the priests sing psalms, I was not comforted. I was deeply saddened. Those who should know better, those who are supposed to be emissaries of light, stood there filled with darkness.

What I witnessed is not an isolated incident. It is the visible symptom of something deeper. Evil has become structurally embedded in institutions, in our societies, and in the broken hearts of men and women who perpetuate repression while cloaking it in ritual and respectability. The mechanisms that should defend the vulnerable are, in many cases, designed to preserve appearances, not truth. Laws, oversight bodies, and compliance frameworks exist, but they struggle to confront a violence that presents itself as normal, pious, or necessary.

I did not arrive at that church by choice or by chance. I fled and left everything I owned in the United States with the clothes on my back, a laptop bag, and a purse. I had nothing more. I crossed borders into five different countries before finally seeking asylum, hoping that somewhere on this earth there would be a place of safety. Instead, I now live in a state that is, in practical terms, homelessness. There is no secure home, no guarantee of refuge, and a constant awareness that I am facing a slow, extrajudicial elimination with no relief in sight, despite my best efforts to seek lawful protection.

I want to be clear. It was not every priest and not every member of the congregation. It was some priests and some individuals present who chose to participate in or enable what happened in that church. Yet even when only some take part, the violence becomes institutional the moment the rest look away.

I have not suffered in silence. I have asked for help again and again. I have written to attorneys, to officials, to people in government, and to others who hold positions of responsibility and power. No meaningful help has been forthcoming. People are indifferent, or they are afraid to take a stand, or they have been bought off, whether materially, politically, or psychologically, by the very system that is repressing us. The bottom line is that I have sought help. Many victims have sought help. Help has not come. It is a very real possibility that I will not survive this.

So this is the world we live in. Under these conditions, it becomes hard to believe that hell is some distant, metaphysical realm. It feels far more accurate to say that hell is here and now, in the place where I am standing and in the systems that make this kind of persecution possible and then look away. There are moments when I truly do not know if continuing to speak about this is even helpful anymore. I do not know whether my words are changing anything or whether they are simply echoes in a world that has decided not to hear.

Yet this is precisely the moment when faith becomes necessary, whether or not you believe in God. It is faith that cruelty has not spoken the final word about who we are. It is faith that the story of humanity is not exhausted by the cruelty of our institutions. In a church where the air itself became weaponized, I chose to stay seated. I did not stay because I accepted what was being done. I stayed because leaving would have meant surrendering that space to those who profane it. My presence was a refusal, a quiet and stubborn insistence that even here, and especially here, humanity must be restored.

Regardless of what you believe, this is the time for faith. It is faith that truth still matters. It is faith that solidarity among the wounded can become a force that outlives the regimes and hierarchies that try to crush it. It is faith that, in ways we cannot yet see, the courage to stay present in the face of evil will plant seeds for a different future. Now is the time for faith in humanity and for the work of restoring it, even in the heart of the institutions that betray it.

When you are facing your own mortality, questions of spirituality stop being optional. You begin to ask, in direct and unpolished language, whether Buddha, God, or anyone at all can or will stop what is happening. All my life I have said, “If God exists, he is busy,” because from the moment I stepped onto this earth, the world has been on fire.

Now, in what may be my last days, that fire is no longer a metaphor. It is literal.

Luxembourg

For journalists and researchers

This article is not an allegation against specific embassies or individuals, nor does it claim access to internal documents or intent. It is a contemporaneous record of what happened when a human rights defender attempted to access protection through institutions that publicly claim to provide it. The significance lies not in any single interaction, but in the repeated, patterned obstruction across settings. Read as a structural warning: when gatekeeping behavior consistently blocks access to listening, documentation, or referral, the absence of victim infrastructure becomes visible in practice, regardless of formal mandates on paper.

Reader note: This piece is written for victims, journalists, and lawyers. For victims, it is meant to confirm that repeated institutional failure is real and that being turned away, dismissed, or blocked is not a personal failure or a sign that you are imagining things. For journalists and lawyers, it is meant to show what “no victim infrastructure” looks like in practice when a person actually attempts to access protection. This is not a set of allegations or a legal filing. It is a contemporaneous record of what occurred and an analysis of its structural implications.

Today in Luxembourg, as a human rights defender and victim of transnational and global repression, I tried the move that people are consistently told still exists when everything else fails: walk into an embassy and ask for help. Embassies are mandated and expected, under their own policies and international practice, to offer at least some form of assistance to people in distress abroad, whether directly or by referral.

