On December 27, 2015, Naji Jerf was shot by a muffled pistol in broad daylight in Gaziantep, Turkey by an operative of the Islamic State (IS). He was a day away from relocating to France where his asylum application had been processed and accepted. While in Syria and in exile, he had worked on films exposing the IS. In his letter to the French embassy requesting asylum he noted that his safety has become more and difficult after an increase in the threats to his self and his family. Jerf was not the first to receive these threats in exile nor was he the last. Months later, on November, 2, 2016 Ibrahim Abdelqader and Fares Hammad were also killed. In an interview months later, after surviving an attempted assassination himself, Abdulqader’s brother Ahmed later reported that suspicion sept into his work, life, and sense of risk. He noted that he almost quit his job, but after escaping death he grew “more resilient than ever.” Moreover, a myriad of journalistic accounts and reports by human rights organizations have reported threats Egyptian activists in exile have received, and attempts of actual intimidation of their families back home. Despite these threats and risk, some exiles continue to be politically active. In this project, I investigate why, despite the associated risks, some people continue to mobilize for their home country from exile. I highlight the mechanisms by which exiles navigate their political victimization and subsequent trauma relative to their political participation. I ask: why do some exiled Syrian and Egyptian activists continue to be politically active for their home countries while others stop? More specifically, I am interested in uncovering a) how they navigate risks of transnational repression from their host countries b) and the consequences of political victimization and traumatic events they faced on their political participation. In this project I use a combination of ethnographic work and network analysis. My case selection focuses on exiled activists from Syrian and Egypt who are now based in Turkey. I choose to study activists in Turkey as it hosts significant numbers of both populations, has been the site of continued political threat and victimization for exiled activists, and has been home to many of the political initiatives both groups created after their resettlement. By holding the host state constant, I am able to focus on the variation within their home country experiences and post-resettlement conditions.

Diasporas are considered an important global actor, but their influence in conflicts continues to be a source of debate (Shain 2002, Mohamoud 2006, Smith and Stares 2007, Pirkkalainen and abdile 2009, Spilimbergo 2009, Koinova 2011, Beyene 2015, Docquier et al. 2016, Barsbai et al. 2017). A decade following the start of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian conflict, many questions around diaspora involvement, mobilization, and influence in the region remain unexamined (Qayyum 2011, Baeza and Pinto 2016, Moss 2019, Carpi and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). This is particularly problematic since many communities around the world view the Middle East as their “ancestral homeland” and can therefore be reasonably expected to concern themselves with the social and political transformations taking place throughout the region. This paper seeks to contribute to this literature by examining the political activation and mobilization of the Syrian diaspora in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, and Chile. I argue that diaspora involvement is fragmented, multifaceted, and, oftentimes, contradictory. It is shaped and influenced by both outreach by the Syrian regime and various opposition groups, as well as the political positioning of the Syrian diaspora in their “host” societies. As the conflict became increasingly sectarianized, divisions among the diaspora deepened and cemented—and the mobilization strategies and tactics that diaspora members pursued both reflected and heightened these divisions. This analysis draws from political ethnography, an interdisciplinary research strategy that seeks to generate contextual knowledge claims by engaging in reasoning from within social practice (Wadeen 2010, Schatz 2013). I rely on 22 semi-structured interviews with diaspora leaders and members, participant observation data I collected while conducing fieldwork and attending events, rallies, and fundraisers related to the conflict, and archival analysis. This data was collected between 2014-2019. All the data collected was transcribed and coded using Nvivo. One of the main findings of this research is that questions of identity, narrative, and belonging are central to understanding not only the Syrian conflict, but also the various and shifting patterns of diaspora engagement toward it. Further, this analysis demonstrates that the often-highlighted distinction between pro and anti-regime mobilization is not only simplistic, but also occludes the multiple ways in which individuals interpret and reinterpret the conflict and thus mobilize in response.

How do political crises affect the relationship between home states and emigrants? Unstable home states have a dual motivation for diaspora enfranchisement; on one hand, they will seek the recognition and legitimation of their domestic political processes abroad – either by their emigrant communities, or indirectly as a means to influencing the relevant policies of their host states. On the other hand, troubled states may also enfranchise their emigrant communities as a form of monitoring and control. Crises expectedly produce political winners and losers, and this may induce losers to exit the state yet remain affiliated and tied to the political developments back home. I argue that democratic or autocratic resolutions to crisis and their consequent effects on political rights have different implications for state policies and practices towards emigrant communities. Specifically, I hypothesize that post-crisis democratic governments may be less motivated to extend political rights to emigrant communities compared with post-crisis autocratic governments. The latter may in fact be highly incentivized to create and reinforce ties with its emigrant community and to do so through extending political rights abroad at a time when it might be simultaneously curtailing political rights back home. I construct a paired comparison of Egypt and Tunisia that explain emigrant enfranchisement policies and subsequent diasporic reactions during the 2011-2014 political crisis episodes. This project strives to account for the contentious politics of activating and deactivating diasporic communities during politically turbulent times.

Ten years after the eruption of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, which had a wide range of eclectic outcomes (Lynch 2016), anti-authoritarian activists continue to resist dictatorships across the Arab world. A key dimension to this resistance is the online activism directed toward shifting public perceptions of undemocratic regimes, while coordinating and organizing opposition movements against them in the diaspora. The advent of “cyberactivism” (Howard 2011; Khamis 2011) opens up new horizons in this ongoing tug-of-war between authoritarian rulers and their opponents in the Arab region. In this qualitative study, we use a comparative framework to analyze the online political activism and opposition discourses of prominent Egyptian and Saudi activists in exile, while unpacking the broader dynamics of their governments’ responses to their activism and resistance, using the same digital tools. In conducting this comparison, we seek to complicate overly simplistic understandings of Arab anti-authoritarianism and the role of internet technologies in activism across the Arab world that have unfolded in the last decade. The study relies on conducting a textual analysis of the online resistance discourses shared by some diasporic activists from an Arab Spring country, Egypt, and a non-Arab Spring country, Saudi Arabia, in addition to conducting in-depth interviews with some activists and journalists from both countries. The study attempts to answer a number of important questions. First, what are the contributions of these two exilic communities to the ongoing struggles against their regimes, and how do they employ a wide array of tools furnished by new communication technologies to disrupt, expose, and resist them. Second, what are the most important similarities and differences between these two diasporic resistance communities, in terms of the tools, tactics, and strategies they deploy, and which ones are more effective, and why. Third, what tools, tactics, and strategies are used by their respective regimes to sabotage and undermine their online resistance efforts, and which ones are more effective, and why. We argue that the differing tactics that both the regimes and their opponents deploy trigger disparate outcomes, both online and offline, which could only be fully understood when contextualized within the complex post-Arab Spring political and mediated environments, while staying away from the simplistic notion of technological determinism, or “techno-euphoria” (Khamis 2019), and acknowledging the surge in the phenomenon of “digital authoritarianism” (Dragu and Lupu 2020) and its numerous implications in the post-Arab Spring era.