Emergent Puzzles from the Arab Spring Abroad 15 deeply reluctant to lend their faces and names to the cause, sometimes even month or years after the revolt’s inception. I was also perplexed by the content of my conversations with Yemeni activists, which often went on for hours over steaming bowls of ful, a delicious bean stew that bubbled in blackened bowls, and rice heaping with a traditional salsa-like condiment called sahawag. During these extended interviews, I learned that anti-regime mobilization was a deeply unifying and fragmenting experience for Yemenis in the diaspora. For instance, from a Yemeni cafe in Birmingham, England, a beaming man named Ali in dark-rimmed glasses described how the Arab Spring had made him feel marginalized and maligned in his own community. Ali described how his writings about the Yemeni revolution were being criticized and censored by his conationals on Facebook, how he and his friends had been shut out of protests, and how hurt they felt by others’ efforts to shut them up. Ali had been a longtime supporter of change in Yemen, but as a result of these experiences, he had withdrawn his support shortly after the uprising began. Many other Yemenis echoed a version of his story. Syrian activists were also deeply divided, and often preoccupied with perceived power grabs and accusations of co-optation in their movements abroad. The transcripts of our conversations read as venting sessions against other likeminded activists and movements within the opposition who, as several British respondents put it, spent as much time “slagging each other off” as actually helping their compatriots at home. As a result, many of the most ardent antiregime exiles and community figures ended up withdrawing their support for the revolution as time wore on. I also learned that diaspora activists’ actual interventions in the rebellions and for badly needed humanitarian relief varied considerably. Syrians in Britain, for instance, reported numerous obstacles to supporting the Arab Spring, from the costs of continuously volunteering their time and labor to being left out of the policymaking process. Syrians in the United States, while certainly reporting fatigue and burnout, instead forged a robust set of advocacy and relief organizations and continued lobbying over the course of the revolution and subsequent war. Furthermore, although Yemenis hailed the Arab Spring as a turning point in their communities, they also detailed their incapacity to help revolutionaries in a tangible way. As Yemen’s dissidents were gunned down in city squares and field hospitals were overrun with casualties in 2011, organizers like Shaima found their activist groups unable to do much more than voice their solidarity on the streets from a distance. Shaima and I spent hours together on buses and sipping teas in Birmingham’s Bull Ring discussing this paradox. “Here, we’re educated,” she mused. “We have activist resources . . .. Even if you’re not educated to a certain level, there’s opportunities here. It’s about just being able to pick it up and move it. But how do you do that?” Others across the United States and Britain echoed her befuddlement. The Arab Spring was a remarkable time for the anti-regime diaspora, signifying a new phase in community https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press