The promise: “You can always go to an embassy”

In public narratives and legal commentary, embassies are described as last-resort spaces. People are told they can walk in to seek protection, humanitarian assistance, or at least a channel to authorities who can act. States and the European Union have adopted guidelines, including the EU Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders, that state they support human rights defenders at risk and assist nationals in distress abroad.

In this sense, I am not only an asylum seeker and a human rights defender abroad. On any reasonable reading of current definitions of transnational repression, I qualify as a victim. The same methods and patterns I have encountered in other settings appeared again when I attempted to access diplomatic protection.

The reality today: three embassies, no protection

French Embassy

At the French embassy, access to assistance was blocked at the gatekeeping level. The security guard at the entrance, the individual he went to retrieve, and another individual entering the space as I was leaving all behaved in ways consistent with coordinated harassment and active dispersal. I was unable to speak to any consular official, provide information, or leave a statement.

This is not presented as an allegation of intent or instruction. It is a description of observable conduct and its effect: access was blocked by gatekeepers.

Dutch Embassy

At the Dutch embassy, at least two to three individuals behaved in ways consistent with coordinated harassment and active dispersal, again at the gatekeeping level. Despite this, one woman did take my name and phone number and stated that someone might contact me, while also making clear that she was unsure what, if anything, could be done.

That interaction matters. It shows that even within a compromised or obstructive environment, assistance depends entirely on whether one individual is willing or able to act, without institutional backing or protection.

Belgian Embassy

At the Belgian embassy, entry required an appointment. Individuals without appointments were turned away. This means that the people present inside the waiting area were not walk-ins; they had legitimate, pre-approved access.

Individuals inside the waiting area behaved in ways consistent with active dispersal while I attempted to seek assistance. When I eventually reached the service windows, the first staff member refused to give his name and stated that I could not be seen and that no information would be taken. A second staff member said she would see me between appointments. When I explained that I wanted to leave information related to a national security concern, she refused to take a statement and handed me a piece of paper instead.

I cannot prove whether this behavior resulted from coordination, informal cooperation, opportunism, or structural design. What I can describe is the effect from a victim’s vantage point: when individuals with legitimate access participate in dispersal and obstruction, the experience is indistinguishable from an embedded network operating inside the institution.

Why this is not just “bad service”

Embassies publicly state that they can assist nationals in difficulty, provide information on lawyers and doctors, and support human rights defenders in serious situations. Many legal frameworks stop short of granting a justiciable right to consular assistance, but states nonetheless present these services as real and available.

What occurred here was not a misunderstanding of mandate. No statement was taken. No record was created. No referral was offered. Access was blocked at the level of individual gatekeepers.

By “no victim infrastructure,” I mean this: there is no reliable place where a victim can go, report harm, be heard, have that harm documented, and receive assistance or referral without being deflected, obstructed, or exposed to further harm. What exists on paper does not function in practice.

Transnational repression, global repression, and hollowed-out civil society

Transnational repression is generally described as states or their proxies reaching across borders to surveil, intimidate, silence, or harm dissidents and human rights defenders abroad. Recent UN, Council of Europe, and EU analyses converge on this definition. I do not have access to internal documents or contracts; my assessment is based on the consistency between what I am experiencing across jurisdictions and what these analyses describe.

What I am experiencing appears to go further. It resembles global repression: a standing network of public and private actors already embedded across societies, operating through discretion, deniability, and individual cooperation rather than overt command.

From a victim’s vantage point, I cannot see internal tasking or formal structures. What I can see is that the scale, persistence, and cross-border continuity of the obstruction exceed what unaffiliated private actors could sustain without access to state systems. Where discretion exists, corruption and pay-to-play dynamics become possible. A well-funded network does not need everyone; it only needs enough individuals willing to cooperate, whether for money, power, protection, or indifference.

This is what it means to say civil society has been hollowed out. Institutions still exist, but many of the individuals within them can no longer be relied upon as neutral or protective gatekeepers.

Why victims still go anyway

Given this reality, why do victims still go to embassies and other institutions?

They go to document.

They go to establish pattern.

They go to show that they attempted to access every available lever and were blocked.

This is how systemic gaps are demonstrated. Not by assuming access will work, but by recording when it does not.

Victims should expect obstruction. They should anticipate gaslighting, dispersal, and denial. They should still go, because documenting that failure is itself evidence that the infrastructure does not exist.

