10 MOSS ET AL . well as pressure from his parents. ‘I feel really bad’, he said. ‘I’ve lost my appetite. My mother and father call all the time, crying on the phone, asking me to quit. I don’t know what to do’ (Walsh, 2020). Families could release diaspora members from some of this guilt by giving them permission to speak out against regimes. Without this permission, however, respondents risked incurring anger, social sanctions, and isolation from their relatives (see also Moss, 2016). In either case, the pressures that the threats of proxy punishment imposed on diaspora activists were traumatizing and pervasive. It is for this reason that many interviewees took a third route, treading a narrow path between principled and protective action. Navigating between protective and principled action Interviewees attempted a third route of navigating between the opposing options of going silent and fighting back when they possessed a strong commitment to their principles, but also had weak social capital. While our sample is not statistically representative, the fact that most of our 246 interviewees chose navigating as a strategic response illustrates the dilemma faced by exiles and emigrants with ‘a foot in two worlds’ (Levitt, 2003). In other words, they become torn between their duty to protect their families and their principled, political obligations to support anti-authoritarian causes. We find that navigation strategies took three primary forms: signalling to regimes that activists cut their family ties in order to persuade them of proxy punishment’s futility (while clandestinely retaining these ties); actually cutting ties as a means to protect their relatives; and self-censoring their public visibility while remaining active behind the scenes. Respondents sometimes combined signalling or cutting ties with self-censorship. At the same time, these tactics could not ensure the safety of their families. Furthermore, activists often felt unsure about the margin of error when attempting to navigate between their opposing obligations. Many decided to adopt strategies of risk mitigation in an improvised manner, depending on whether they had been threatened directly, received new information about regime reprisals or policies, heard rumours about impending regime plans, and observed the costs paid by their peers. In cases of signalling, respondents attempted to derive a work-around strategy to proxy punishment by signalling to regime monitors that they were estranged from their families. An Iranian editor of a prominent news organization, for instance, spoke loudly and rudely to his father on the phone, pretending to be angry with him in order to ‘speak’ to agents tapping the line. ‘I told my father that my work was none of his business and he could not interfere’, he attested, in order ‘to let [the security agents] know that they couldn’t get to me through my father. To some extent it helped. My father [also] told them that . . . he had told me to stop my work but I wouldn’t listen’. In this way, activists tried to persuade regime agents that proxy punishment was a futile strategy. This also worked the other way around, as when a Syrian activist’s father called him and told him angrily to stop his advocacy. ‘I know he doesn’t mean it’, the interviewee affirmed; rather, his father was attempting to convince security agents to leave him alone after facing continuous harassment for his son’s activities in London. Even if activists and their families did not truly ‘mean’ what they said, they had to keep their communications hostile or exceedingly limited in order to maintain the ruse over time. It follows that the strategy of navigation also prompted some respondents to actually cut their ties and cease communicating with relatives at home as a strategy of familial protection. Libyans and Syrians reported that before and during the 2011 uprisings, this strategy gave their relatives plausible deniability if they were questioned by authorities. A Syrian activist interviewed in 2019 explained that when his family was threatened by security agents because of his Facebook postings, he decided to ‘block all the family on Facebook’ to protect them. Others ceased contacting their families at all, as in the case of a Syrian journalist who escaped to Europe in 2018. ‘My family is still in Damascus, [but] until now I haven’t sent them a direct message’, he said. ‘I sent a message through my aunt in Saudi Arabia. She tells me every week what my family is doing. I am still afraid to contact them’. Respondents also navigated these pressures by self-censoring their visibility. As mentioned above, some respondents who had been silent previously became motivated to mobilize in solidarity with their compatriots at home after the onset of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions. At the same time, interviewees attempted to reduce the risks to their