“We Will All Get in Trouble”: Outsourced Relational Repression and the High Stakes of Disclosing Activism in Authoritarian Azerbaijan

This study examines how young Azerbaijani activists decide whether to disclose their stigmatized political identities to their families. Drawing on interviews with 29 activists and the anticipated responses and outcomes framework, I find that participants anticipated predominantly negative responses and outcomes: anger, criticism, and fear; reduced freedom and resources; and jeopardized prospects for themselves and their relatives. From these accounts I develop outsourced relational repression, a mechanism of political control in which the state relies on the family’s own interdependence, honor, and obligations to suppress dissent, with relatives policing activists in anticipation of consequences the state rarely needs to impose directly.