GOING AFTER THE FAMILY 5 with 40 individuals residing in the United Kingdom and Turkey. These projects produced a total of 246 original indepth interviews with diaspora activists, including respondents who became active over the course of their residence abroad and those who were forced abroad because of their activism. (For more information on the data and analytical procedures, see Michaelsen (2018, 2020), Moss (2022), and Kennedy, [2017]. These data are ideally suited to shedding light on proxy punishment for several reasons. The home-countries examined here—Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Libya—have each experienced prolonged periods of authoritarian rule with severe restrictions on expression and civil society. Together, the interviews cover periods of stable authoritarian rule and heightened unrest, including the 2009 Green movement protests in Iran and the Arab Spring uprisings, which gave diaspora activists new opportunities and motivations to mobilize for home-country change in 2011 and beyond (Kelly, 2011). In Egypt and Iran, short-lived openings were followed by a repressive backlash that re-imposed authoritarian control. In Syria, the 2011 uprising led the regime to declare war on its population, and following the 2011 Libyan revolution, a brief period of democratization was followed by an internationalized civil war. These conditions pushed many to emigrate and join pre-existing diaspora communities (Dunne & Hamzawy, 2019; Human Rights Watch, 2012). After these studies were completed, we jointly examined our findings and found that respondents living in different host-countries faced the common threat of proxy punishment. Using our data, we co-constructed categories encompassing all reported forms of transnational repression involving in-country relatives who were not themselves active for politicized causes. Thus, their repression could not be construed as punishments for their own activism. We also cased secondary sources, including scholarly works, media articles, and human rights reports, to help us to refine and corroborate these categories. We then coded our original interviews for activists’ responses and justifications, using process-tracing strategies to account for patterns in event sequences, strategic decision-making processes, and respondent characteristics (George & Bennett, 2004; Lofland et al., 2006). Using this inductive, grounded analytical approach (Charmaz, 2006), we derived a common repertoire of activists’ responses and identified the mechanisms driving their decision-making. The safety and security of our respondents remained a core concern, and the informed consent of interviewees followed institutionally mandated protocols (see the Appendix of Moss, 2022), including obtaining consent orally in some instances. The latter procedure is appropriate for researching communities vulnerable to retaliation by political authorities (Glasius et al., 2017, p. 100; European Commission, 2020). In order to account for the shifting realities of the Middle Eastern region and to provide maximum protection to our respondents, the majority of interviews cited in this paper are anonymized. Exceptions were made in cases where activists themselves had published on, and spoken publicly about, proxy punishment. We also give minimal descriptions of anonymized participants to facilitate their deidentification and protection. EXPERIENCING PROXY PUNISHMENT Proxy punishment was a common and predominant concern for interviewees from Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Libya alike. As a Libyan dissident recalled, if the Gaddafi regime ‘knew you were opposing them and they can’t reach you, they would target your family’. Similarly, a Syrian interviewee pointed out in 2019 that the Assad regime could detain families in Syria at any moment ‘to use them as a pressure tool’ against opponents abroad, emphasizing that this was ‘the first nightmare for any activist’. Our analysis finds that proxy punishment fell into five major categories. The first was the (1) physical harm and confinement of activists’ relatives in the home-country. In 2011, for instance, regime agents kidnapped and beat musician Malik Jandali’s parents in Homs after he spoke out in favour of liberty in Syria during a performance in Washington, DC (Amnesty International, 2011). In a parallel case, a Syrian activist reported from Turkey in 2018 that regime militia threatened his brother’s life; although the brother succeeded in fleeing abroad, his colleague in Syria was subsequently tortured and killed by the same militia. Physical harm and confinement could also take the form of arrest, detention, and interrogation. An Egyptian human rights defender reported in 2018 that authorities ‘sent my father messages,