Stalemate

This is a stalemate, not an ending. Every obvious move is guarded. That does not mean the game is over. It means the next move is not obvious and will not come from the same levers that have already failed.

You do not dismantle a system like this by giving up. You dismantle it by identifying weak points, regulators, oversight bodies, journalists, and individuals within institutions who still believe in doing the right thing. They exist, even if they are harder to find, because not everyone knows this system exists.

The purpose of this piece is to say: you are not going crazy. The resistance you are encountering is real. The absence of protection is structural. Knowing that does not end the fight, but it allows people to stop blaming themselves and to start looking for the cracks.

Methodological note

This account should be read as documentation of institutional access attempts rather than as proof of motive or coordination. Victims of transnational and global repression rarely have access to internal records, contracts, or tasking; what they can document are outcomes. Recording where access was sought, how it was blocked, and by whom is one of the only ways to demonstrate systemic gaps. Repeated failure across institutions is not anecdotal noise; it is evidence that the protection pathway itself does not function for people in situations like mine.

Why this matters beyond my case

If a human rights defender in circumstances like mine cannot obtain even basic listening, documentation, or referral by physically entering multiple embassies, then “go to an embassy” is no longer a reliable protection pathway. It is a story we tell victims while the real system has already hollowed out the institutions meant to catch people when everything else fails.

Luxembourg

The document below is shared as both a contemporaneous record and a reference for others.

The text is a letter I am currently using to request protection, safe housing, and referrals from humanitarian and support organizations. It is published here without addressees or correspondence details so that others can see how a pattern of harm can be described when no established victim infrastructure exists.

Transnational repression is increasingly referenced in policy, academic, and advocacy spaces, but it was not developed in collaboration with victims and did not emerge from victim needs. As a result, it functions primarily as an analytical and advocacy concept rather than as a pathway to relief. There is no dedicated victim infrastructure attached to it: no intake routes, no housing protocols, no specialized legal pathways, and no coordinated psychosocial or medical support. If such infrastructure existed, victims of both transnational and global repression would already have access to safe housing, informed legal assistance, and appropriate support long before questions of detection tools or specialized medical testing arose.

Global repression, understood as a pre-positioned, distributed system that reproduces similar patterns across locations and sectors, is even less recognized. Most people have no conceptual framework for it at all, and there is no infrastructure within which it can currently be addressed. As a result, victims are repeatedly forced to explain their experiences from first principles, often without shared language or institutional recognition.

What It Means When Victims Are Forced to Explain “From First Principles

When we say victims are forced to explain “from first principles,” we mean this:

They have to explain everything from the ground up, as if no shared framework, category, or prior knowledge exists.

In practical terms, it means the victim cannot rely on any accepted baseline such as:“This type of harm is recognized.”“There is a known pathway for this.”“There are standard indicators for this situation.”

Instead, they must start at zero every time.

Concretely, explaining from first principles looks like this:

The victim must explain what the harm even is, not just that it happened.They must explain why separate incidents are connected rather than random.They must explain why standard explanations do not fit.They must explain why existing systems fail to capture what is happening.They must explain why their request is reasonable in the absence of precedent.

All of that happens before they can even ask for help.

By contrast, when infrastructure exists, none of this is required. For example:A victim of domestic violence does not have to explain why repeated intimidation is a pattern.A torture survivor does not have to explain why symptoms persist after release.A refugee fleeing a recognized conflict does not have to explain why return is unsafe.

Those victims can rely on shared concepts, intake categories, and institutional memory. That is what infrastructure provides.

When victims of transnational or global repression are forced to explain from first principles, it is because:There is no shared vocabulary.There is no agreed framing.There is no intake pathway that says “this kind of harm belongs here.”

So every interaction becomes an educational exercise instead of a protection process.

That is why this matters so much. Explaining from first principles is exhausting, destabilizing, and risky. It increases misclassification, dismissal, and delay. It also shifts the burden of system design onto the victim.

Many people experiencing surveillance, coercive control, cross-border pressure, environmental harm, or retaliation fail to obtain help not because nothing is happening, but because they cannot explain what is happening in a way that preserves the pattern. Their experiences are fragmented into isolated incidents, misread as incoherent, or dismissed because the harm does not fit existing categories.

