Do authoritarian states deter dissent in the diaspora? Using data on Libyan and Syrian activism in the United States and Great Britain, this study demonstrates that they do through violence, exile, ...threats, surveillance, and by harming dissidents’ relatives at home. The analysis finds that the transnational repression of these diasporas deterred public anti-regime mobilization before the Arab Spring. I then identify the mechanisms by which Libyans and Syrians overcame these effects during the 2011 revolutions. Activists “came out” when (1) violence at home changed their relatives’ circumstances and upset repression’s relational effects; (2) the sacrifices of vanguard activists expanded their objects of obligation, leading them to embrace cost sharing; and (3) the regimes were perceived as incapable of making good on their threats. However, differences in the regimes’ perceived capacities to repress in 2011 produced significant variation in the pace of diaspora emergence over time and guarded advocacy. The study advances understanding of transnationalism by demonstrating how states exercise coercive power across borders and the conditions under which diasporas mobilize to publicly and collectively challenge home-country regimes.
Abstract
Research demonstrates that diaspora movements play a powerful role in contentious politics and social change in their homelands under a range of conditions. However, few have systematically ...explained the conditions that facilitate diaspora movements’ “voice” after “exit” across cases or over time. The article addresses this shortcoming by explaining how and to what extent diaspora movements became auxiliary forces for anti-regime rebellions during the Arab Spring. Using data that include 239 original interviews on Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni mobilization from the US and Great Britain, the analysis finds that only some diaspora groups played a sustained, full-spectrum role in their home-country’s rebellion by broadcasting their allies’ claims, remitting resources homeward, representing the rebellion to external audiences, brokering between parties, and volunteering on the front lines. The article then demonstrates how differences in (1) the rebellion’s needs, (2) geopolitical support, (3) activist resources, and (4) access to the front lines produced variation in auxiliary activism by national group, host-country, and over time. In so doing, the article contributes to theories of transnationalism, social movements, diaspora politics, and cross-border contentious politics more generally.
Diasporas can undermine authoritarian regimes from abroad, but when and how do they become transnational forces for change? By comparing diaspora activism for the Arab Spring revolutions, this book ...identifies the social forces that make diaspora activism a powerful tool for rebellion and relief.
Internet communication technologies (ICTs) enable diasporas to act transnationally by facilitating ties to their places of origin and providing low-cost ways to mobilize against home-country regimes. ...However, studies neglect to address how ICTs globalize regimes' methods of social control and impact anti-regime diasporas. In order to investigate the operation and effects of what I call digitally-enabled transnational repression, this study analyzes data that include original interviews with pro-revolution Syrian activists based in the US and Britain. The findings demonstrate that the presence and tactics of pro-regime agents online during the onset of Syria's 2011 uprising (i) eroded respondents' transnational ties and (ii) deterred many from using ICTs to contest the Assad regime. The study shows how networked authoritarianism mitigates diaspora members' voices and tactics during periods of violent unrest, which is precisely when ICT-enabled activism can aid home-country movements in significant ways. I conclude by discussing implications for the study of authoritarian regimes, diasporas, and transnational dynamics of contention.
This article reexamines spontaneity as an important, albeit neglected, mechanism in collective action dynamics, and elaborates on its operation and effects in protest events and social movements. We ...do not presume that spontaneity is routinely at play in all collective actions. Rather, based on our grounded analysis of historical and ethnographic data, we contend that spontaneity is triggered by certain conditions: nonhierarchical organization; uncertain/ambiguous moments and events; behavioral/emotional priming; and certain ecological/spatial factors. We conclude by elaborating why the activation of spontaneous actions matters in shaping the course and character of protest events and movements, and we suggest that spontaneity be resuscitated in the study of collective action and everyday life more generally.
Diasporas play a critical role in home‐country politics by supporting social, political, and economic change therein. Yet, regimes countermobilize against activists abroad by repressing their ...diasporas. This paper investigates a widespread but overlooked method in the transnational repression toolkit: that of ‘proxy punishment’, that is, the abuse of family members at home as a means to manipulate and subjugate dissidents abroad. Using 246 original interviews with diaspora activists from Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Libya, the analysis demonstrates that regimes deployed five tactics against diaspora members’ non‐activist families at home: harm and confinement, threats and harassment, forced participation in regime propaganda and slander, resource deprivation, and travel bans. We then identify the mechanisms shaping how diaspora members responded to this repertoire. The paper concludes with implications for research on transnational diaspora activism, globalized authoritarianism, and collective dimensions of the repression‐dissent nexus.
