Conversion of Capital 183 6.2 the conversion of capital: fungible resources, material aid, and social capital 6.2.1 Libyans’ Capital Conversion: Sufficient over Time Libyans and Syrians alike intervened by tapping the wealth of the anti-regime diaspora, thereby converting cash into funds for rebellion and relief. Given Gaddafi’s long-standing expulsion and isolation of the business classes, civil society leaders, and other elites, his repression came home to roost as wealthy individuals funded insurgent action against him. But so too did ordinary Libyans, including students and non-wealthy families forced to leave Libya with very little, make tremendous sacrifices to channel resources to the cause. Among Libyans in the United States and Britain, no respondent reported difficulties in converting fungible resources and acquiring material goods for the Arab Spring from their conationals. Dr. Mahmoud Traina recalled that after getting to Cairo, for instance, he found that Libyans there “had amassed a crazy amount of money – about one million dollars – from different expats,” which they used to purchase aid and drive caravan of medicine and food into Benghazi. Another US-based activist recalled, We had a registered bank account and an EIN number so we could collect money. We collected about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of funding and about three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of medical equipment. I took these boxes with me over to Malta, and this cash. There was a group of Libyan businessmen. They had these ships and were sending supplies, arms, and stuff like that, over to Misrata. They also had a shortage of milk and medical supplies and diapers, [so] that’s what we spent a vast majority of our cash on. It was just kind of, how do you get these needs covered? Activists also poured their own individual capital into the cause. As a medical doctor working in Cardiff, Niz used his personal finances and social capital to recruit five co-workers to treat injured fighters in Libya.6 He explained, “We paid and planned everything down to the last little detail for them to fly from Cardiff to London to Egypt, to be driven into Benghazi, to be driven to Ajdabiya and back to Benghazi where they were staying in a safe house.” In another case, an activist from Manchester attended a psychiatry conference in Norway in order to beseech doctors to come to Tunisia and volunteer their services with refugees. Using private donations from fellow Libyans, this individual helped to arrange for nine doctors from Norway to come to Tunisia in June to address the needs of traumatized Libyan women. 6 According to Benamer (2012), 707 doctors registered in Britain had obtained a primary medical degree in Libya as of 2012. He cites the number of Libyan doctors in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, and Canada as about 1,120 without disaggregating these numbers. These figures do not count those who completed their primary medical degree in USA and Britain or those working toward an MA or PhD in the medical sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press