The purpose of sharing these documents is to demonstrate a method of explanation: how to describe recurrence rather than isolated events, how to justify why explanation is necessary in the absence of infrastructure, how to distinguish contextual explanation from concrete requests, and how to ask for protection or assistance without asking the reader to adjudicate ultimate truth or causation. This is a transferable skill. While some of these letters arise in the context of asylum, the structure applies equally to whistleblowers, labor retaliation cases, activist harassment, journalism, and other contexts where harm is cumulative and nonstandard.

These documents are also shared as a contemporaneous record of escalation: who was notified, what assistance was requested, and whether assistance was provided. The intent of each letter is to obtain help. When assistance is not provided, that outcome itself further documents the gap that currently exists for victims of transnational and global repression.

This post is part of an ongoing series. I will be sharing additional letters as I continue to seek assistance and escalate requests to humanitarian, regulatory, oversight, and human rights bodies. Together, these documents show how escalation occurs in practice: how requests move across institutions, how regulatory and oversight bodies are engaged, and how self-advocacy unfolds when no dedicated victim pathway exists. Read collectively, the letters also function as an escalatory map that others can use to understand where to write, how to escalate, and how to document engagement when responses are limited or absent.

Contemporaneous letter and Reusable language

The letter below was sent today to multiple humanitarian and support organizations. Addressee names and identifying correspondence details have been removed so the document can be shared as a reference while protecting the confidentiality of ongoing requests.

My name is Tamara Dixon and I am an asylum seeker currently in Luxembourg. I am also a human rights defender and the founder of Global Repression Studies, both as a discipline and as an institute for victim testimony, L’Institut d’études de la répression mondiale. The purpose of this institute is to collect and archive the testimony of victims of global repression, and to produce documentation and publications that describe the architecture of the emerging global repression system and the harms it is inflicting on victims, at a time when no dedicated victim infrastructure exists to recognise or address these harms.

Since spring 2025, I have been a targeted individual subjected to a pattern of repression that forced me to leave the United States and later to seek asylum in Europe. This repression has followed me across at least ten U.S. states and five countries in Europe. I arrived in Europe on 10 November 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Luxembourg on 31 December 2025; in less than seven days in Luxembourg, I have been forced through seven hotels, and in one hotel I had to change rooms six times within two to three days because the same pattern of harassment and toxic exposure followed me not only on the property but into each room, where the perpetrators appear to exploit architectural ingress points (such as HVAC systems, vents and other building conduits) to force toxic substances into the room.

In my work on Global Repression Studies, global repression is distinguished from national or transnational repression. Transnational repression usually describes agents or private contractors following a victim across borders, whereas global repression refers to a pre‑positioned system embedded across multiple societies and sectors (such as hospitality, housing, policing, and corporate security) that is already in place before the victim arrives. When a targeted person like myself appears in a new country or city, this embedded system activates around the target and reproduces the same patterns of surveillance, harassment, and toxic exposure in each new location; similar to transnational repression, there may also be actors who physically travel with and follow the victim from place to place, operating alongside those embedded actors who activate once the victim arrives in a given location.

The actors involved in my case appear to be private military and security companies (PMSCs) and related private security contractors using dual‑use cyber and surveillance technologies that exploit gaps in export control regimes such as the Wassenaar Arrangement. Their methods combine unlawful digital surveillance and intrusive monitoring of my devices with repeated low level exposure to volatile organic compounds or other toxic substances in my environment. This exposure can occur in accommodation and also in public and semi‑public places (for example in streets, hotels, restaurants, and transport), and appears to have adverse effects on my cognition, neurology, and overall physiology, and has made it impossible for me to live safely in communal or camp‑style accommodation. Because volatile organic compounds are short‑lived in the body and require specific testing within a short time window, and because police and hospitals typically lack appropriate detection tools and protocols, victims are generally unable to obtain positive toxicology results or standard medical and police reports that prove the harm, which creates a structural, systemic gap in protection and access to legal remedies.

From what I have observed, this architecture is being used to target human rights defenders, whistleblowers, dissidents, and others in the form of extrajudicial elimination without due process. On 8 September 2025, I initiated a human rights complaint in Geneva and am now seeking counsel to help advance that complaint, but my most urgent need is safe housing. I have already reached out to ProtectDefenders.eu, the European mechanism for at risk human rights defenders, to request urgent support. However, because I am now an asylum seeker in Luxembourg and am not allowed to leave the country while my procedure is pending, I am not sure they will be able to assist me with relocation or safe housing outside Luxembourg, which makes it even more urgent for me to find a safe, non‑communal housing solution within Luxembourg territory.

