🌍🌎 Global Eyes, Weekend Reader

100 days of war, the long arm of authoritarianism, and leopard cubs.

By Michael Siebert via Pixabey

🌐 Global

🦾 The long arm of authoritarianism: Freedom House examined 735 incidents of transnational repression between 2014 and 2021 and found that growingly, authoritarian governments are cooperating across borders to find, threaten, harass, and detain their critics:

Over the past year, governments around the world have engaged in increasingly brazen attempts to stifle dissent by attacking critics who live abroad. Belarusian authorities forced an international airliner to land so they could detain a journalist who was on board. Iranian agents conspired to kidnap a women’s rights activist from her home in Brooklyn. Turkish intelligence officers abducted the nephew of a political figure from outside a police station in Nairobi. These audacious acts of transnational repression, in which governments reach across national borders to silence opposition among diaspora and exile communities, demonstrated a dangerous disregard for international law, democratic norms, and state sovereignty.

What’s the root cause of migration? The internet:

We find that increases in 3G coverage have a sizeable impact on the desire and plans to emigrate and that the impact is approximately linear. An increase of 10 percentage points in 3G mobile coverage leads to an increase of 0.27 percentage points in the desire to emigrate permanently. In addition, we find that such an increase leads to an increase of 0.09 percentage points in plans to emigrate permanently over the ensuing 12 months in our preferred specification. 

---

🇺🇦 Ukraine

🚀🚂 June 3 marked the 100th day of fighting in Ukraine.

The war has lasted 100 days. We have selected 100 events that help to show its scale. Most of them are still hard to believe. (In Russian.)

Nearly seven million Ukrainians have fled the country.

A survey of the battlefield: