Variation in Diaspora Interventions 169 traveled into Damascus in 2011 in order to understand what was happening in Syria for himself. Going against his parents’ wishes, he then joined the protest movement and worked with the anti-regime Damascus Media Center. As the revolution escalated, this respondent reported undertaking aid delivery and weapons smuggling, as well as fighting on the front lines with an FSA brigade in Aleppo. Unlike my Libyan interviewees, however, he did not report fighting alongside other members of the Syrian diaspora during this period. Several respondents also reported volunteering in Yemen during the revolution, although this was not a part of activists’ collective strategies of intervention. Some simply decided to put their lives on hold to venture home and see what they could do. Raja, a student in New York, for example, was motivated by the Friday of Dignity Massacre to take a leave from her university and become a citizen photojournalist in Sanaʻa. Because the regime deported many foreign journalists the week before the massacre, these circumstances gave her a unique opportunity to document the violence. Armed with her Yemeni residency card and her camera, she recalled, I don’t need a visa to get into Yemen, and at that point they weren’t issuing visas to anyone, especially from the US. So I went, it was pretty easy to get in. I can blend in and integrate and report. I speak English, I have media contacts, so my added value was sky rocketing at that point. Raja went as an independent observer and published her photographs and writings on her blog and on social media. She remained in Yemen from March through August. Lacking a journalist’s background, she learned how to document the conflict on the fly. Summer from New York also returned to her family’s residence in Aden several times during the revolution. She avoided joining the protests, however, because she did not want to become embroiled in the controversy surrounding southern separatism. Instead, Summer worked to document stories and events on her blog. In one other case, I found that a London-based journalist named Abubakr joined his family in Sanaʻa during the revolution for about a month in April, working as an intern for the Yemen Times during the day and participating in the sit-ins at night. That said, Yemeni diaspora movements did not incorporate volunteering on the ground into their tactics or goals. Instead, activists made the decision to participate directly in Yemen’s Arab Spring on a selective, individualized basis. 5.6 variation in diaspora interventions As illustrated above, diaspora movements from the United States and Britain performed a range of critically important roles in Arab Spring. When compared by national group and host-country, these roles varied widely, as summarized in Table 1.3 in the Introduction. The riots that kick-started Libya’s revolution escalated into a national revolutionary war that “needed everything,” as one https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press