Without safe accommodation and effective protection, there is a real risk that I will simply become another statistic of this repression network, and that a rare opportunity to map its architecture and create safeguards will be lost. As both an academic researcher and a person who has lived this experience directly, I am in a unique position to document how this global repression system operates, to help design victim infrastructure, and to contribute to future policy and legislation that could protect others from what may be one of the most serious emerging threats to democracy in the post‑Cold War era. Unfortunately, export control frameworks such as the Wassenaar Arrangement were never designed to address intangible, cloud based surveillance tools and other dual‑use capabilities developed for war zones and now deployed against civilians; these technologies have outpaced legislation, oversight and accountability, enabling private contractors and associated actors to operate with near impunity.

I require non‑communal, secure accommodation in Luxembourg where I will not be subjected to further toxic exposure by private contractors and associated networks, and I am asking for your assistance to obtain safe, private accommodation and guidance on any mechanisms that can protect me from this ongoing global repression system.

In light of the above, I would be very grateful for your help with the following:

* Information on what non‑communal accommodation options exist in Luxembourg for vulnerable asylum seekers who cannot safely live in camps or shared housing (for example small independent rooms or flats in supervised housing projects or similar), and how I can apply for them as an asylum seeker.

* Support to obtain appropriate referrals to medical and psychological services, including where possible a toxicologist and a neurologist, so that I can document and treat the effects of toxic exposure and prolonged persecution.

* Assistance to document my current unsafe housing situation in your files and, if possible, to provide a brief letter or note that I can use with other services (such as legal aid, hospitals, and the National Reception Office – ONA) confirming my vulnerability and my need for non‑communal accommodation.

* Advice on any additional services or support (social, medical, legal or financial) for which I might be eligible as a vulnerable asylum seeker in Luxembourg.

* If no suitable non‑communal accommodation is currently available in the state or NGO system, guidance and support to help me obtain independent housing that is compatible with my asylum status.

Respectfully,

Tamara Dixon

January 5, 2026. Luxembourg

At this point in time, there is no functioning victim infrastructure and no clear pathway to help for those of us being subjected to technologically driven persecution by private contractors. The tone of distress in this letter reflects the reality that there are no police tools, no legal pathway without a report, and no accessible toxicology for continuous exposure. Without law enforcement recognition and a criminal report, there is no access to legal remedy, and plausible deniability makes most events illegible until a pattern can be proven. Detection tools for low‑dose toxic exposure are scarce, which means that by the time anyone can verify what has been happening, people have already been harmed or killed. In the meantime, this system continues operating inside ordinary communities while the general public, and even most advocates and researchers, only see fragments of what is going on.

I am sharing this letter to show how what is happening is being described and how assistance is being requested when no victim infrastructure exists. You may not be in the same position I am. You may be at a different phase, earlier or later, or experiencing different methods or impacts. Adapt the language to reflect what is happening to you, remove what does not apply, and add details that are specific to your situation.

This letter is provided as a practical example of how to write to attorneys, elected officials, medical professionals, oversight bodies, or others when you are trying to explain what is happening and ask for help. Its purpose is to give people language they can use.

I am also posting this letter as a contemporaneous record in case anything should happen to me. My Substack and my website are intended to function as an archive of what has been reported, when, and to whom, and as a resource for journalists, advocates, and investigators.

Contemporaneous letter and sample language

This is a letter sent today to a Washington, D.C. based civil and human rights attorney; the addressee’s name and identifying details have been removed to protect his confidentiality and privacy.

I am writing to follow up on my earlier correspondence. Since those messages, I have been able to articulate with greater precision both the nature and the gravity of what is occurring, not only to me but to others similarly situated.

In addition to unlawful, technology based surveillance and intrusive monitoring of my devices, I am being subjected to a coordinated campaign of harassment, psychological torture, and chemical suppression through repeated low level exposure to volatile organic compounds. These exposures appear calibrated to degrade neurological, cognitive, and physiological functioning over time, and they carry clear risks of organ damage, genetic injury, and death. The pattern suggests a form of extrajudicial elimination: destabilizing and incapacitating targets so that they cannot organize, seek counsel, or access remedies, while causing fatal harm without visible or easily attributable evidence. Because these chemicals are difficult to detect and require immediate testing, there is effectively no access to police reports, courts, or reliable medical documentation, and no functioning victim infrastructure at all.

