Over a decade ago, Arab youth marched through a number of countries demanding freedom, justice, and equality. Eleven years later, the autocratic regimes have returned in full force and the youth demobilized, exiled, jailed, disappeared, or killed. While much of the literature in the post-Arab Spring period (Brownlee et al., 2015; Cook, 2017; Kandil, 2012; Stacher, 2012) have attempted to explain the unfortunate outcomes of the uprisings, this project looks at the activists themselves and how their political lives were animated by the subsequent waves of violence and repression. In this project, I look at the relationship between victimization by state authorities and political participation. More specifically, I am focused on exploiting this relationship on an individual level highlighting why some people are mobilized by certain types of contact with state authorities, while others are demobilized by it. To that extent, the project tries to argue that repression is not a blanket state, and that people’s experiences of repression vary and that they have implications on their political participation. To that end, I argue that post-victimization mobilization is a factor of perception of the purpose and context of victimization. I posit a two-stage process in which people partake in post-victimization participation. In the first stage, I build on insights by Nugent (2020) that repression in autocracies influence how “actors identify themselves” (Nugent, 2020, p. 15). I argue that this expands beyond only opposition actors to a much wider array of state victims. Social identities and their concomitant discourses are shaped in tandem with the coercive apparatus. The severity of contact with authorities, ranging from everyday intimidations to detainment are not only mediated by the victim’s perception of which of their identities is being victimized, but also created by it. Victims navigate public discourses on some of their identities to internalize their experiences of it. In the second stage, I argue that mobilization is more likely when they perceive a politicized identity is victimized. Instances in which a non-politicized identity is victimized, victims are not as likely to mobilize. That is to say that contact with authorities triggers a process of interpretation of the contact along the lines of social identity. Here, I build on Muldoon’s Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC) approach (Muldoon et al., 2019). I examine these dynamics through semi-structured interviews with Egyptian and Syrian exiles in Turkey. These will be conducted between July-October 2022.