First, it was Balochistan.

People disappeared. They were taken from homes, university campuses, roads and checkpoints, often by men whose identity was officially unknown and perfectly obvious to everyone. Some returned after months or years, broken by detention and torture. Others reappeared as bodies.

Many never returned at all. Their families were threatened for asking questions. Journalists were warned for investigating. Lawyers were harassed for demanding due process.

Activists were arrested for protesting against illegal arrests. The state denied responsibility, invoked national security and gradually constructed an entire legal and political vocabulary in which the victim became the suspect and the person asking where he had gone became an enemy of Pakistan. Balochistan was the laboratory.

It was there that Pakistan’s security establishment perfected the techniques later exported elsewhere: enforced disappearance, collective punishment, intimidation of relatives, anti-terrorism cases, censorship and the systematic destruction of the distinction between peaceful dissent and armed violence. The logic was brutally simple.

Once criticism could be classified as terrorism, the state no longer had to answer it. It could prosecute it. And eventually, even exile ceased to offer protection. Sajid Hussain left Pakistan after threats and surveillance connected to his work as a journalist.

As editor of the Balochistan Times, he reported on enforced disappearances, organised crime and the conduct of the security forces. He sought asylum in Sweden. In March 2020, he disappeared in Uppsala. His body was later recovered from a river.

A few months later came Karima Baloch. Karima had led the Baloch Students Organisation-Azad and become one of the most prominent international voices against disappearances and military abuses in Balochistan. She escaped to Canada after receiving threats. In December 2020, she disappeared in Toronto.

Her body was found the following day. Pakistani responsibility was never legally established in either case. That was not the point. Their deaths became symbols because they revealed the essential consequence of transnational repression: nobody feels safe abroad because nobody is safe at home.

Exile changes the dissident’s address. It does not necessarily end the state’s power over him. The machinery built for Balochistan then moved towards the centre of Pakistan. It reached journalists, Pashtun activists, civil-society organisations and finally the country’s most popular political leader.

Imran Khan was himself a product of the system that now persecutes him. His rise was facilitated by the military establishment, his opponents were weakened on his behalf and his government initially benefited from precisely the imbalance between civilian politics and military power that he later denounced. He was not an outsider to Pakistan’s architecture of repression.

For a time, he was one of its beneficiaries. That makes his fate more revealing, not less. Once Khan ceased to be useful, the establishment applied to him and his movement the same methods long familiar in Balochistan: arbitrary detention, anti-terrorism legislation, media erasure, pressure on families, forced defections and the criminalisation of political mobilisation.

Khan has been imprisoned since August 2023 under an expanding catalogue of cases whose legal details have often mattered less than their political function. His incarceration is not simply the prosecution of a former prime minister. It is the physical removal of the only political figure capable of challenging the army’s control over Pakistan’s electoral system.

His conditions of detention, restrictions on access, repeated convictions and the refusal to allow his electoral mandate to translate into power have demonstrated that nobody is beyond the reach of the system. Not even a former prime minister. Not even one who helped legitimise that system when it served him. A machinery of repression never remains confined to the people for whom it was originally designed.

It expands. It acquires laws, judges, police units and bureaucratic routines. Then it searches for new enemies. The attack on Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf after the events of 9 May 2023 showed how completely the Balochistan model had entered national politics.

Individual responsibility for violence was replaced by collective punishment. Party leaders were arrested or pressured to defect. Candidates were prevented from campaigning. Television stations were instructed to avoid Khan’s name.

Political speech became sedition, cybercrime or terrorism. But PTI possessed something the Baloch movements had never enjoyed on the same scale: a vast, wealthy and politically active diaspora. Pakistanis in Britain, Europe, North America and the Gulf could organise protests, fund legal challenges, lobby foreign politicians and circulate information suppressed inside Pakistan.

They were beyond the immediate reach of the police station and the television regulator.

So the repression followed them.

The United Kingdom has become one of its principal arenas. What began with Baloch activists now encompasses Pakistani journalists, former officials, military defectors and PTI supporters. Exiles in Britain have reported surveillance, threats, harassment and pressure on relatives still living in Pakistan. Some have been convicted in absentia.

Others have faced terrorism or cybercrime cases based largely on speech made abroad. British security services have warned Pakistani dissidents that their names were circulating on alleged hit lists. The warnings were not entirely abstract. In 2021, a London-based man was charged with conspiring to murder exiled Pakistani blogger Ahmad Waqass Goraya in the Netherlands, reinforcing suspicions that such lists could be accompanied by attempts to recruit local intermediaries.

Among the most prominent targets is retired Major Adil Raja, a former Pakistan Army officer who became an outspoken critic of the military establishment and its role in the removal and persecution of Imran Khan. Raja represents a particular kind of danger. He is not simply a dissident. He is a former insider.

He understands the institution, its command culture, its political networks and the gap between Pakistan’s constitutional façade and the actual distribution of power. An activist may accuse the army of repression. An insider can explain how it operates. Pakistani courts have repeatedly convicted Raja in absentia.