Over the past six months, I have fled across ten U.S. states and then to multiple European countries, only to encounter the same pattern replicated with remarkable consistency in each jurisdiction. This strongly indicates a transnational repression network in which private contractors appear to have supplied both technological systems for surveillance and coordination and the personnel to operate them, while also deputizing civilians. These operations appear to exploit legal and regulatory gaps, including those within the Wassenaar Arrangement and related export control regimes, allowing private actors to engage in conduct that would be unconstitutional or unlawful if carried out directly by state actors, and to do so without meaningful oversight or accountability.

Because it became clear that I could not escape what appears to be a global network of repression, I was forced to seek asylum in Luxembourg. The targeting has not stopped. The same patterns of surveillance, harassment, and chemical exposure are continuing within the asylum process itself. I am genuinely afraid that I may not survive long enough to secure protection, obtain competent medical evaluation, or pursue any legal remedy, either for myself or for others. Continuous toxic exposure combined with psychological torture and the absence of any victim facing mechanisms makes time a critical factor.

I recognize the complexity of these claims and the difficulty of conveying them. It has taken months of continuous exposure, flight, and research to find language that accurately reflects what is occurring. I am renewing my request for assistance because the situation is now life threatening, and because your experience with complex, precedent setting civil rights and national security matters uniquely positions you to help shape an appropriate legal and institutional response. Even if direct representation is not possible, guidance on immediate protective steps or referral to colleagues with relevant expertise would be invaluable.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Respectfully,

Tamara

Geneva, Switzerland

Summary: This essay argues that recent European concern about US democratic backsliding and surveillance (from Freedom House scores to the CJEU’s Schrems II ruling) points to something larger than a “US problem.” It shows how formal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic are entangled in a partly privatized global repression network built from surveillance laws, private contractors, and dual‑use technologies. The piece introduces Global Repression Studies as a framework for naming and mapping this system and concludes that the goal cannot be minor reform but, ultimately, dismantling that network.

A recent Substack post put it starkly:

“Some Europeans, even previously staunch Atlanticists, are openly acknowledging that the USA is now not even to be seen as a neutral but instead to be understood as an enemy of liberal democracy in Europe.”

That may sound exaggerated, but if you look at the institutional record and then at what is happening around surveillance and dual‑use technologies, you can see why this framing is starting to appear.

And the crucial point is this: the problem is not just the United States. It is a transnational, partly privatized “global repression network” that liberal democracies themselves helped build and are now entangled in.

The baseline: formal warnings about US democracy and surveillance

Before we even get to private contractors and dual‑use technologies, there is already a thick layer of formal concern on the record:

- Freedom House’s *Freedom in the World* reports show a multi‑year decline in the United States’ democratic scores and explicitly describe the US as a democracy in decline.

- V‑Dem’s indices categorize the US as undergoing democratic erosion, not a stable high‑performing liberal democracy.

- The European Parliament has passed resolutions warning about democratic backsliding and about the implications of January 6 for the rule of law and electoral integrity.

- Most concretely, the Court of Justice of the European Union, in its “Schrems II” judgment, invalidated the EU–US Privacy Shield because US surveillance law does not give people whose data is transferred from the EU to the US protections equivalent to those guaranteed by EU fundamental rights law.

Already at this “official” level, Europe is not just mildly disappointed in the US. Its legislature and highest court are saying, in careful legal language, that US practices are incompatible with the level of rights protection that a liberal democratic constitutional order is supposed to ensure.

Schrems II is only the floor, not the ceiling

But Schrems II is still about the “minimum”. It deals with:

- national‑security surveillance frameworks like FISA 702 and Executive Order 12333,

- bulk access to data held by major service providers,

- and the lack of effective remedies for EU data subjects.

It does “not” address what happens when you layer on:

- private intelligence and cybersecurity contractors,

- covert or semi‑covert procurement channels,

- “dual‑use” technologies marketed as security tools but usable for political repression,

- and modern spyware‑style capabilities.

If the official, on‑paper legal framework already fails to provide equivalent protection, then adding private contractors and dual‑use tools on top of it does not just marginally worsen the situation. It “changes its nature”. It turns a flawed surveillance regime into a distributed, hard to see infrastructure of control.

The missing conversation: privatized and dual‑use repression

This is where the public conversation badly lags behind the reality.

For roughly two to three decades, we have seen:

- The outsourcing of key surveillance, data‑analytics, and offensive cyber capabilities to private firms.

