04/10/2026
By Samuel Olufeso

The College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Global Studies Program invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation proposal defense by Samuel Olufeso on “Digital Repression by Design: Calibration, Anticipation, and Diffusion in Protest Governance.”

Candidate Name: Samuel Olufeso
Defense Date: Thursday, April 23, 2026
Time: 4 – 5:30 p.m.
Location: Dugan Hall, Room 105, South Campus

Committee:

  • Chair: Christopher Linebarger, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Criminology and Justice Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Jason Rydberg, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Criminology and Justice Studies & Center for Program Evaluation, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Daniel J. Broyld, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Abstract
How do contemporary states govern dissent in a digitally mediated world, and what explains the strategic choices they make in doing so? This dissertation advances a theoretically integrated account of digital repression across three interrelated dimensions: the logic by which regimes select among available repression tools, the anticipatory mechanisms through which states intervene before protest materializes, and the transnational processes through which digital authoritarian practices spread across borders. This dissertation argues that digital repression is not a blunt or uniform response to political threat but a calibrated, temporally dynamic, and globally diffusing system of political control. The first paper argues that protest type, rather than protest intensity, drives repression tool selection. Drawing on cross-national dataset spanning 174 countries from 2000 to 2025, the paper theorizes that regimes match tool visibility and cost to the character of the threat they face.

The second paper develops a theory of anticipatory repression, where predictive analytics invert the temporal logic of classical repression theory by enabling states to preempt protest before it becomes observable. A nested mixed-methods design combining cross-national quantitative analysis with process tracing in China, Nigeria, and the United States examines how predictive monitoring reshapes protest incidence, tactical repertoires, and the institutional conditions under which anticipatory control takes hold. The third paper asks how digital authoritarian practices travel. Through infrastructure provision, authoritarian learning, and geopolitical alignment, surveillance technologies move across borders in ways that existing scholarship has treated separately and incompletely. Drawing on the AI Global Surveillance Index, AidData’s Chinese Development Finance Dataset, and case studies of Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, the paper builds an integrated framework for understanding the transnational architecture of surveillance governance. These three papers trace digital repression from the moment of tool selection, through the anticipation of dissent, to its travels across borders, offering a unified account of how states have learned to govern protest in the digital age