Globalizations

ISSN: 1474-7731 (Print) 1474-774X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20

The Ties that Bind: Internet Communication

Technologies, Networked Authoritarianism, and
‘Voice’ in the Syrian Diaspora

Dana M. Moss

To cite this article: Dana M. Moss (2016): The Ties that Bind: Internet Communication
Technologies, Networked Authoritarianism, and ‘Voice’ in the Syrian Diaspora, Globalizations,
DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2016.1263079

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1263079

Published online: 15 Dec 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rglo20

Download by: [University of Newcastle, Australia] Date: 20 December 2016, At: 05:08
Globalizations, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1263079

The Ties that Bind: Internet Communication Technologies,

Networked Authoritarianism, and ‘Voice’ in the Syrian
Diaspora

DANA M. MOSS
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

A BSTRACT 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.

Keywords: Internet communication technologies, transnational repression, diasporas, social

media, social movements, Syria

Technologies play a central role in contentious politics, and social movements’ ever-expanding
uses of Internet communication technologies (ICTs) facilitate collective action in a variety of
ways. Activists use digital venues to organize and publicize their campaigns at the local
level, and during recent waves of protest such as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, ICTs have
also proven to be effective tools in the diffusion and globalization of anti-authoritarian collective

Correspondence Address: Dana M. Moss, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh, 2400 Wesley W. Posvar
Hall, 230 Bouquet Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. Email: dmm209@pitt.edu
# 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 D. M. Moss

action. Cross-border connections forged between activists facing state repression and their exter-
nal allies provide dissidents under siege with needed forms of attention and resources. Diasporas
serve as key members of these transnational advocacy networks, employing ICTs to incite rebel-
lion at home and transmit evidence of regime atrocities to international audiences. While ICTs
are not the only means used by diasporas to respond to home-country conflicts, their increasing
capabilities to link dispersed populations and contest authoritarian state practices warrant scho-
larly inquiry.
Though ICTs grant social movements leverage in contesting state power, so too do authorities
harness these technologies for repressive ends. Government authorities incorporate them into
their repertoires of social control to better implement surveillance, censorship, propaganda,
and crackdowns; authoritarian regimes also nationalize ICTs to control their uses and content.
But despite growing attention to how regimes rely on new technologies to facilitate repression
within their national borders, little research has been done on how ICTs globalize the reach of
authoritarian regimes in ways that ensnare their nationals abroad, produce an acute sense of
threat among the diaspora, and impact the expression of ‘voice’ after emigration (Hirschman,
1978). Though scholars recognize that ICTs promote transnational advocacy, few have investi-
gated how regimes and their agents, including of a range of formal and informal actors working
in the service of the regime, use these tools to practice transnational repression. For these
reasons, understanding pro-regime agents’ online practices and their effects is important, par-
ticularly during periods of unrest when those residing on the outside have the potential to
assist anti-regime social movements and humanitarian causes at home.
In order to address these dynamics, this study takes up the case of Syrian mobilization in the
US and Great Britain during the onset of the 2011 revolution and asks the following questions:
first, how do authoritarian regimes and their agents use ICTs to counter dissent in the diaspora?
Second, what effects does digitally-enabled transnational repression have on regime opponents
overseas?

