Breakdown of Transnational Repression 99 figure 4.1. An anti-Gaddafi protester demonstrates voice by holding a sign reading “We’re not afraid of you anymore” from London in support of the Libyan revolution against Muammar al-Gaddafi. (Photo credit: Mike Kemp, In Pictures Ltd., 2011/Corbis via Getty Images) Abdullah also recalled that Libyan students abroad came to side with the revolution rapidly in the United States, even though these students risked having their scholarships withdrawn and their families harmed. When Abdullah and his colleagues in Enough Gaddafi! talked to them in Washington, DC, “We said, ‘Aren’t you afraid? You have family in Libya!’” He recalled with admiration, They’re telling me, “Those guys are facing bullets! The least I can do is come to a protest, you know?” [They] had this confidence and this loyalty to the lives that are being lost, the people who were dying, and the idea that, hey, we’re really on the cusp of a real change. And those were a lot of the same students who were forced to come out for Gaddafi at the UN [in 2009], protesting on the other side of the line from us. As journalist Evan Hill (2011) reported for the Doha-based news agency Al Jazeera English, this shift in moral obligation also led students to explicitly refute regime threats. For some of the students in the United States, the sight of citizens publicly calling for Gaddafi’s ouster was enough to inspire them to defy the embassy’s demands to come to Washington, DC. “I was up late all last night watching the videos of masked youths pleading to the Libyan people to rise against the oppression,” one of the students wrote in an email. “These videos have been circulating on Facebook, and after watching them I broke into tears. I will no longer accept this oppression.” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press