188 Converting Resources to the Cause childhood friends [about this]. [One of them] called me and said we need to help, we’re trying to get some medical supplies in. [Around] the twenty-second, I went to Cairo. While in contact with hospitals in Libya, we immediately went about arranging a caravan of medicine and food. We went to Benghazi so we drove through the border. People from all over were coming [to Cairo], it was a diverse group. By the twentyseventh, we had a shipment put together of four trucks of medicine and another three or four trucks of food items and drove them into Libya. Then I went to help in one of the hospitals in Benghazi and they were pretty overwhelmed. The hospitals were not equipped to handle the amount of major trauma that they had to deal with. M., who was in her second year of law school when the revolution began, also recalled an opportunity to serve on the revolution’s transnational, diasporadriven legal team even though she had not yet obtained her law degree. I attended a training there at the ICC, which was really interesting because it was only for lawyers with ten years’ experience. Ten years ago, I was in fifth grade, you know! So after I completed that training, I then went to London to meet up with some of the lawyers I was working with, but only really on the internet. There was one in London, one in Paris, one in Spain, one in Dubai, some in Libya. In London, we had a series of consultations with [Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office] Alistair Burt [to] discuss with him the issues that were going on, and we’d phone in someone on the ground in Libya to explain more, or what the UK could do to support them. So we did a lot of that that summer – ICC cases, investigating, but also advocating in general. My colleague who was with me went to the UN to advocate there, we had a lot of things going on at that time. We created guidelines for pro-revolution fighters once the armed conflict began on how they could comply with international rules of engagement without violating any sort of human rights. We did so at the request of the National Transitional Council. Basically we boiled them down to little flip cards that they could carry with them, laminated little cards, which was a flow chart of if you’re in this situation, what do you do, what don’t you do. So we were engaging at all different levels on the legal front. In all, by pushing many of Libya’s most well-to-do and highly educated out of the country in search of freedom and opportunities, the regime produced a highly skilled and well-resourced diaspora primed to mobilize against the regime under the right conditions. As M. remarked, Those abroad ended up becoming very educated, very well-connected in their societies, and they were able to influence from the outside. That was something that Gaddafi did to himself, because he did forcefully exile those people. Everyone used their kind of expertise and their skills to contribute in any way they could. A lot of influential Libyans were consulting other governments, and were well-connected enough to raise a lot of funds for aid. Not a single thing was left undone, I think, by Libyans abroad. 6.2.2 Syrians’ Capital Conversion: From Sufficient to Insufficient The exact figures remain unknown, but there is no doubt that Syrians abroad have remitted tens of millions of dollars to Arab Spring organizations and charities over the course of the rebellion and war (Svoboda and Pantuliano 2015). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press