Technology and Transnational Mobilization

Technological innovations have long been considered vital to the study of globalization because
they facilitate migration, cross-border relations, and transnationalism (Anderson, 1998; Parham,
2004; Portes, Guarnizo, & Landolt, 1999; Smith, 1998). The increasing availability of ever-
cheaper methods of long-distance communication enables migrants and their descendants to
maintain ties with their home countries and engage in transnational economic, social, and pol-
itical practices (e.g. Adamson, 2002; Bauböck, 2008; Son, 2015; Vertovec, 2004; Wayland,
2004). The connections forged through ICTs also increase ties within globally dispersed popu-
lations on the basis of shared understandings of and biographical origins in the home country or
homeland (Alinejad, 2011; Bernal, 2006; Den Bos & Nell, 2006; Helland, 2007; Madianou,
2012). As such, venues such as messaging platforms and social media reduce challenges to com-
munity maintenance posed by geographical distance (Alonso & Oiarzabal, 2010) and ‘network
erosion’ (Pfaff & Kim, 2003) caused by ‘exit’ (Hirschman, 1978). The use of ICTs also facili-
tates the formation of ‘digital diasporas’ with political identities and concerns (Bernal, 2005,
2014; Brinkerhoff, 2004, 2009; Everett, 2009; Peel, 2010). Cyberspace can provide a ‘free
space’ (Futrell & Simi, 2004; Polletta, 1999) that permits diasporas—particularly those who
have emigrated out of authoritarian states—to embrace ‘voice’ (Hirschman, 1978), communi-
cate shared grievances in a safe arena (Bernal, 2006; Brainard & Brinkerhoff, 2006; Conrad,
2005), and mobilize on behalf of home-country causes.
 The Ties that Bind 3

Studies of technology and protest have correspondingly argued that the mass communications
made possible through the Internet, Web, and wireless technologies provide a ‘digital scaffold-
ing’ for civil society that can fuel collective efforts for liberal social change (Howard & Hussain,
2011, p. 46; see also Earl & Kimport, 2011; Howard, 2010; Yang, 2009). From the portability of
the tools that make communication possible, such as laptops and mobile phones, to the platforms
that enhance interactive information flows like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Skype, the
architecture of the ‘Web 2.0’ enables ordinary citizens to share and produce information, as
well as to launch collective actions (Vegh, 2003). ICTs help activists produce ‘information cas-
cades’ that motivate participation in social movements and raise the costs of repression for
image-conscious states (Lynch, 2011, p. 304). Digital media are also used by dissidents to
‘scale up’ their protests to external audiences (Tarrow, 2005) and to garner ‘international
buy-in’ from governments, advocacy and media organizations, and diasporas (Howard &
Hussain, 2013, p. 26). In this way, ICTs facilitate the formation and mobilization of transnational
advocacy networks, which link activists to one another, to states, and to international institutions
across borders on behalf of shared goals (Bob, 2005; Brysk, 1996; Keck & Sikkink, 1998).
Because activists mobilizing in authoritarian contexts are subjected to government controls
over both traditional and new media, members of transnational advocacy networks can aid
repressed movements in important ways. By disseminating digitized evidence of regime atroci-
ties to sympathetic governments, journalists, and global audiences, they name-and-shame
offending regimes into tempering their responses to dissent (Hafner-Burton & Tsutsui, 2007;
Moss, 2014). Diasporas also aid their counterparts at home by acting as ‘brokers’, relaying
and translating information between aggrieved groups at home and third-party allies
(Koinova, 2010; Tarrow, 2005). As witnessed during the Arab Spring, for example, diasporas
from Syria and elsewhere translated video footage of regime atrocities and protest movements
into English, the lingua franca of globalized communication (Anden-Papadopoulos & Pantti,
2013; Mustafa, 2016). Overall, diasporas that mobilize from within countries where ICT
usage is relatively uninhibited make them especially well positioned to play a prominent role
in transnational advocacy networks during periods of political conflict at home.

Regimes’ Tactical Adaptations to Net-activism

While ICTs have become notable tools for activism, research on ‘networked authoritarianism’
(MacKinnon, 2011) demonstrates that regimes’ methods of repression and social control have
become increasingly tech-savvy (Aday et al., 2010; Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, & Zittrain,
2010; Howard, 2010; Morozov, 2011). Engaged in an evolving dynamic of tactical adaptation
against dissidents (Diamond, 2010; Lynch, 2011; McAdam, 1983), governing authorities have
recognized that everyday uses of ICTs can threaten their monopoly over information and com-
munications and can be harnessed to fuel oppositional mobilization. As a result, regimes that are
highly intolerant of dissent view cyberspace as an arena requiring policing and counter-mobil-
ization (Greitens, 2013; Gunitsky, 2015). ICT-facilitated repression has therefore challenged the
liberating promise of the Internet and social media, demonstrating instead that globalized tech-
nologies and networks can facilitate, rather than undermine, authoritarianism (Cooley &
Heathershaw, 2017; Diamond, Plattner, & Walker, 2016).
Regime uses of ICTs include a range of defensive and offensive tactics (Deibert, Palfrey,
Rohozinski, & Zittrain, 2011). Initially, some governments took a relatively laissez-faire
approach to the Internet as an ‘open commons’, while many non-democracies denied access
to it all together (Deibert et al., 2011). At the same time, shuttering the Internet proved costly
4 D. M. Moss

