Conflict Transmission 91 YCA and joined the National Board. But because separation was maintained between home-country politics and the YCA, Saleh stated that they managed community “coherence [with] less conflict, fewer problems” than in the Liverpool and Birmingham YCAs. The reproduction of home-country conflicts influenced the anti-political character of diaspora mobilization in the Yemeni American community as well. My request for an interview with representatives of the Yemeni Association of Scientists and Professionals – the only functioning organization I could locate at the time – was politely declined because representatives viewed my research as political, and therefore outside the purview of their organization. The British Yemeni youth who had formed new groups on the eve of the Arab Spring also reported that their initiatives were plagued by divisions from home-country politics. For example, Awssan, co-founder of the Yemen Forum Foundation, aimed to mobilize the broader Yemeni-British diaspora for the purposes of domestic empowerment, and specifically “to bring the youth together first because they don’t have the politics or the [boundaries] or the sectarian ideologies some of the elders had. So we traveled to most of the cities in the UK and tried to bring them together.” To that end, they had planned to partner with the Birmingham, Brighton, Liverpool, and Sheffield communities. At the same time, Awssan and his colleagues’ status as “independent youth” also paradoxically hindered their mobilization efforts because they lacked legitimacy among the “elders” with ties to the Yemeni political establishment. He explained, We weren’t in touch with Yemen, which made our lives a lot harder. The community organizations were in touch with the ambassador or the embassy at the time. For us, it’s difficult [because we’re] not known. It was like, who are these three young guys with this radical ideology of bringing Yemenis together? Though a southerner, Awssan was not a secessionist, and he had a difficult time convincing southerners in Birmingham to get on board with their plan while they were involved in a conflict over the YCA. The Yemen Forum Foundation, he explained, was just getting off the ground as an incorporated organization when the revolution began in 2011. In sum, Yemeni diaspora mobilization before the 2011 uprisings was hindered by conflict transmission stemming from regionalism and corruption in the homeland. Community leaders correspondingly viewed the infiltration of home-country politics as toxic to their efforts to empower local communities. As a result, leaders involved in YCAs and development had to avoid appearing political in any way, including eschewing any mention of the very events and practices that made the diaspora a national community, such as Yemen’s Unity Day. Other associations remained dysfunctional or sites of contention. So even though Yemeni Community Associations might have served as vehicles for collective action, these organizations were either undermined by crony politics or kept strictly apolitical. Furthermore, youth organizers who were motivated https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press