Deterrents to Voice After Exit 35 that place of origin. As a result of their biographical, familial, and identitybased ties across borders, conditions “over there” in the home-country impact persons living “here” in the diaspora (Waldinger 2008, 2015). This simultaneity, I assert, means that diaspora members are not only transnational actors but also transnational subjects. Their capacities for mobilization are therefore impacted by their embeddedness in, and relational ties to, the home-country. Accordingly, diasporas do not simply act on, or in response to, conditions in the home-country according to their advantages abroad. Rather, home-country conditions act back on them through their transnational ties in an interactive fashion. This means that exit is a relative, rather than absolute, phenomenon (Hoffmann 2010) precisely because diaspora members maintain “ways of being and ways of belonging” (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004: 1002) that keep them tied to authoritarian home-country contexts. Ties to the home-country may therefore just as likely depress the members’ willingness and capacity to work together for regime change as fuel transnational activism (Duquette-Rury 2016, 2020). Building on this, I argue that two deterrents stemming from the homecountry – transnational repression and conflict transmission – suppress transnational activism for liberal change by subjecting diaspora members to authoritarian systems of social control and divisive home-country conflicts. By transnational repression, I mean the ways in which home-country regimes work to silence and punish dissenters abroad through tactics such as surveillance, threats, and harming their family members at home. By conflict transmission, I mean the ways in which divisive home-country politics are reproduced in diaspora communities through members’ biographical and identity-based ties. Such ties can “produce conflicting views” among diaspora members that “mirror debates in the homeland rather than dictate them” (Shain 2007: 126). By making it difficult for exiles to garner community support or form robust civil society organizations, I find that each of these conditions, which can also work in tandem, was sufficient to constrain anti-regime diaspora mobilization before the Arab Spring (see also Chaudhary and Moss 2019). 1.3.1 Transnational Repression The borders of the given nation-state delimit a regime’s power and jurisdiction in important ways (Mann 1984; Weber 1978). As discussed above, the movement of populations from authoritarian contexts to relatively liberal ones presents political opportunities for voice. But despite the importance of the host-country in shaping these opportunities (Bob 2002; Tarrow 2005), authoritarian regimes often permeate state borders to pursue their enemies and control their diasporas in “blatantly progovernmental and policelike” ways (Bauböck 2003; Délano and Gamlen 2014; Miller 1981: 401; Shain 2005[1989]: ch. 8). A growing number of studies on transnational repression demonstrate that regimes do so by surveilling diaspora communities in person and online; by https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press