The Arab spring Abroad: diaspora activism against authoritarian regimes

Abstract

I n a time of ongoing challenges to democracy and the growing global reach of autocrats around the world, The Arab Spring Abroad: Diaspora Activism against Authoritarian Regimes by Dana M. Moss offers optimism in the global fight against authoritarianism. The book provides a theoretically new and empirically rich perspective on transnational mobilization during the Arab Spring and investigates the varying conditions under which diaspora members gain voice, come together, and mobilize against dictatorial regimes in their homelands. Bringing diaspora studies and social movement literature into conversation, the book constitutes a key comparative effort to theorize, conceptualize, and empirically assess dynamic processes that shaped Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni diaspora mobilization against authoritarian regimes before and after the Arab Spring. Moss does so by drawing on extensive multi-sited fieldwork, interviews, and ethnographic methods and displays the value in rigorous inductive analysis that illuminates the power of diaspora activists that are otherwise overlooked in processes of regime change. One of the book’s most important contributions is the uncovering of important mechanisms and concepts that help us understand variation in the ability of diasporas to contest authoritarian regimes from abroad. To explain weak mobilization against authoritarianism before the Arab Spring, the book first attends to two mechanisms, namely transnational repression and conflict transmission. Drawing on earlier work, Moss defines transnational repression as “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” (p. 35). Conflict transmission, on the other hand, is understood as “the ways in which divisive home-country politics are reproduced in diaspora communities through members’ biographical and identity-based ties” (idem.). She finds that these two mechanisms explain why