GOING AFTER THE FAMILY 7 a precise answer. And they could prevent you from [obtaining a] civil [or] commercial register because your relative is classified as a threat. Similarly, in the case of an Egyptian activist, the state put pressure on him by preventing his family from obtaining national identity cards. This imposed numerous hardships on his relatives, including making it impossible for them to work legally. The fifth and final type of proxy punishment that of (5) travel bans issued against relatives at home. As a Syrian dissident recalled in 2014, ‘when I left the country, the Assad government issued an arrest warrant for me . . . and also issued a travel ban on all my family members—my mother, sisters, brothers’. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s executive branch in the United Kingdom attested that the Egyptian government blocked his family members from ‘traveling [to England] to my daughter’s wedding because of my work’ in 2018. The chief editor of a popular Iranian news media in Europe likewise explained that parents of his staff had been prevented from visiting their children abroad. Spouses of Iranian journalists in the diaspora have also had their passports confiscated by regime agents (Reporters Without Borders, 2017). By keeping transnational family groups apart, regimes effectively divided and strained activists’ ties in major ways. Our analysis finds that these five tactics were not mutually exclusive. Respondents attested that their relatives were often subjected to multiple forms of proxy punishment at once, that different members of the same family sometimes faced different of repression, and that their immediate families might face a range of repressive actions within a condensed period of time. Furthermore, while some tactics appeared to be ‘one time’ punishments (such as denying relatives their national identity cards), this was not guaranteed. Respondents perceived that regimes and their agents might escalate their tactics quickly if they did not relent, but that the timing and severity of proxy punishment were also difficult to reliably predict. Interviewees’ responses were therefore not determined by the type of individual tactic deployed against individual relatives per se, owing to the multifaceted and often unpredictable nature of this repression. Rather, activists abroad responded to proxy punishment as a ‘set’, or repertoire, of actions that made dissent both high-risk and high-cost. As explained below, our analysis finds that interviewees’ responses were shaped by mechanisms that determined whether or not they possessed both the ‘will’ and the ‘way’ to act out against regimes in the face of these costs. THE MECHANISMS SHAPING DIASPORA MEMBERS’ RESPONSES TO PROXY PUNISHMENT Our inductive analysis finds that interviewees’ responses to proxy punishment were shaped by (1) the degree of their commitment to engaging in principled, politicized action, such as independent journalism, human rights work, and lobbying against regimes, and (2) their relative degree of social capital in the host-country. By social capital, we mean the social statuses and organizational affiliations that provided public, institutional, and political support for activism and civil society. These mechanisms shaped diaspora members’ responses to both the perceived threat of proxy punishment (i.e., the expectation of the sanction) and its actual application to their families in patterned ways. We categorized political commitment and social capital as ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ according to interviewees’ self-evaluations and reported resources. As summarized in Table 1, these mechanisms influenced respondents’ decisions to react by: (a) going silent, (b) fighting back, or (c) navigating between protective and principled action. Going silent Respondents reported ‘going silent’ after settling abroad when their weak political commitment to change at home was combined with weak host-country social capital. While interviewees feared for their own safety, they reported