GOING AFTER THE FAMILY 9 Fighting back In contrast to the response of keeping silent, we find that interviewees with strong political commitment and strong social capital rebuffed the threats posed by proxy punishment in order to ‘fight back’ openly against regimes. Strong commitment was signified by their leadership and regular participation in anti-regime actions and transnational social movements, such as the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood or the Syrian opposition-in-exile. Others became independent opposition figures and anti-regime influencers on social media. For example, Abdullah el-Sherif, a popular YouTuber and critic-in-exile, had his brothers arrested by Egyptian authorities and thrown into a maximum-security prison under trumped-up charges for his critical commentary. Sherif’s father was also forced onto state TV to denounce his son. Nevertheless, Sherif remained committed to continuing his work, reasoning that the regime of Fattah el-Sisi could not be trusted to stop abusing his family. At the same time, Sherif’s social capital as an online celebrity and Sisi’s ‘loudest critic in exile’ (Walsh, 2020) helped him to garner support from outside organizations, including damning condemnation of his family’s plight from The New York Times and Human Rights Watch (2019a). While such capital did not lead to the cessation of proxy punishment, it did indirectly mitigate these costs for Sherif by making the Egyptian government’s repression an open subject of international controversy and scrutiny. Some highly committed respondents fought back by openly challenging the threat of proxy punishment itself. One human rights defender, for instance, recalled how he had been incarcerated and tortured by the Sisi regime; this fuelled his commitment to anti-regime activism after being forced to leave Egypt. Upon resettling in Germany, his father was arrested and interrogated, and his family pressured him to cease his activities. This activist rebuffed their requests, vowing that he would use his connections to German parliamentarians and journalists—that is, his social capital—to ‘make everything public—and then they [the Egyptian authorities] would have problems with the Germans’. Although this strategy temporarily eased the regime’s pressure on his relatives, doing so was no guarantee of their safety in the long term. In this case, harassment and threats against his immediate family increased again after he participated in public events and meetings with European officials. In addition to popular followings and political ties, social capital also stemmed from organizational support from media organizations. In 2017, for instance, the BBC filed an official complaint to the United Nations on behalf of its Iranian journalists over the regime’s harassment of them and their families. UN Secretary-General António Guterres subsequently expressed his concern over the persecution of BBC staff (BBC, 2019). Since then, the BBC and other UK-based Iranian media have repeatedly worked to raise public attention about transnational repression and help journalists resist proxy punishment. As one Iranian news editor in the United Kingdom explained, ‘For a while, it was tried to convince the regime in silence, behind closed doors, to stop the pressure on outside journalists. For instance, they sent letters to officials to ask them to prevent these measures’. Because this ‘closed door’ strategy had no effect, ‘it was decided to take this public in order to make them stop’. At the same time, the editor conceded that media organizations did not ‘have a lot of means to convince the Iranian regime to refrain from this pressure and harassment’. Organizations therefore also focused on trying to reduce the costs of anti-regime work by providing psychological support and showing solidarity with their staff. Another Iranian editor based in Europe pointed out that colleagues affected by proxy punishment worked conscientiously to support one other. They came to understand ‘that if they step back, the pressure will not stop. The authorities will know that they have found the soft spot and will move forward step by step’. Activists without the backing of protective organizations, however, were left to handle these pressures on their own, making it far less likely that they would be able to withstand collective punishment and its attendant pressures over time. Respondents who took the principled decision to continue their public activism despite the threat of proxy punishment did experience significant guilt and stress, however. An Iranian women’s rights defender pointed out that residing in a European country gave her the freedoms to be vocal in her claims, but ‘day by day, it puts your links inside the country in more danger’. This led some activists to question whether they should maintain their stance of fighting back. Abdullah el-Sherif, mentioned above, expressed these events as ‘painful’ and experienced a deep internal conflict, as