The Conditions Shaping Voice After Exit 23 regimes in Libya, Syria, and Yemen in the 1960s and 1970s pushed emigrants abroad. Owing to the additional “pull” factors of host-countries with democratic freedoms and educational opportunities, the United States and Britain came to host a range of anti-regime members, exiles, and well-resourced professionals with the requisite grievances to form opposition movements abroad. First- and second-generation regime opponents also retained ties to their home-countries in the form of familial connections, experiences and memories, self-professed identities, and – for those not in exile – regular trips to visit the home-country. Nevertheless, anti-regime movements were small, atomized, and considered partisan by their conationals before the Arab Spring. Neither Libyan and Syrian exiles nor well-resourced white-collar professionals were able to forge public member-based associations or initiate mass protest events until well into the Arab Spring. Yemeni movements, meanwhile, focused on supporting southern separation from the Yemeni state, rather than on the reform or liberalization of the central government. Chapter 3 then demonstrates why this was the case, illustrating how two transnational social forces depressed and deterred anti-regime mobilization before the Arab Spring. They did so by embedding diaspora members in authoritarian systems of state control and sociopolitical antagonisms through individuals’ home-country ties. As the third column in Table 1.3 describes, each of these transnational forces was sufficient to suppress diaspora mobilization, but they often operated conjointly before the Arab Spring. The first mechanism, which I call transnational repression, refers to how regimes exert authoritarian forms of control and repress dissent in their diasporas. Regime agents and loyalists from Libya and Syria in particular did so in numerous ways, including by surveilling nationals living abroad, making threats against them, and by punishing regime critics and their family members in the homeland. I find that transnational repression by the Libyan and Syrian regimes made most non-exiles far too mistrustful and fearful to join the exiles who dared to speak out against the regimes before the Arab Spring. As Chapter 3 details, decades of transnational repression among these groups, which included the assassinations of Libyans in London in the 1980s and 1990s and the surveillance of Syrians as far afield as California, deterred the diaspora’s collective ability to speak out and organize against their tormentors. Plagued by widespread suspicion and paralyzing fears of conationals, neither diaspora produced a public membership-based anti-regime association or mass protest in the United States or Britain before 2011. The Yemeni regime, in contrast, attempted to repress its diaspora, but did not have the capacity to silence anti-regime members to the same degree due to its relatively weak governance at home and abroad. The second mechanism that deterred diaspora mobilization before the Arab Spring is what I call conflict transmission, which refers to the ways in which political conflicts and identity-based divisions travel from the home-country through members’ ties to the diaspora. I find that conflict transmission divided https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press