Description
This paper sets out the emerging topography of transnational blacklisting between the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the Eurasian Economic Union. Amid the ongoing global reversal of democracy and human rights, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to deepening, and powerful, alliances of authoritarian states, and specifically the implications of these illiberal cross-border configurations for human rights and political freedoms (e.g. Conduit, 2020; Cottiero & Hoggard, 2021; Debre, 2020). This paper contributes to this literature by mapping the coordination of illiberal alliances' national and regional security priorities and, amongst these specifically, the mutual enforcement of national anti-terror blacklists designating organisations and individuals as terrorist, dissident or enemy of the state. Freedom House (2021) has called on scholars to ‘expand research into the consequences of transnational repression for targeted communities, since these mechanisms enable alliance states to target, pursue, and extradite blacklisted individuals from across the breadth of the alliance’s jurisdictions and beyond. The paper commences by drawing from Agamben’s (2005) theoretical work that frames state blacklisting as pivotal to the ‘very codes of political power’ in modern sovereignty and the ‘state of exception’ in emergency rule (Agamben, 2005), and from critical security scholarship that unpacks how security norms are generated, internalised and operationalised (e.g. Bigo 2006; Jackson; Jarvis). In doing so, the paper (i) develops a framework of illiberal blacklisting imperatives to analyse the bureaucratic architecture of authoritarian cross-border security cooperation and (ii) concludes by describing the global implications of the emerging illiberal alliances’ category of outlaws.
