The Conditions Shaping Voice After Exit 25 anti-regime diasporas and undermined their mobilization before the 2011 revolutionary wave in several ways. Cleavages among Libyan regime opponents stemmed primarily from the Gaddafi regime’s efforts to rehabilitate itself in the 2000s, which divided hardline regime opponents from reformers. For Syrians, competition and mistrust between anti-regime groups, including between Syrian Kurds, secular liberals, and various factions of the Muslim Brotherhood, reproduced destructive fissures among anti-regime members before the uprisings. For Yemenis, the resurgence of a southern secessionist movement in Yemen around 2007 pitted southern separatists against pro-unity northerners at home and abroad by tying anti-regime activism to Yemen’s fate as a unified republic. This conflict transmission led to avoidance of politics, censorship, and fights over communal resources in Yemeni communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In each case, the transmission of homecountry conflicts to the diaspora inhibited the capacity of conationals to work collectively for regime change before 2011. Given the deterrent effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission, what brought Libyans, Syrians, and Yemenis together for the Arab Spring? Chapter 4 describes how the Arab Spring mobilized members of the anti-regime diaspora not only by stirring grievances and inducing new hopes for change at home, but by disrupting the normative operation and effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission in the diaspora. The Arab Spring induced what David Snow and his collaborators (1998) call a “quotidian disruption” abroad for several reasons. First, the Arab Spring upended the silence-inducing effects of transnational repression in the diaspora as regime repression engulfed members’ loved ones at home. After members’ relatives were killed, detained, and forced to fight or flee, diaspora members felt released from the obligation to keep quiet in order to protect their loved ones from the threat of repression – what I call “proxy punishment” – in Libya and Syria. Activists also decided to come out publicly for the uprisings when they perceived that the home-country regime’s use of repression escalated into collective, arbitrary violence. To them, this escalation signified that going public no longer posed additional risks to their significant others, thus transforming public activism from a high-risk activity into a low-risk one. The risks and sacrifices undertaken by vanguard activists – such as Hamza al-Khateeb, the Syrian boy who was tortured to death by regime forces for smuggling food to protesters under siege in early 2011 – also led respondents to come out against the regimes in public for moral reasons. Such incidents broadened diaspora members’ sense of moral obligation from their immediate families to the national community as a whole. Diaspora members also went public when they perceived that the regimes were unable to deliver on the threat of transnational repression. After witnessing the defections of students and officials abroad, Libyans felt empowered to come out in public. Furthermore, by 2012, some Syrian respondents came to believe that the regime was too consumed by war at home to sanction them individually. Perceived changes in https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press