The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings are often portrayed as a wave of failed revolutions that devolved rapidly into anarchic violence. Yemen and Libya appear to illustrate this dynamic
par excellence
, as ...interim governments collapsed in the face of violence, war, and humanitarian disasters by 2014. Although studies of these revolutions have proliferated in recent years, the fuller range of outcomes emerging from the Arab Spring at the local level and in everyday life have comprised a theoretical and empirical black box. Based on the grounded analysis of ethnographic data from Yemen and Libya during the post-Arab Spring interim periods (2012–2013), this study argues that although the 2011 revolutions failed to achieve their major goals, they succeeded in breaking down normative forms of incumbent authoritarian power across major urban centers. As a result, activists and ordinary citizens gained what we call newfound “civic opportunities” to make political claims in Yemen and Libya’s emergent civic spheres. Participants did so by repurposing their built environment for artistic expression, engaging in peaceful collective action, and publicly commemorating the victims and heroes of anti-regime resistance. While civic opportunities were later eclipsed by violence, we argue that revolutions failing to instigate democratic change from “above” can nevertheless create meaningful civic opportunities for democratic practices from “below.” The study concludes by suggesting how this mobilization matters for future waves of protest and democratization, and for the scholarly investigation of revolution outcomes more generally.
This paper analyzes cross-national and longitudinal variations in criminal laws regulating sexual activities. We blend historical and sociological institutionalisms to argue that criminal sex laws ...embody exogenous models, supplied by colonial and imperial powers and evolving world society. To test our ideas, we apply logit-panel and pooled-time-series models to original data from more than 150 countries on four aspects of sex laws, 1965 to 2005: (1) maximum prison terms for rape, (2) ages of sexual consent, (3) the existence of sodomy prohibitions, and (4) gender neutrality in adultery regulations. Our analyses confirm the importance of exogenous factors and show that endogenous factors—including the dominance of Islam and the status of women in society—play lesser roles in explaining formal content differences. In supplementary analyses, we explore counterpoint variations, that is, sex-law reforms that flout global standards, illustrated here by sodomy-law expansions during the period. We find exogenous imprints even in these cases.
Over the past century, native amphibian species in California, USA, have declined in geographic range and population size, including precipitous declines of the California Red-legged Frog Rana ...draytonii Baird and Girard, 1852 and the California Tiger Salamander Ambystoma californiense Gray, 1853. Habitat loss, infectious disease (e.g., chytridiomycosis), and the introduction of invasive species are potential contributors to this decline, but it is unclear how these variables interact with extreme weather events, such as prolonged drought to affect amphibian population dynamics. We used a 7-y dataset (2013–2019) on amphibian breeding activity that encompassed a recent extreme drought event to assess 1) how breeding activities of these taxa differed during and after drought conditions and 2) the additive and interactive relationships of drought, chytrid fungal infection (Bd), and invasive species with the presence and abundance of larval amphibians. Based on 650 surveys of 110 lentic habitats in California, both amphibian species were highly sensitive to drought severity, such that the proportion of occupied sites during peak drought conditions decreased by 36% for R. draytonii and 87% for A. californiense relative to the initial year of the study. However, both taxa showed strong recovery, with increases in breeding occurrence as drought conditions eased in the following years (2016–2019). Invasive fishes and American Bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana Shaw, 1802) also negatively predicted the occurrence and density of the 2 native taxa. Finally, we found that the relationship between Bd and R. draytonii larval density was influenced by drought conditions, suggesting that Bd’s transmission rates or effects on host persistence are sensitive to climate. These findings illustrate the ability of native taxa to recover from recent drought conditions and reinforce the importance of controlling invasive species for improving breeding activities of threatened amphibians.
Phenological synchrony shapes pathology in host-parasite systems McDevitt-Galles, Travis; Moss, Wynne E; Calhoun, Dana M ...
Proceedings - Royal Society. Biological sciences/Proceedings - Royal Society. Biological Sciences,
01/2020, Volume:
287, Issue:
1919
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
A key challenge surrounding ongoing climate shifts is to identify how they alter species interactions, including those between hosts and parasites. Because transmission often occurs during critical ...time windows, shifts in the phenology of either taxa can alter the likelihood of interaction or the resulting pathology. We quantified how phenological synchrony between vulnerable stages of an amphibian host (
) and infection by a pathogenic trematode (
) determined infection prevalence, parasite load and host pathology. By tracking hosts and parasite infection throughout development between low- and high-elevation regions (San Francisco Bay Area and the Southern Cascades (Mt Lassen)), we found that when phenological synchrony was high (Bay Area), each established parasite incurred a 33% higher probability of causing severe limb malformations relative to areas with less synchrony (Mt Lassen). As a result, hosts in the Bay Area had up to a 50% higher risk of pathology even while controlling for the mean infection load. Our results indicate that host-parasite interactions and the resulting pathology were the joint product of infection load and phenological synchrony, highlighting the sensitivity of disease outcomes to forecasted shifts in climate.
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