6 MOSS ET AL . called him and threatened him that he will pay for [my actions] . . . . Then they took him to the police station for two nights’. Violence against family members was also used to try and lure diaspora activists back home. A Syrian journalist working in an exiled media organization in Turkey reported in 2018 that his brother and colleague were arrested ‘to get me back into the country.’ Two years later, the families were informed that both men had died in prison. Iranian authorities also used this tactic to target journalists working for Persian-language programs of foreign media, including BBC Persian and Radio Free Europe. An editor of one of these stations explained that authorities arrested his father in 2009 to send him ‘a message’ and lure him to Turkey or Dubai, where he might be kidnapped and renditioned home. In response, I let [the Iranian authorities] know that they could contact me directly to tell me what they want . . . [But] they never contacted me directly. The pressure increased: they also took my mother, my brother. They threatened them in different ways. They insisted that I stop working. In 2017, 85 Iranian journalists working for BBC Persian—more than half of the staff—indicated in an internal survey that their family members in Iran had been interrogated because of their reporting. The sister of a BBC journalist was even held in solitary confinement for 17 days to force the journalist into a Skype-based interrogation with the authorities (Saremi, 2017). Several Iranian, Libyan, and Syrian respondents attested that relatives who visited them abroad were either interrogated upon their return or were pressured to spy on them before departing. The second type of proxy punishment involved (2) verbal threats and in-person harassment of family members by regime agents. A Libyan dissident who fled his home-country in the early 1990s recalled, ‘My father was being harassed consistently while I was abroad . . . about me’. Two Egyptian residents in Turkey working for Muslim Brotherhoodaffiliated media organizations likewise stated that their families were threatened as a direct result of their media work. The ‘Egyptian national security guys went to my father many times, telling [him] they would kill him’, one of them reported. Egyptian security agents raided families’ homes, destroying or confiscating personal belongings such as laptops and smartphones (Human Rights Watch, 2019a). Syrian respondents explained that security agents often paid families a visit to gather information about their relative’s activism abroad. ‘Just their physical presence sends a strong signal’, explained one such activist. He pointed out that some families who were threatened this way decided to leave Syria ‘because they felt insecure and did not want to be in that position again’. In an especially tragic case, an Iranian journalist and human rights defender reported that because of his activities abroad, his brother in Tehran was harassed for years by intelligence agents and was eventually driven to suicide. The third type was (3) forced participation in regime propaganda and slander. For instance, the Iranian regime pressured the husband of human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to ‘confess’ on national television about his wife’s so-called involvement in an anti-Iranian Western conspiracy (Ebadi, 2016). The sister of women’s rights campaigner Masih Alinejad was likewise forced on primetime Iranian state television to criticize Alinejad’s activism and her Western lifestyle, and to claim that their parents disapproved of her campaigns (Alinejad, 2018). The father of Mohamed Ali, an exiled businessman who stirred protests with YouTube videos criticizing government corruption, was forced to appear on TV programs in Egypt denouncing his son (Human Rights Watch, 2019a). Egyptian policemen also ordered the brother of a Muslim Brotherhood activist in the United Kingdom to testify in the media that this activist was a terrorist. The fourth type of proxy punishment was (4) resource deprivation. Resource deprivation included the termination of family members’ employment, the seizure of their assets, and the denial of work permits. An Iranian journalist explained that his brother was blocked from working in the media sector because of his family’s activism abroad. A Syrian activist recalled that state authorities also used routine bureaucratic requirements to put exiles’ relatives under pressure: When you go to any public office to do paperwork, they will harass and question you: “What is your son, your relative doing outside?” If you give a vague answer, it will not be accepted; you have to give