Co-Producing Legitimacy: The (Non)-Discursive Constructions in Transnational Cooperative Repression

How do states continuously sustain against international scrutiny and monitoring when their repressive operations become more cooperatively enacted and publicized? While the existing literature has explained, through discourse theories, how states enact a logic of repression and how they evade international pressures, it focuses narrowly on individual states and their domestic audiences. Considering heightened transnational repression events that have shifted modes of repression, I argue that states legitimize their cooperative repressive actions through the creation of a discursive distance that focuses on 1) the use of legal discourse and language to de-securitize and de-moralize repressive actions, and 2) strategically using silence to limit and reframe information available to the public. Using a unique corpus of 67 documents on extradition events, one of the most frequently recorded forms of transnational repression, I conduct a set of discourse analyses across both cooperative and non-cooperative dyads to test my theory. I find evidence to support my argument through coding legal, security and normative framings in government responses. I further find that strategic silence is enacted in three forms: explicit, implicit and temporal, which reshape the perceptions of repressive actions. I consider three implications of my work: 1) challenge dominant understandings of how repression is legitimized, particularly the focus on securitization discourse as the primary framework for interpreting repressive practices, 2) show that increased visibility of repression does not necessarily produce accountability, as states adapt their justificatory strategies to legitimize their actions, 3) problematize the role of language in repression by demonstrating how discursive practices shape both the recognition and obscuring of harm, a framework that can be extended to additional cases, including those involving democratic states, to better identify and hold actors accountable for human rights violation.