Role of Diaspora Movements 13 enable them to participate in public affairs and circulate between two or more worlds. Diaspora groups who settle in countries that purport to uphold political rights and civil liberties are further advantaged by what social movement scholars call “political opportunities” for transnational action (McAdam et al. 1996; Meyer 2004; Tarrow 1998, 2005). These opportunities include the rights to hold peaceful protests, establish social movement organizations, and lobby for political causes at the domestic and international levels (Bauböck 2008; Brubaker and Laitin 1998; Cohen 2008; Eccarius-Kelly 2002; Fair 2007; Orjuela 2018; Østergaard-Nielsen 2003; Wayland 2004). Not all diasporas settle in places that protect the right of assembly or the free flow of information, but those who do are especially well-positioned to disseminate their grievances online, in their communities, and through protests (Amarsaringham 2015; Bernal 2014; Betts and Jones 2016; Brinkerhoff 2005; Quinsaat 2019). Exiles find themselves gaining added opportunities for voice when their aims align with the agendas of host-country policymakers (DeWind and Segura 2014), as in the cases of anti-regime Russians, Cubans, and Iranians in the United States. Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, who was on the Central Intelligence Agency’s and State Department’s payroll for decades, became infamous for helping the administration of president George W. Bush justify the occupation of Iraq (Roston 2008). In this way, as political scientists Alexander Betts and Will Jones (2016: 9) argue, outside patronage “animates” diaspora elites and their movements. Taken together, research on transnational movements, migration, and diasporas illustrate how contentious politics are not contained within the borders of the nation-state. As national groups and belonging become increasingly “unbound” across state borders (Basch et al. 1994; Harpaz 2019) and transnational practices become easier and cheaper to undertake (Vertovec 2004), so too do diaspora actors appear to wield disproportionate influence in homeland affairs. Equipped with the ties, resources, and political opportunities needed to act on their anti-regime grievances, their actions can create a “serious politics that is at the same time radically unaccountable” (Anderson 1998: 78; see also Adamson 2004; T. Smith 2000). It is for these reasons that scholars such as Benedict Anderson (1998) and Samuel Huntington (1997, 2004) have expressed alarm at the ways in which diaspora movements instigate insurgencies and influence policy in pursuit of sectarian self-interests. Such “unencumbered long-distance nationalists,” Anderson (1998: 78) warns, “well and safely positioned in the First World, . . . send money and guns, circulate propaganda, and build intercontinental computer information circuits, all of which have incalculable consequences in the zones of their ultimate destinations.” For better and for worse, anti-regime diasporas appear well-poised to wield, in Hirschman’s terminology (1970), loyalty and voice after exit as weapons for change at home. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press