- The development of dual‑use platforms that can be deployed for legitimate security purposes but just as easily turned inward against journalists, activists, opposition figures, migrants, and minorities.

- Procurement systems that are opaque by design: security exemptions, national‑security classification, and fragmented contracting that hides who is actually doing what.

This is “not” just a US phenomenon. European states also buy from, cooperate with, and in some cases rely on the same or parallel contractor ecosystems. Some of them deploy these tools domestically; others share data and capabilities with partners abroad. Authoritarian regimes plug into similar networks, often purchasing from companies based in democracies.

The result is what I call a “global repression network”: a transnational infrastructure that:

- is partly public and partly private,

- spans formal democracies and authoritarian regimes,

- and allows states to outsource or distance themselves from the most controversial forms of monitoring and control.

Why Europe is not simply “the victim”

This is why it is too simple to say “the US is now an enemy of liberal democracy in Europe” and leave it there.

From one angle, European institutions are right to be alarmed by US democratic backsliding, extra‑territorial surveillance, and the strategic pivot away from NATO and Ukraine. Those trends objectively weaken Europe’s liberal democratic security order and objectively benefit authoritarian powers.

From another angle, however, Europe is “part of the system” it is criticizing:

- European governments and agencies contract with private surveillance and cyber‑intelligence firms.

- European companies develop and export dual‑use technologies that end up in repression chains abroad.

- European legal systems also struggle to regulate modern spyware, AI‑driven analytics, and data‑broker ecosystems that enable continuous monitoring.

So the right frame is not “the US versus Europe” but “democratic institutions versus a global repression network” that crosses borders and legal systems.

Why I am insisting on “global repression”

This emerging pattern is what led me to found and develop Global Repression Studies as a field. The core claim is simple but uncomfortable:

- If we keep treating each scandal as a national aberration, we will never see the structure that connects them.

- The surveillance, data‑extraction, and control infrastructures that underwrite modern repression are transnational by design, with democracies deeply involved in building and maintaining them.

- We therefore need analytical tools, public narratives, and legal frameworks that operate at the same scale as the technologies and contractor networks themselves.

Yes, many of the underlying technologies and outsourcing practices have been evolving for 20–30 years. What is relatively new is the recognition that:

1. They now form a coherent “global system”, and

2. That this system directly shapes the future of democracy, not only in authoritarian states but inside nominally liberal democracies as well.

The layer most people still do not want to see

What I have sketched here is still the most “respectable,” documentable layer of the story: institutions, laws, procurement, and technologies. Behind it lies a much harsher reality that many targeted individuals already know too well: unlawful surveillance blending into harassment, psychological operations, and, in some cases, forms of chemical or physical suppression that look less like policing and more like counterinsurgency.

For many readers, that will feel like too big a leap. I understand that. But if we can at least agree that a global repression network now exists in infrastructure and law, then the next step is to listen seriously to those of us who are living at its sharpest edges.

This piece is not a full policy blueprint. The first steps are these: name the system, map its actors, expose its legal and technical foundations, and make it politically costly for democracies to pretend that “national security” justifies everything. Global Repression Studies exists to do exactly that work, precisely because most people still do not yet see the system they are living inside. Over time, this network has hollowed out large parts of civil society, drawing in a vast number of institutions, companies, and individuals until participation in repression or its enabling structures becomes almost routine. In that sense, it is the greatest threat to democracy in the post‑Cold War era, and the goal cannot be to simply reform it at the margins but ultimately to dismantle it.

Further reading

Freedom House, Freedom in the World (United States country reports and global scores)

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world

Varieties of Democracy (V‑Dem), Liberal Democracy Index and country profiles

https://www.v-dem.net

European Parliament resolution on the situation of the US in the context of democracy and human rights (January 2021)

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2021-01-20_EN.html

Court of Justice of the European Union, Schrems II judgment (C‑311/18) and press release

https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-07/cp200091en.pdf

European Parliament / EP Think Tank briefings on Schrems II and EU–US data transfers

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2020)652073

European Data Protection Board and European Data Protection Supervisor materials on modern spyware and Pegasus‑type tools

https://www.edps.europa.eu

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/pega/home

Carnegie Endowment – analyses of US democratic backsliding and its impact on alliances

https://carnegieendowment.org

European Parliament Research Service – “Democracy in America” and related studies on US decline and transatlantic values

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank

Geneva, Switzerland

Living inside a kill box

Imagine having ex‑military professionals and people from military intelligence and national security, grown men who have navigated war zones, targeting you as an individual. Imagine them studying you for weak points and sending in people to harm you every day, 24/7. Every day you stay in one place, they adapt around you and build what, in military terms, is called a kill box: a space you cannot escape, where you are subject to chemical suppression at will.

