Breakdown of Conflict Transmission 115 the biggest thing I’ve ever been a part of. Usually when we protest[ed], I would have spent my last dime driving to New York or DC for a protest that had maybe thirteen people. The DC protest was the most Libyans I have seen in one place in America ever. It was [hundreds of] people who had never been politically active, who had never met before. Osama, who at the time of the revolution was living in Chicago but had grown up among other Libyan families in Tucson, Arizona, echoed that at informal community events, such as “the picnics that happened during the revolution, suddenly everyone [is] singing freedom songs, singing the national anthem – any picnic it would be like that.” The contrast in community relations before and during the Arab Spring could not have been starker. Of course, neither the revolution itself nor the diaspora’s response was a purely harmonious effort. There were underlying conflicts and mistrust between groups, including violence between anti-regime forces in Libya itself, as well as lingering resentments by long-standing regime opponents of those who had jumped on the anti-regime “bandwagon,” as Ahmed H. recalled. Several members of Enough Gaddafi! who helped to organize the February 19 protest also recalled competition between opposition figures to dominate the event. Ahmed explained that he spoke with the leaders of other groups in order to tell them, Listen, we just need people to show up. If you want to demonstrate solidarity with the people who are on the front lines going through it right now, [then participate]. That’s the objective more than anything else. We want to present a common front, a unified front, to the world. Mohamed of Manchester also referenced an underlying “competition” over who would appear in the media. However, despite these wobbles in community cohesion, respondents reported experiencing a sense of solidarity as never before. Mohamed said his experience protesting in Manchester around February 19 “was in and of itself amazing” because We were rubbing shoulders with everyone. The thing that brought us together was being Libyan and being anti-Gaddafi. I was talking and standing together with socialists, communists, liberals, Islamists, we all had one goal and one pain and we were happy to be together. Furthermore, despite some tensions, collective action in the diaspora was fundamentally unified around a set of anti-regime grievances and demands. As M. stated, “There was one goal to be achieved. Yes, we all have our differences, but the main goals were to get Gaddafi out, and to stop the killing of people.” Mohamed of Manchester also recalled that Libyans were joined together by the fact that the revolution had escalated immediately into “a fight to the death” – and that despite the disparate groups involved, the revolutionsupporting opposition was “united in one fight” against Gaddafi, as Adam from Virginia recounted. As a result, their various strategies to intervene in the https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press