The Arab Spring Abroad 9 1.2 the arab spring abroad As the Arab Spring spread across the region, so too did it activate supporters in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni diasporas. Over steaming teacups in a crowded London tea shop, a young professional named Sarah recalled how the Arab Spring marked her entrée into the anti-regime struggle. After Gaddafi’s forces had fired on unarmed protesters in February, she told me, Sarah’s aunt rang her from Benghazi to report that her young cousin had been killed. Sarah was stunned. She had not even been following the news that day, much less anticipating an open revolt that would impact her family so deeply. After a shocked pause, Sarah urged her aunt to stay indoors. But her aunt had refused, declaring, “Sarah, it’s either him or us.” In the words of Omar al-Mukhtar, the time had come to win against their oppressor or die trying. Gunfire rattled in the background as Sarah hung up the phone. The following day, Sarah continued, she met her Libyan friends at a cafe. Usually, they chatted about work or played squash. Today, clasping their hands around ceramic cups, the mood was sullen. Sarah’s friend finally spoke up. He proposed that they go protest at the Libyan embassy. They agreed, but Sarah was nervous. Despite having attended demonstrations for other causes in the past, she had never done anything political for Libya before. Sarah pulled the hood of her sweatshirt tightly around her face as they waited for a bus to Knightsbridge in central London. Libya’s uprising had just begun and the consequences were uncertain, but it had suddenly become unthinkable to stay at home and do nothing. For Libyans forced into exile, on the other hand, the Arab Spring was the moment that they had been waiting for their entire lives. Thousands of miles away, in the trimmed suburbs of Los Angeles, a young couple named Hamid and Dina told me their story. Like Sarah, Dina’s activism for regime change was new; Hamid, on the other hand, was a seasoned veteran. His uncles had been killed fighting Gaddafi in the 1980s, and the family had been forced to flee after his birth. This dislocation bonded Hamid to fellow exiles – lifelong friends such as Ahmed and Abdullah, Hibba and M.7 – whose hatred of Gaddafi smoldered like a burn on their guts. From these friendships they forged Gaddafi Khalas! (Enough Gaddafi!), an organization dedicated to publicizing the regime’s atrocities and organizing a protest against Gaddafi’s 2009 visit to the United Nations in New York. With regime change looking evermore hopeless by this time, the members of Enough Gaddafi! felt a responsibility to keep the torch of resistance alive. “We had no money and no experience,” Hamid told me, “but we had heart. Besides, who else was going to do the job of reminding the world 7 Some names are pseudonyms, or have been shortened to first names or a first initial, according to the preferences of the interviewees and Institutional Review Board-mandated procedures from the University of California, Irvine when these data were collected. Names reported to me secondhand during interviews have also been anonymized. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press