86 Silenced and Split us to carry this torch.” Adam attested that his trip to LA estranged him from others in the exile community. “When I came back to Virginia and called up a few friends and told them what had happened, I got a lot of negative feedback,” he said. “Some people cut me off completely. Someone went as far as to say that’s blood money that’s on your hands. Hold on, blood money from who? Who did I kill? Who died because I went to LA? They were like, no, because you sat down at the same table.” Owing to conflict transmission, anti-regime diaspora members from Libya were deeply divided. Split over whether to negotiate directly with the regime for reform or remain steadfast in demanding that the regime pay for its crimes, the eve of the 2011 revolution was a time of strong disagreement among those few who were working for change in Libya. 3.2.2 Syrian Divisions Conflict transmission was likewise a problem for Syrian activists in exile. Though Syrian Kurds and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated activists shared deep histories of repression, these groups remained split internally and with one another over the solution to their common foe.3 As a persecuted ethno-religious minority facing region-wide threats of ethnic cleansing, Kurdish activists viewed secession and the establishment of an independent Kurdish state as the solution to regime repression. Arabs with Muslim Brotherhood affiliations, on the other hand, looked toward a political transition that would give their representatives and the Sunni majority a dominant role in government. Regime opponents were therefore divided in significant ways over their goals such that they not only opposed the regime, but each another as well. Furthermore, second-generation-exile activists were also highly discontented with the opposition politics of their elders.4 The Syrian Justice and Development Party, for example, sought to distance itself from what cofounder Malik al-Abdeh described as an outmoded opposition. “The Muslim Brotherhood,” Malik explained, “are not really effective, like old fogies. They’re not doing anything. We need[ed] to do something to re-galvanize the opposition scene. And we need to have young people involved. It’s a new generation.” However, this stance isolated them in the opposition community due to a sense of competition and threat from other groups. We came under a lot of pressure from the Brotherhood because they saw us as a threat, [and] that we’re going to draw away their youth to us. And the whole point of the 3 4 Raphaël Lefèvre’s important book Ashes of Hama (2013) describes in detail how the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was and continues today to be factionalized by city of origin, anti-regime strategy, and leadership. See also Dara Conduit’s work (2019) for more details on intraBrotherhood fissures. I was told that the “elder”-led movements also included “classic” communist opposition groups based primarily in France. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press