Mobilization and Migration Studies 31 Yet, relatively little is known about how diaspora movements emerge or why their transnational political practices change over time. This chapter presents a framework to help fill these gaps by drawing inductively on the Arab Spring abroad. Adopting Albert Hirschman’s (1970) heuristic vocabulary of exit, voice, and loyalty, I propose the conditions under which diaspora movements become empowered to act on their loyalties and wield voice after exit against authoritarianism. Specifically, I show how transnational repression and conflict transmission suppress voice; how quotidian disruptions give rise to it; and how resource conversion and geopolitical support transform voice into the means of contentious political action. In so doing, this book demonstrates why antiauthoritarian diaspora mobilization is a contingent, and even fragile, force for change in a highly globalized world. The conceptual and theoretical warrants for these arguments are elaborated below. 1.1 the transnational turn in mobilization and migration studies The study of how contentious politics operate transnationally has expanded rapidly in the decades since Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane (1971, 1972) declared that the cross-border interactions of non-state actors are an essential dimension of contemporary politics. Since that time, the transnational turn in the study of social movements has demonstrated that activists mobilize transnationally in different ways.2 Local movements savvy to the need for international support do so by engaging in “scale shift” (Tarrow 2005), by redirecting their claims from the local arena to supranational, state-regulating actors. The purpose of scale shift is to mobilize international institutions and agencies to come to the defense of movements and their constituents (Tarrow 2005). As Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) landmark research demonstrates, the ties between local movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international bodies such as the United Nations can grant activists important forms of leverage. By “naming and shaming” relevant authorities, activists persuade human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to take up their claims and condemn regime crimes (HafnerBurton and Tsutsui 2007). They also lobby governments and international bodies to exert corresponding pressure on offending authorities to change their practices and policies (Brysk 2000; Carpenter 2010; Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2007; Keck 1995; Tsutsui 2004, 2006, 2018). Bestowed with an internationalized set of “political opportunities” (Kay 2011; Tarrow 2001) – a relatively stable set of conditions that facilitate activism – transnational 2 For related works on the interactive dynamics of transnational social movements, international organizations, and state-regulating institutions, see Boli and Thomas (1999), Della Porta and Tarrow (2005), Keck and Sikkink (1998), McCarthy (1997), Risse et al. (2013), Risse-Kappen (1995), Ron et al. (2005), J. Smith (2008), J. Smith and Johnston (2002), and Tsutsui (2018). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press