92 Silenced and Split to overcome the divisions that plagued the diaspora were paradoxically hindered by their status as independent youngsters. Lacking social and political clout with older elites, their initiatives were sparse and largely informal. In all, like their counterparts in the Libyan and Syrian diasporas, Yemeni activism in the United States and Britain was rife with fissures before the Arab Spring. 3.3 conclusion As Chapter 2 elaborated, exiles and émigrés from Libya, Syria, and Yemen capitalized on political opportunities to mobilize on behalf of home-country affairs from their places of settlement and refuge. However, this chapter has demonstrated that diaspora members’ transnational ties also acted back on them to constrain and contain voice. As elaborated above, diaspora members’ ties to the home-country subjected them to transnational repression and conflict transmission, both of which mitigated opportunities to protest, lobby, and organize from abroad. In line with Alunni’s research on the Libyan diaspora (2019: 258; 2020), “divisions in the diaspora together with the regime’s policies at home and persecutions abroad were overall detrimental to the establishment of an all-Libyan diasporic public space.” Syrians experienced the same problems. While the Yemeni regime was not strong enough to enforce the same degree of threat abroad, all three communities were subjected to conflict transmission. As a result, the use of voice immediately preceding the Arab Spring was considered a highly partisan, if not downright risky, political endeavor. At the same time, it is precisely because of members’ simultaneous embeddedness in home-country conditions (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004) that the disruptions wrought by the Arab Spring had such powerful mobilizing effects on diaspora activism. As the revolutions disrupted the normative, everyday effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission, diaspora members became motivated to come out and come together for home-country change as never before. The next chapter elaborates how disruptions to social control and conflict at home had far-reaching effects on the diaspora, leading to a new wave of mass, public transnational contention against authoritarian regimes. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press