Investigating Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni Activism 21 humanitarian disaster. Despite this variation in timing,16 this research design enabled me to compare how diaspora mobilization had emerged and changed within and across groups over time. In total, I conducted 239 in-depth interviews among the diaspora communities listed in Table 1.2.17 Our extended conversations addressed their migration histories and activist backgrounds, their involvement in social movements before and during the Arab Spring, and perceived failures and successes of their collective efforts. In all, their ranks represented a total of sixty-one groups and organizations, both formal and informal, spread across the United States and Britain.18 Activists working for relief warranted inclusion because their homecountry regimes viewed independent humanitarian work as traitorous. In fact, those working to deliver charity to the needy incurred as much risk as freedom fighters themselves, as numerous aid workers disappeared into prisons and have been subjected to bombings, torture, and state-sanctioned murder. Many activists engaged in both overtly political and humanitarian work, or switched from one to the other when political work became too fractious. Because my resources did not allow me to visit every interviewee in person, I relied on media like Skype and Viber to reach participants in Cardiff, Wales, and Bradford, England; those who were working at the time in Turkey and Qatar; and those who were residing across Michigan (Dearborn, Flint, and Ann Arbor) and in Boston, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay area. I conducted all interviews in English, though respondents and I frequently used Arabic terms, and no interviewees were excluded from the study on the basis of language. Activists’ abilities in English and Arabic varied, though many were proficient in both. Finally, I undertook ethnographic observations (and sometimes participant observations) of thirty events related to the revolutions and relief efforts from 2011 until 2014. Most of these events took place with Syrian activists in the Greater Los Angeles area where I was studying and living at the time, though 16 17 18 Some degree of case-based unevenness is inevitable when studying real-world events due to the researcher’s inability to control conditions as they would in a lab experiment; this does not, however, negate the validity of comparative research or the comparisons of countries within geopolitical regions (Brownlee et al. 2015; see also Goodwin 2001). Among these respondents, 231 were members of the 3 national identity groups. Eight others worked closely with activists in the American and British diasporas, but did not fit precisely into these categories. These respondents included a Lebanese-British head of a Syrian humanitarian organization, an Anglo-British member of the Yemen desk at Chatham House in London, and two Libyan-Canadian activists who worked with conationals from the United States and Britain during the 2011 revolution. Research procedures followed Institutional Review Board protocols. Because political conditions in activists’ home- and host-countries have worsened at the time of this writing (see Meek et al. 2017; Sengupta 2017), I refrain from specifying identifying information when it could be of potential risk to them. However, many of these activists have “gone public” with their claims in the media and are widely known in diaspora movement communities (and to regimes) already, regardless of conflict dynamics at home. See also the Methodological Appendix. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press