In authoritarianism research, legitimation and repression have received growing attention over the past years. However, these two strategies of political rule do not form separate pillars of power, they are interrelated and affect each other. Autocrats not only rely on coercion, they also seek to justify their use of repression vis-à-vis at least some of their citizens and the outside world. These legitimizing discourses are part of political communication in autocracies. The opacity of authoritarian regimes varies, impacting on how incumbents publicize, admit to, or conceal certain forms of repression. So far, few researchers of the protest–repression nexus have studied justifications of repression, mostly in the context of singular repressive events. This paper is the first to conceptualize and systematically investigate how officials in autocracies justify a variety of repressive acts directed against different targets. It outlines a conceptual framework based on insights from research on political violence, authoritarian legitimation, and political communication. Empirically, it analyzes justifications of repression in Morocco and Tunisia from 2000–2010. In their justifications, autocratic officials choose from a variety of frames based on legal, political, or societal arguments. Multiple factors influence which types of justification are used. One decisive factor is against which targets repression is employed. In framing the targets of repression in a certain way, autocratic elites seek to attain the approval of certain audiences while at the same time deterring potential or actual dissidents. Furthermore, justifications diverge regarding which actors use them and towards which audiences. The sources for this paper are reports by human rights organizations complemented by news reports describing repressive incidents and their respective justifications. Collected systematically in a database, the extent of justification as opposed to denial or cover-up is analyzed. The paper investigates repressive incidents against individual activists, studying the change of justifications over time. In addition, it covers repressive episodes in the context of larger protest events, such as in Gafsa or Sidi Ifni in 2008. This approach is an innovative way of studying state-society relations and regime durability in autocracies. It adds an important piece to the puzzle of authoritarian survival strategies illuminating the “dark side” of legitimation.