Investigating Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni Activism 19 opportunity to forge popular movements intent on intervening on behalf of rebellion and relief. The US-Britain comparison was useful for several reasons as well. First, these two host-countries contained many of the most consequential diaspora communities from Libya, Syria, and Yemen in 2011. Britain hosted the largest community of Libyans outside of their home-country in the city of Manchester at this time due to chain migration and state-sponsored scholarships to its universities. Both host-countries granted refuge to many prominent anti-Gaddafi figures owing to their opposition to his international acts of terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s. Syrians are the oldest and one of the largest Arab immigrant communities in the United States, home to many upper- and middle-class professionals. Syrians in Britain are a smaller community in size (see Table 1.1) but nevertheless home to students and professionals, as well as refugees persecuted by the Assad regime. Yemenis were Britain’s “first Muslims” (Halliday 2010[1992]) owing to South Yemen’s colonial ties with Britain and their employment on British coal ships. Outside of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Yemenis in the United States and Britain send more remittances homeward than from any other country. Taken together, on the eve of the Arab Spring, each group had significant numbers of first- and 1.5-generation residents in the United States and Britain.13 Furthermore, the United States and Britain are geopolitical powerholders with permanent positions on the UN Security Council. Their international influence grants anti-regime diasporas political opportunities to lobby policymakers in London and Washington, DC, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York, on matters of the homeland. Both are wealthy democratic states that attract emigrants by virtue of their opportunities for political freedom and social mobility, real and perceived. At the same time, each has subjected groups from the MENA region to discriminatory and Islamophobic policies, immigrant quotas and refugee bans, and rhetoric that paints their members as threats to national (read: white, Anglo-Christian) culture, security, 13 These ties keep immigrants embedded in two worlds simultaneously and connected to political events at home (Levitt 2003; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). At the same time, I am not claiming that diaspora activism from the United States and Britain was the only kind that mattered in the Arab Spring. On the contrary, diaspora members and newly minted refugees mobilized from places such as Stockholm, Beirut, and Abu Dhabi for the home-country revolutions (Dickinson 2015). However, the US-Britain comparison provides an opportunity to explain why diaspora mobilization varies in spite of their relative advantages and political opportunities for transnational mobilization – especially given anti-regime diaspora members’ English-language capabilities, the lingua franca of global communication and expertise, necessary to talk to and through mainstream media; as well as their proximity to the governments of two major world powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council, and their relative economic and social capital vis-à-vis their counterparts at home. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press