Authoritarian Surveillance

Summary

Surveillance has become a central pillar of contemporary nondemocratic rule. Around the world, nondemocratic regimes from totalitarian North Korea to posttotalitarian China and authoritarian Kazakhstan fuse centuries-old techniques of bureaucratic and social control with high-tech infrastructures that permeate everyday life. Authoritarian surveillance is a conceptual framework for understanding these practices.

Authoritarian surveillance refers to the systematic, multilayered, and often transnational use of offline and digital infrastructures by nondemocratic regimes and their collaborators to monitor, manage, and discipline populations in ways that consolidate regime power by undermining accountability, pluralism, and meaningful political contestation. It incorporates state security agencies, citizen informants, and private or transnational technology firms into a distributed apparatus of control that permeates social life and frequently extends beyond national borders.

Although authoritarian surveillance has expanded through the internet, automation, and commercialization, it is neither new nor purely digital. It builds on long-standing bureaucratic practices such as administrative record keeping, population management, and social sorting, as well as on social infrastructures like informant networks. In the 21st century, technology corporations play a central role by designing, supplying, and maintaining the infrastructures that enable authoritarian surveillance.

Conceptually, authoritarian surveillance differs from digital authoritarianism, which tends to foreground internet controls and information manipulation by contemporary autocrats, and from digital illiberalism, which describes rights-restricting, technology-enabled surveillance practices within democratic or hybrid regimes. Authoritarian surveillance designates the broader architecture of nondemocratic control across both analogue and digital domains and highlights how state agencies, social relations, and commercial actors work together to sustain and export nondemocratic rule.