Breakdown of Conflict Transmission 133 association chair to accept the applications posed another obstacle. According to Neshwan, Alkanshali refused the applications by claiming that the YCA required each new applicant to present their paperwork in person. Alkanshali affirmed this response in an interview with me, accusing the group of violating the association’s rules. [They submitted] forged documents. First, they didn’t use the proper documents from the YCA. They printed their own stuff. And then they went round getting signatures. The rules said that the person himself must come into the YCA, fill the application form, and none of that happened. Neshwan recalled retorting that they would bring each new applicant to the YCA to do so, but that Alkanshali said, “‘No, we can’t accept you.’ Why? ‘Because you are coming here to overtake.’ That was explicit. Overtake. ‘And we can’t let you do this.’” Bashir said that in response to the YCA’s refusal to accept the new applications, they launched a spontaneous protest. In the end, however, the campaign to reform the YCA failed, “And now it’s still a problem,” he said. Since this campaign, Bashir explained that they decided to ignore the YCA because it was a failing organization that was “collapsing within itself.” But despite the fact they failed to reclaim the YCA, respondents described this campaign with relish in light of the community’s past ennui and passivity. Abdul Basit reported, [The revolution] activated the challenging nature within us. Before, we were just like, accepting we [have a] dysfunctional community association. We [had] a dysfunctional country [i.e., Yemen] – and we just accepted it. What the revolution did is make that initial jumpstart for us all. Kamal also explained how this campaign signaled to local elites and elders that the youth were not going to be so accepting of the status quo in the future. We’ve reached that here [in] the diaspora itself and in Yemen – we’ve reached that point now where there is no going back to the old ways where you get elders who come and do nothing and talk rubbish, and then wreck the community like they’ve done. The YCA in Liverpool represented a microcosm of Yemen’s electoral authoritarianism to pro-revolution activists in the community. While their campaign failed to reform the organization by democratic means – in contrast to Fadel’s experience reorganizing the Syrian British Medical Society in London – these efforts nevertheless demonstrate how Yemen’s uprising created an impetus for change within the diaspora community itself by promoting new forms of civic engagement. That said, the YCAs and other organizations remained unconverted to the cause. In the United States and Britain, activists who worked to mobilize protests, community meetings, and other initiatives were therefore forced to do so without the backing or the resources of existing organizations and their members. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press