14 Introduction 1.4 emergent puzzles from the arab spring abroad Studies of diaspora and emigrant mobilization have advanced our understanding of contentious politics by demonstrating that their transnational practices shape home-country politics, conflicts, and international relations (Adamson 2006). In light of their home-country loyalties and members’ relatively privileged “positionality” abroad (Koinova 2012), it is not especially surprising that diaspora members mobilized to help their compatriots under siege during the Arab Spring. As I set out to investigate this phenomenon by undertaking fieldwork across the United States and Great Britain, I found that Libyans, Syrians, and Yemenis had played up to five major roles in the uprisings. First, they broadcasted information about events on the ground and revolutionaries’ demands to outside audiences through protests, lobbying, and by publicizing information. Second, they represented the revolution to their host-country governments and the media, whether formally or informally, and served in its various organizations and governments-in-waiting. Third, they brokered for the rebellions and relief efforts by connecting their allies on the ground with outsiders in politics, the media, and civil society. Fourth, they remitted their skills, material aid, and cash to the cause. Lastly, they volunteered in the homecountry and immediately outside its borders to help their conationals in every way imaginable. While my interviewees firmly asserted that revolutionaries at home were the real heroes, they nevertheless became a collective transnational auxiliary force against authoritarian regimes in 2011 and beyond. Yet, much of what I learned and observed about diaspora mobilization over the course of my research was downright puzzling – and not only to me, but to many of my respondents as well. For instance, beginning in the fall of 2011, I witnessed hundreds of Syrian Americans come out to support the revolution by demonstrating on the streets of Southern California. During these events, participants raised their voices to demand dignity and freedom for Syria through chants, public appeals, and in song. However, their efforts to engage in what social scientists call public, collective claims-making (Koopmans and Statham 1999; McAdam et al. 2001) by criticizing the Assad regime and demanding international support also had a protective, private quality to it. On the street corners of Anaheim, for instance, demonstrators often hid their faces behind scarves and sunglasses. At a community meeting hosted by the Syrian American Council of Los Angeles in December 2011, I was explicitly instructed not to photograph the audience even though an organizer declared that “the wall of fear has been broken!” Even more confusingly, some activists showed their faces in their communities, but not online; others created prorevolution Facebook pages, but then quickly made them secret or closed groups. And until I became a familiar face, my presence at protests was also viewed with suspicion. As I observed, the Syrian community was coming out on the streets in greater numbers each week to condemn the Assad regime. However, despite being thousands of miles from the front lines, many seemed https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press