Marcus Michaelsen is a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab. His work centres on digital transnational repression and the ways authoritarian regimes use digital technologies to extend political control and repression across borders. From 2019 to 2022, he was a senior post-doctoral researcher with the research group Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel where he investigated digital surveillance and transnational repression against exiled activists from the Middle East, funded by a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship of the European Union (DIGIACT). Previously, he was a Senior Information Controls Fellow with the Open Technology Fund. From 2014 until 2018, he worked as a lecturer and postdoc researcher in the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam, primarily in the research project “Authoritarianism in a Global Age”.
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Publications
Security Without Safety
Queering Cybersecurity in the Age of Digital Transnational Repression
Citizen Lab researchers Noura Aljizawi, Shaila Baran, Marcus Michaelsen, and Siena Anstis published a paper titled “Security Without Safety: Queering Cybersecurity in the Age of Digital Transnational Repression” in the special issue on “Digital Intersectionality and Marginalization in the Majority World” of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.
How to Combat Transnational Repression
Citizen Lab researchers Siena Anstis and Marcus Michaelsen write about the lack of accountability for perpetrators of transnational repression.
Tall Tales
How Chinese Actors Use Impersonation and Stolen Narratives to Perpetuate Digital Transnational Repression
In collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), we identified two distinct actors aligned with the People’s Republic of China that have been targeting and impersonating journalists and civil society. Our findings provide insight into the Chinese government’s practice of digital transnational repression and its shift to a system of state-sponsored attacks carried out by private contractors.