by hindering domestic economies, drawing unwanted international attention, and incapacitating

the security apparatus (Howard & Hussain, 2013). By the mid-2000s, therefore, many regimes
had ‘opened’ their countries to the Internet, but also launched efforts to block and filter content,
deploy information and platforms favorable to the regime, infiltrate critical websites and com-
munications, and cut off the Internet ‘just-in-time’ during selective periods of unrest (Deibert
et al., 2010, 2011; Greitens, 2013; Howard & Hussain, 2013). Regimes have also increasingly
nationalized technologies and platforms such as search engines and social media, often compel-
ling third-party producers of ICTs who wish to operate inside of their territories to capitulate to
oversight and manipulation (Morozov, 2012).
Authoritarian regimes are also characterized by the operation of expansive security appara-
tuses that rely on broad informant networks to collect information, induce fear, and root out dis-
loyalty (Pfaff, 2001). Benefitting from the anonymity that ICTs often provide, these loyalist
networks are deployed online to counter-mobilize against regime opponents in the form of
state-sponsored armies and trolls; regimes also incite vigilantes and loyalist cyberbrigades to
‘disrupt planned rallies, plant false information, monitor opposition websites, and harass oppo-
sition members’ (Gunitsky, 2015, p. 45). The operation of agents acting in the service of the
regime through the Web can undermine activists’ efforts to expose regime abuses, counter pro-
paganda, and maintain or expand domestic and transnational collective action networks. As a
result, the direct and indirect deployment of pro-regime agents through ICTs enables regimes
to surveil and repress widely while simultaneously refuting responsibility for anonymous
counter-mobilizations against their opponents (Deibert & Rohozinski, 2012).

The Transnational Reach of Networked Authoritarianism

Though research into regimes’ uses of ICTs is typically focused on their domestic applications,
the reach of these counter-measures is not limited to activists operating within authoritarian
states. Because ICTs are designed to facilitate transnational connectivity, they have correspond-
ingly globalized the reach of state security apparatuses and their informers. In this way, ‘net-
worked authoritarianism’ (MacKinnon, 2011) places critics abroad on the radar of regimes
and their agents. This is not a new phenomenon, but rather an extension of what Moss (2016)
calls ‘transnational repression’; this refers to the direct and indirect efforts by diasporas’
home-country regimes, including the Syrian regime, to surveil diaspora communities, threaten
activists verbally and harm them physically, prevent them from returning home, and punish
their family members and colleagues in the home country for real or suspected disloyalty (see
also Brand, 2006; Miller, 1981; Østergaard-Nielsen, 2001; Paul, 1990; Shain, 1989). The ties
of diasporas to authoritarian contexts and the people therein can therefore render activism
abroad as a relatively high-risk activity.
Though transnational repression has been wielded against diasporas long before the digital
revolution (Brand, 2006; Miller, 1981; Moss, 2016), revelations in the aftermath of the Arab
Spring suggest that regimes are increasingly able to infiltrate transnational activist networks
using ICTs. Bahraini authorities, for example, have used FinFisher interception software—
developed by UK-based Gamma International—to track and monitor the ‘every move’ of pol-
itical refugees in Britain through their computers and mobile phones (Desmukh, 2014;
Privacy International, 2014). ‘Spear-phishing’ attacks designed to collect personal data and
slander individual activists have also been launched by anonymous pro-regime agents against
Syrians in the Canada-based diaspora (Mustafa, 2016). While it is unknown how many or
how frequently these kinds of attacks have taken place, even if few activists are targeted by
 The Ties that Bind 5

