38 Diaspora Activism and the Dynamics of Voice travel with refugees from the home-country to their places of refuge, reproducing caste-like stratifications and intra-community conflicts after settlement (Besteman 2016; Rawlence 2016). Varied migration circumstances can also fracture diaspora members over their transnational home-country bonds, as in the cases of generational divides between emigrant cohorts from Vietnam and Cuba (Huynh and Yiu 2015; Pedraza 2007). The transmission of conflicts to the diaspora through members’ cross-border ties is also likely to create disagreements over the use of organizations for activism. Literature on mobilization suggests that activists can grow their movements by appropriating “indigenous” structures in minority communities, such as ethnic or religious organizations, and converting their participants, resources, and legitimacy to the movement (Andrews 2004; McAdam 1999[1982]). This form of resource conversion provides movements with legitimacy and a base of adherents and potential participants. However, what I call conflict transmission can render such resources a major site of contention over who has the right to command them (Besteman 2016). Members’ common ties to a home-country can therefore undermine their willingness and capacity to work together when shared origins embed them in partisan homeland politics, stigmatized identities, and intra-opposition cleavages. 1.4 how quotidian disruptions facilitate voice Given that transnational repression and conflict transmission deter voice, under what conditions do diaspora members come out and come together for change at home? The answer, detailed in Chapter 4, is once again rooted in their ties to the homeland. I argue that just as authoritarianism and conflict travel abroad, so too do disruptions to these normative conditions. During episodes of turmoil and contestation, changes to regime control and power relations in the homecountry travel abroad through members’ ties. Thus, diaspora voice against authoritarianism can result from what David Snow et al. (1998) call a “quotidian disruption.” This theory suggests that groups suffering from previously low degrees of political empowerment and high degrees of alienation are likely to require a major disruption to the norms and routines of everyday life to mobilize them for change. For diaspora members, disruptive changes that travel abroad have the potential to activate horizontal voice between diaspora members and motivate action aimed at expressing collective, vertical voice (Wald 2008). Building on this concept, I argue that heightened mobilization and repression in the home-country will not only disrupt the quotidian at home, but also promote voice abroad by undermining the normative operation and effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission. In the case of the Arab Spring, this occurred when escalating regime repression engulfed diaspora members’ loved ones in the home-country (as when their relatives became pro-revolution in orientation or action, were forced to flee from violence, or https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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