Authoritarian Surveillance Trends: Structural Racism and Transnationalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper extends the “authoritarian surveillance as a practice” (Topak, Mekouar, and Cavatorta 2022) perspective by focusing on the major trends that shape authoritarian surveillance in three different contexts. It draws on authoritarian surveillance practices implemented by Turkey, Israel (in Palestine), and the European Union (EU) (at Africa-Europe borderzones) and observes that, despite different contexts and regime types, authoritarian surveillance is driven by structural racism and transnational associations. In Turkey, racialized Kurdish populations and pro-Kurdish dissident groups have been the major recipients of authoritarian surveillance practices, even though mass authoritarian surveillance has impacted large segments of the society. The Gülen community, which is a Turkey-origin transnational movement, played a major role in the intensification of authoritarian surveillance, while the EU provided indirect support because of its reliance on Turkey for stopping migrants trying to reach Europe. The EU implements authoritarian surveillance not only through responsibilizing external actors (such as in Turkey and Libya) for border policing but also through the deployment of its own border surveillance technologies. The EU drones, provided by Israeli companies, surveil and facilitate the return of black African migrants to Libya where they are subjected to crimes against humanity. The long history of European colonialism in Africa shapes the current racist use of EU drones as an authoritarian surveillance practice, which is implemented through the EU’s transnational associations involving Libyan militia groups and Israeli drone companies. In Palestine, the legacies of Israel’s settler-colonial racism against Palestinians have culminated in the current genocidal surveillance by Israel. Israel has been committing genocide within a network of transnational associations and is also one of the major exporters of authoritarian surveillance technology, ranging from spyware to drones. Through examination of these contexts, the paper argues that authoritarian surveillance is practiced by both liberal and authoritarian regimes, is driven by structural racism and is implemented through the involvement of various transnational actors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".