regime members and their loyalist networks in actuality, this study proposes that the potential
threats posed by digitally-enabled transnational repression means that not all members of the
diaspora will possess the requisite autonomy (Koinova, 2012) to mobilize against regimes via
ICTs. As a result, while ‘exit’ can present newfound opportunities for ‘voice’ (Hirschman,
1978), diasporas with ties to illiberal states are not always free to use ICTs as unencumbered
activists (Anderson, 1998). But because scholars know far more about how transnational acti-
vists use new technologies than how members of the diaspora are constrained in doing so, par-
ticularly during episodes of home-country violence when diasporas are presented with newfound
opportunities to aid in resistance efforts, this paper takes up the case of Syrian diaspora activism
online during the uprising’s escalation in 2011.
The Syrian case is theoretically and empirically generative for several reasons. First, the study
addresses the varied ways in which activists abroad encounter and perceive the presence of
regimes and their agents online, which has been neglected in studies of ICTs, authoritarianism,
and mobilization to date. Second, the case attends to how members of diasporas respond to
opportunities for ICT-enabled activism, testing the premise that diasporas are doubly advantaged
to speak out online due to their geographical distance from repressive home countries (Ander-
son, 1998) and their access to solidarity-enhancing and inexpensive ICTs (Bernal, 2006). Third,
focusing the analysis on a period of escalating regime violence and censorship in the home
country demonstrates how diasporas are affected by networked authoritarianism during the
precise period when ICT-based activism has the potential to matter. Overall, the case and its tem-
poral dimension are ideally suited to analyze the opportunities and constraints posed by ICTs for
diasporas with ties to authoritarian states.

Data and Analytical Procedures

This study analyzes original data on Syrian anti-regime diaspora activism in the US and Great
Britain that were collected as part of a larger study titled ‘The Arab Spring Abroad’, as well as
secondary sources on diaspora activism and pro- and anti-regime uses of ICTs during the revo-
lution and subsequent war. I conducted 79 interviews in 2014 with activists involved in transna-
tional efforts to support the 2011 uprising and alleviate the ensuing humanitarian crisis; all but
three of those interviewed were of Syrian descent. In-depth, open-ended interviewing is a highly
appropriate method for social scientists to discover and assess covert dynamics of state repres-
sion, particularly when the tactics used are disavowed by state officials and perpetrators alike
and difficult to ascertain independently (see Pearlman, 2016). Respondents are characterized
as activists because they engaged in a variety of formal and informal transnational efforts to
support the revolution, from organizing protests against the Syrian regime from abroad, to lob-
bying their host-country governments for support, to volunteering in border regions and inside of
Syria to assist dissidents and civilians.1
Interviews were conducted across concentrated diaspora communities and in accordance with
referrals gained over the course of the data collection process in the greater southern California
region, in Washington, DC, London, Manchester, and Bristol, and by Skype and phone with acti-
vists located in other cities across the US. Sampling procedures maximized variation (Lofland
et al., 2006, p. 93) to include exiles and non-exiles, first- and second-generation immigrants
(one third-generation Syrian activist is included in the sample), respondents of different ages,
and women. Interviewees were initially located through the author’s ethnographic participation
in pro-revolution protests in the greater Los Angeles region, through online searches of anti-
regime organizations and media reports, and through referrals from activists.
6 D. M. Moss

Interviewees were asked to detail their experiences mobilizing for their home country, their
encounters with state repression before and after emigration, their uses of ICTs in mobilization,
and their decisions to publicly identify with the revolutions (or not) online. In order to analyze
and compare how their mobilization efforts were impacted by the known and perceived presence
of pro-regime agents online, transcribed interviews were coded using open and focused coding
procedures (Charmaz, 2006) in NVivo, a qualitative analytical program. Activists’ accounts
were triangulated by external sources whenever possible and with one another for consistency
and plausibility. Some names referenced below are pseudonyms; others gave their permission
to be identified due to their long-standing public opposition to the regime and because their
names have already appeared in media sources; all identifiers are used in accordance with
human subject protocols (IRB protocol HS #2012-8918, University of California, Irvine).

