Introduction 3 Although the Arab Spring uprisings are well-known, the role that diaspora movements played in this revolutionary wave is not. This is not surprising, given the guiding assumption among social scientists that protesters must be present – proximate, in person, and ready to storm the gates – to challenge authoritarians.3 As economist Albert Hirschman (1970) describes in his hallmark work Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, populations aggrieved with their governments can do one of three things. They can either remain loyal and hope for the best, voice their dissent at home through protest – a high-risk strategy in authoritarian contexts – or exit, thereby voting against authorities with their feet. Hirschman argues that exit in the form of emigration, whether forced or voluntary, decimates the potential for voice and social change.4 By breaking up dissident networks and separating leaders from their adherents, exit acts as a safety valve for regimes by releasing pressure from below, thereby reducing “the prospects for advance, reform, or revolution” (Hirschman 1986: 90). Yet, as the case of the Arab Spring abroad demonstrates, dissidents who travel abroad have the potential to induce change from without. In fact, those who remain loyal to the people and places left behind can use voice after exit to demand change at home (Glasius 2018; Hirschman 1993; Hoffmann 2010; Mueller 1999; Newland 2010; Pfaff 2006; Pfaff and Kim 2003). Members of diasporas – a term used here to refer to the exiles, émigrés, expatriates, refugees, and emigrants of different generations who attribute their origins to a common place – do so for many reasons.5 Memories of their lives before displacement, 3 4 5 For notable exceptions, see works by Amarsaringham (2015) and Quinsaat (2013, 2019). This is why regimes “behead opposition groups by allowing, encouraging, and forcing exit” (Hirschman 1993: 84) and cast their opponents into exile. Authorities also discredit exiles by slandering them as traitors and outlaws (Glasius 2018). Here, “diaspora” is a descriptor used akin to the way sociologists use the term “emigrant” – a person who has exited from a country where they no longer reside – but it is also preferable to using the latter term since many diaspora activists have never themselves emigrated, being of the second or third generation, and because many of my respondents called themselves diaspora members. By using “diaspora” to describe activists and their movements and organizations (which is a synonym of diasporic, but less awkward), I refer to the biographical, cognitive, and structural orientations of persons and their social, political, and economic practices vis-à-vis a shared place of origin, that is, a “home-country.” While many diasporas speak of a “homeland” instead of a home-country – as in the case of the Palestinians or Kurds – the actual places where diaspora members are rooted tend to fall within the jurisdictions of states. I thus use homecountry and homeland interchangeably in some parts of this book for practical and stylistic reasons. In order to distinguish the attributed place of origin from the place of residence, I use “hostcountry” as a synonym of “receiving country” or “country of settlement.” This does not mean that the persons in this study only consider their place of origin as “home” and their place of residence as temporary. I found that many interviewees consider the United States or Britain more so their “home” than anywhere else; for others, they felt belonging to (and rejection from) more than one country as well. In a world where persons are increasingly embracing hybrid identities (Hall 2016) and may attribute their belonging to multiple locations and communities, the distinctions here are made for the purposes of analysis and are not intended to essentialize https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press