6 Converting Resources to the Cause Social movement scholars have long held that resources increase a movement’s readiness to engage in collective action and the likelihood that movements will survive and achieve at least some of their goals (Edwards and McCarthy 2004; McAdam et al. 1996, 2001). These resources often come from organizations that sponsor social movement activity, such as NGOs and professional organizations (McCarthy and Zald 1977). The catch, however, is that elite sponsorship puts limits on what movements can do (Jenkins and Eckert 1986; Staggenborg 1988) because revolutionary change inherently threatens sponsors’ social standing and power. As a result, patronage can make mobilization possible, but it also compromises activists’ abilities to achieve radical social change. Constraints imposed on the grassroots by elites can therefore become a major dilemma for movements that require external resources to fulfill their missions. While the top-down sponsorship of movements is an important subject that I address here and in Chapter 7, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how activists serve as peer patrons of allied movements for the express purpose of revolutionary, radical change. Yet, this is precisely what makes diaspora mobilization so important in world affairs (Adamson 2002, 2004, 2016; Smith and Stares 2007; Vertovec 2005). As the previous chapter illustrates, diaspora movements can ameliorate resource shortages in highly repressive, underprivileged locales by remitting a range of tangible and intangible resources homeward. Based on my analysis of the Arab Spring abroad, this chapter argues that doing so hinges on a process I call resource conversion – that is, the capacities of diaspora activists and their movements to convert personal and collective resources to shared political projects rooted across borders. Here, I argue that two major types of resource conversion mattered during the Arab Spring abroad. The first type consisted of activists’ transnational 174 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press