46 Exit from Authoritarianism revolutionaries, civil society actors, and student activists, gave rise to new antiregime networks abroad. Members of these diaspora networks and groups would play an important role in auxiliary activism for the Arab Spring in 2011 and beyond. I also find that Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni immigrants in the United States and Britain established groups dedicated to the empowerment and socialization of the diaspora community itself. According to respondents who had been involved directly in the founding and operations of these associations, such groups were intended to be strictly apolitical, focusing instead on meeting the professional, economic, and social needs of the national immigrant community. However, as I elaborate later in Chapter 3, the conversion of these organizations – what social movement scholars call “indigenous organizations” (McAdam 1999[1982]) – into politicized “mobilizing structures” (McAdam et al. 1996) enabled them to channel significant resources to Arab Spring allies in 2011 and beyond.2 This chapter also sets up the puzzles that I address in Chapter 3. First, in spite of their relative opportunities for voice, the political initiatives of antiregime diaspora members from Libya and Syria remained relatively small, informal, or underground. The data demonstrate that attempts to broaden the scope and publicity of their claims to mobilize the wider anti-regime community in the open were largely unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Yemenis had several groups dedicated to political change, but these groups called for the autonomy or secession of southern Yemen from the north, rather than for regime change of the central government. Second, although emigrant communities often work collectively to support development and charity in their places of origin through fundraising and hometown associations (Moya 2005), no Libyan or Syrian groups were dedicated to development or aid in the homecountry. Only in the Yemeni case did a few organizations undertake some charitable efforts; these were, however, exceedingly small and not the primary purpose of the associations that spearheaded these campaigns. Taken together, organizations dedicated to home-country development or charity were noticeably lacking in all three national communities prior to the Arab Spring. Chapter 2 explains these missing mobilizations as the result of transnational deterrents that have been largely overlooked in studies of transnational movements and diasporas to date. 2 McAdam et al. (2001: 45) argue that “Mobilizing structures can be preexisting or created in the course of contention but in any case need to be appropriated as vehicles of struggle.” While I do not disagree, I contend that there is an important significance to the conversion of preexisting organizations to political causes; these organizations bring their own set of constituencies and resources to a movement and lend it legitimacy. Furthermore, creating new structures also takes significant resources, which can place an undue burden on activists. See Chapter 6 of this book on resource conversion for details. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press