Introduction 2 terrorism. By 2010, autocrats augmented by oil wealth had Western nations so cozily in their pockets that their confidence in perpetual rule was sky high. With so much attention focused on authoritarian durability, it is little wonder that the revolutions to follow caught scholars and governments by surprise (Bamyeh and Hanafi 2015). This new era of revolt began in Tunisia in December 2010; within weeks, demonstrations against corruption and repression had spread to Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain. These uprisings, which have become known as the “Arab Spring,”2 spanned from the sapphireblue waters of the Mediterranean coast to the green highlands of the Arabian Peninsula. As tens of thousands of ordinary people demanded their dignity by marching in the streets against corruption and abuse, popular movements and insurgencies destabilized regimes thought to be unshakable. The conflicts that ensued produced both improbable triumphs through selfless heroism and devastating losses through abject slaughter. But well before this wave gave rise to resurgent dictatorships and civil wars (Lynch 2016), the masses shook the earth with rage and made dictators quake with fear. Revolutions are rarely neatly confined to their places of origin, however. They also galvanize anti-regime activists in the diaspora around the globe, and the Arab Spring was no exception. Diaspora mobilization for the Arab Spring was no trivial matter. Long before foreign governments and international organizations jumped in to support revolutionaries, ordinary emigrants, refugees, and their children protested in Washington, DC, London, and New York City against their home-country regimes; channeled millions of dollars’ worth of aid to poorly equipped insurgencies and beleaguered refugees; and traveled homeward to join the revolutions as rescue workers, interpreters, and fighters. Diaspora activists’ efforts to help their compatriots under siege not only heralded a new wave of transnational activism, but exposed regimes’ crimes against humanity and saved lives on the ground. Their mobilization against authoritarianism also signified a new phase in community empowerment and collective action, particularly among those who had grown up in places where speaking out against ruling dictatorships could get a person imprisoned, tortured, or killed. 2 As scholars such as Holmes (2019) have rightly pointed out, the Arab Spring is a misnomer since many non-Arabs participated in revolts and protests, from the Nubians of Egypt to the Kurds of Syria. I use this label intentionally, however, because it commonly refers to the protest wave initiated in Tunisia in 2011 and carried on by protesters in Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain in 2011 (and beyond in some cases). In contrast to Bayat (2017), I characterize these movements as revolutionary (rather than “refolutionary”) due to the fact that they demanded the fall of dictatorships, not reforms, and new social, economic, and political arrangements to ensure justice and equity (see also Brownlee et al. 2015; Holmes 2019). Of course, what these demands actually meant to participants in practice depended on who or what movements within the revolutionary coalitions one is referring to (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood versus secular feminists). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press