Conversion of Capital 185 Chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil to help them in lobbying the Obama administration for assistance. Fadel recalled that as an ad hoc advisor to the NTC, he helped them to formulate an argument for intervention based on the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Having worked previously in the NGO world of Washington, DC, he recounted, I have a lot of American friends who were involved in the Responsibility to Protect. I said we have to use this, and I sent it to them [the NTC] in English in an email – I still have this email – and they said, can you send this to us in Arabic? They couldn’t read it because in the ’80s, Gaddafi banned English. So I sent it to them [in Arabic] and said this is what we’re going to do. It has never been used before, but we know Gaddafi is going to [retaliate] at that level. So that was the first advice, in terms of how we can go about getting the support of the international community and the framework we can use. Fadel, among other respondents, continued to advise the NTC informally as a member of “their supporting cast” throughout the revolution. In another example, Dina converted her skills in communications to assist in brokerage with dissidents and CNN. She recalled, I ended up getting contacted by a producer from Anderson Cooper. I’m sitting here aspiring to get a job in the media; my master’s is in communications. So I’m getting firsthand experience in something I really wanted to do and hopefully really contributing to a cause at the same time! I had all these media contacts that just converged. People that I hadn’t heard from in years were like, “Hi Dina, so I’m working on getting some contacts for Libya and was hoping [you could help].” It’s just because, you know, there’s not very many Libyans. From that day, I was literally the on-call consultant for Anderson Cooper 360 , really working closely with the entire editorial production team to figure out what we’re doing for the show for the night, five days a week. Activists also used their social capital to address the traumas of sexual violence among Libyan refugee women. They did so by mobilizing to change the norms surrounding the social stigmatization and shaming of assault victims. Salam, for example, said, We tried very hard to raise awareness in Libya about rape. We produced these [recordings], one in the Amazigh language, one in a Tripoli accent, one in a Benghazi accent, where boys, young men, would speak, explaining to people that, listen, these are victims. They didn’t do anything wrong. You shouldn’t be ashamed of them. We wanted to get the message out that, one, these people need help, and for a long time. It’s not like, oh, your physical wounds are healed, you’re fine. I don’t think that Libyans understand culturally that the psychological effects of rape are sometimes lifelong. And we kind of wanted to stress that. I know that Libyan expats, especially the female Libyans in America, were just adamant on this. Diaspora members also came to represent the revolution itself by joining the NTC to fill in gaps in leaders’ professional expertise. After working with CNN, Dina of Southern California came to be recruited by the NTC as an advisor and assistant due to her professional expertise in communications. After working for Mahmoud Shamman at the AlAhrar satellite station, he introduced her to https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press