Chemical suppression is not an abstract phrase. It means that your emotions, your physiology, your cognition are being pushed and pulled by forces outside your control. It means trying to carry out your life under constant pressure, knowing that someone else is trying to control your mind and your body while also attempting to assassinate you without leaving a conventional mark.

That is the weight of what I and other victims are living with on a daily basis. I honestly do not know how I have managed to speak about this and stay clear‑eyed and coherent for the last months. I am writing and recording from inside the blast radius, not from a safe distance.

Reporting from the blast radius

Picture sitting in a room, detecting chemicals, feeling sensations in your body, while you try to send emails, draft posts, contact law firms, and reach out to potential allies. You know you cannot go “home,” because they have followed you through state after state in the United States and subjected you to the same treatment everywhere.

You leave the country, thinking you are going into exile for safety, and arrive in a foreign place where you have no allies, no friends, no community. Instead of a reprieve, you discover that what looked like domestic repression is actually part of a global repression network. The tactics, the profiles, the patterns are there too.

So now you are in multiple EU countries, again without allies and on your own, dealing with an invisible, chemical, asymmetric form of warfare. You are fighting a war against an army of people trained to kill, who are attempting to eliminate you without ever laying a hand on you.

In the middle of this, you write to senators, governors, law enforcement, former officials. You map the architecture as best you can. You identify layers and roles and flows of money. You do this while being attacked by that same architecture in real time.

I know I am not Wonder Woman. I am not superhuman. I know I cannot outrun chemicals forever. They keep coming precisely because they know there is no mechanism I can pull, no lever I can activate, no cavalry that is going to arrive. The plan is simple: grind you down, suppress you chemically, and kill you quietly.

I am fully aware that I may be murdered or disappear before anyone in power moves. I am fully aware that it might be only after I am in the ground that some journalist or investigator starts piecing this together. That awareness sits in my body every hour.

Moving through choke points

As I try to move to yet another place, Dublin of all places and more expensive than where I am now, I have to calculate basic survival against logistics. How do you get there?

If you take the train, you pass through major hubs like Paris. Bigger cities and longer routes mean more opportunities, more time, more choke points: along the metro, along the train, on the ferry. Every added minute in transit is an added window for assault in public space.

Because Dublin is a technology city, I already expect that the infrastructure will be there, as it has been everywhere else. I assume there are already people in place, already planning how to block, sabotage and contain me: contacting potential landlords, offering cash, leveraging a system that is rich with money from the sale and use of these technologies.

This is the situation I find myself in as I publish this.

The system does not want this work

The system I am describing has every incentive to prevent serious academic work on it from ever seeing daylight. A dissertation that maps this architecture is, by definition, a threat to it. My expectation is that there will be efforts, subtle and not so subtle, to discourage, derail, or block this research at the institutional level, including through people who are already positioned to interfere.

I cannot see inside every institution, but based on what I have already experienced, I assume that there are or will be individuals embedded around the places where I try to work whose role is to make sure this dissertation is never completed or never accepted. That is part of what it means to try to study a repression system that is global, networked, and operating in the shadows.

My only hope is that there are still a few people who understand that this is work that has to get out if there is ever going to be legislation, policy and guardrails strong enough to dismantle this system. I also fully realise that I may never be able to reach my formal goals, and that this Substack may, in effect, end up being my dissertation: the place where the analysis lives because the institutions around me cannot or will not hold it.

These operations run on money and reach. They make it impossible to live as a normal human being, to move through the world openly and trust others. I have posted pleas, asked for people to step forward, asked for this to be stopped, and the truth is that many people are profiting from this architecture and have been for decades. It appears to have been in place for twenty or thirty years, with large amounts of money changing hands, and it is very likely to continue, because those of us who are trying to expose it are not expected to survive long enough to make a difference.

Why say this now

I am writing this today because I cannot guarantee that there will be a tomorrow for me to write it. There is no safety margin, no buffer. Global Repression Studies is not an abstract field for me; it is the name for the system that is trying to erase me while I am still trying to describe it.

If you have never lived anything like this, it may sound impossible. If you have, you will recognise the patterns immediately. Either way, this is my testimony from inside the kill box.

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.