In January 2026, an Islamabad anti-terrorism court handed him two life sentences in cases connected to the May 9 unrest, accusing him and other exiled commentators of incitement, conspiracy and abetting war against the state through their broadcasts and social-media activity. Islamabad formally requested his extradition from Britain and presented the matter as ordinary law enforcement against “anti-state propaganda.”

The pressure did not remain confined to diplomatic correspondence. On Christmas Eve 2025, men allegedly attempted to force their way into Raja’s home in Chesham, while another group targeted Shahzad Akbar, Imran Khan’s former adviser, at his home in Cambridgeshire. British prosecutors have described the incidents as part of a coordinated and sophisticated conspiracy.

Counter-terrorism police are investigating them as highly targeted attacks, and several men have been charged. What has not yet been publicly established in court is who commissioned the operation. But the circumstances surrounding Pakistan’s extradition demands are disturbing enough without embellishment.

A leaked letter setting out Islamabad’s conditions for accepting the deportation of Shabir Ahmed, the convicted Rochdale grooming-gang ringleader, reportedly included demands for British action against Raja, Akbar and other exiled opponents of Pakistan’s military-civilian order. Pakistan was therefore not merely pursuing unrelated law-enforcement cases at the same time.

It was attempting to place a convicted sexual offender and political dissidents on opposite sides of the same diplomatic transaction. The grotesque nature of the proposal is difficult to exaggerate. A criminal Britain wanted to remove was transformed into leverage for recovering critics Pakistan wanted to punish. Human beings became diplomatic currency.

The comparison also exposed Islamabad’s priorities. The return of a convicted offender could be disputed, delayed or made conditional. A dissident who embarrassed the army had to be brought home. Shahzad Akbar presents a similar problem for the establishment.

As a former senior adviser to Imran Khan, he possesses knowledge of government operations, internal disputes and the relationship between the civilian administration and the military hierarchy. Like Raja, he is dangerous not merely because of what he says, but because of what he knows. He too has faced repeated harassment and violence in Britain.

Other exiled journalists, scholars and commentators have received comparable treatment. Pakistani authorities have obtained arrest warrants, issued convictions in absentia, cancelled identity documents and publicly warned that overseas critics would be returned to Pakistan. The message is not restricted to those formally accused.

It is addressed to the entire diaspora. The state wants to recreate abroad the atmosphere it has created at home: uncertainty over which statement may produce a case, which relative may receive a visit, which passport may be cancelled and which accusation may convert a journalist into a terrorist. This is transnational repression in its modern form.

It does not always require kidnapping or assassination. It can be carried out through courts, immigration systems, consular documents, counterterrorism cooperation and extradition requests. The methods appear legal because they use legal instruments. Their purpose remains political.

Pakistan has become particularly skilled at this bureaucratic laundering of repression. A political opponent is described as anti-state. Anti-state activity becomes incitement. Incitement becomes terrorism.

Terrorism produces an arrest warrant. The arrest warrant becomes an international request. By the time the matter reaches a European court, the original political conflict has been repackaged as neutral criminal procedure.

The June 2025 guidance issued by the United Nations Human Rights Office identified threats against exiles, surveillance, intimidation of families, abuse of counterterrorism laws and reprisals against those who cooperate with international institutions as features of transnational repression. It also made clear that host states have a duty to protect those targeted and prevent their legal systems from being manipulated by foreign governments.

Britain has begun to recognise the problem. Parliamentary inquiries and government statements increasingly describe transnational repression as both a human-rights violation and a national-security threat. British authorities insist that foreign governments will not be permitted to intimidate, harass or harm individuals on British soil.

The difficulty lies in translating that language into policy. Pakistan continues to benefit from its position as a nuclear power and from the Western fear that it may collapse if pressed too hard. For decades, the army has converted those fears into diplomatic impunity. It presents itself as the only institution capable of controlling nuclear weapons, fighting terrorism and preserving regional stability, even when it is simultaneously producing the instability from which it claims to protect the world.

That indulgence allowed repression in Balochistan to be treated as a domestic security matter. It allowed disappearances to accumulate, families to be ignored and peaceful activism to be criminalised. It taught the army that the international cost of repression would remain manageable. Sajid Hussain and Karima Baloch showed that exile no longer guaranteed even the perception of safety.

Imran Khan showed that the same system could imprison a former prime minister and neutralise the country’s largest political movement. Adil Raja, Shahzad Akbar and the other dissidents pursued in Britain show how that system now attempts to project itself into foreign jurisdictions. The progression is clear. First, the state removed people in Balochistan.

Then it threatened those who spoke about them. Then it pursued the speakers beyond Pakistan. Finally, it applied the same machinery to the political centre and exported the persecution of Imran Khan’s movement to the countries where his supporters had found space to speak. Pakistan’s transnational repression is not a separate foreign operation.

It is the continuation abroad of a system built at home. Nobody is safe abroad because nobody is safe at home. The border is merely the point at which repression changes uniform.