ICTs and Transnational Mobilization During the 2011 Uprising

In 2000, Bashar al-Assad, the newly appointed head of the Baathist autocracy established by his
father Hafez in 1970, first opened the country to Internet access. The Internet penetration rate
grew steadily to 20%, but despite having a relatively large wired civil society (Howard &
Hussain, 2013), the regime worked to control its use by imposing strict censorship and monitor-
ing in line with its zero-tolerance policy against dissent (Al-Saqaf, 2012; Deibert et al., 2011).
Despite hopes for a ‘Damascus Spring’ in the early years of al-Assad’s reign, dissidents who
dared to speak out online were persecuted and often forced into exile. The regime blocked
social media sites in 2007, and though digital tools existed for individuals to circumvent
these restrictions, regime repression overwhelmingly succeeded in suppressing civic action on
and offline (Ziadeh, 2013) until the uprising of 2011. As a result, new media in Syria became
used ‘intensively as political tools only after the “Arab Spring,” largely through an operation
of emulation of net-activism practices in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia’ (De Angelis,
2011, p. 4; see also Bruns, Highfield, & Burgess, 2013; Della Ratta & Valeriani, 2012).
In response to peaceful demonstrations in Damascus that emerged in the wake of Egypt’s
revolution in February 2011, the regime initially unblocked social media. A promising conces-
sion on its face, this proved to be an effective counter-mobilization tactic, allowing the regime to
entrap dissidents by tracking users’ online activities and identifying protest participants in videos
and photographs. Detained protesters were also forced to give up their login information to sites
such as Facebook during interrogations (De Angelis, 2011; Khamis, Gold, & Vaughn, 2012).
Equipped with lawful interception software developed by Western corporations to monitor com-
munications and email traffic coming into Syria, the regime also infiltrated activist networks and
used phishing attacks to collect users’ personal information and credentials (Freedom House,
2015; Horwitz, Asokan, & Tate, 2011).2 The regime later responded by cutting off Internet
access intermittently, and digitized contention escalated as hackers, including an anonymous
pro-regime group called the Syrian Electronic Army heralded by Bashar al-Assad, worked to
attack the opposition’s web-based infrastructure and so-called enemies of the state across the
globe.
During the initial uprising, ‘online censorship was viewed as the first and biggest hurdle to
overcome in order to publish politically challenging text and multimedia content and to
report on rallies, demonstrations, and human-rights violations’ taking place in hard-to-reach
areas (Al-Saqaf, 2012, p. 132). Because the regime worked to censor its repression and
promote propaganda that the uprising was the work of foreign conspirators, terrorists, and crim-
inals, part of the diaspora’s role during the revolution was to ‘externalize’ (Tarrow, 2005) the
 The Ties that Bind 7

revolution to global audiences in the hopes of gaining the sympathies and support of outsider
allies, as well as to aid in the coordination of protest activities. In order to do so, activists
inside and outside of Syria worked to publicize regime abuses by uploading photographs and
videos to social media and YouTube, as well as by sending footage to mainstream media
outlets banned from operating within Syria.
The few members of the diaspora who already had opposition-oriented media in place worked
to receive and transmit information produced by everyday citizens in the early days of the Arab
Spring. For example, Malik Al-Abdeh, co-founder of the exile opposition group the Movement
for Justice and Development Party and an opposition London-based satellite channel called
Barada TV, was inspired by broadcasts of mobile phone recordings of protests in Tunisia to
do the same for Syrians. He explained:
We started this program in December 2010 called ‘Syria Through Your Eyes.’ All I did was [to ask
Syrians to] send us videos, [and] we’ll broadcast [them] . . . [For example], there was video of this
professor who started a private university with the help of money from someone within the Assad
family, and then he fell out with that person. So this guy from the Assad family sent two guys to
beat him up outside the university. So some people filmed it . . . and we showed this on TV.

After protests began to escalate in Syria in March 2011, activists like Malik continued to serve as
receptors for illicit footage and were relied on to transmit this material to broader audiences. In
another example, Ibrahim Al-Assil, a student in the UK at the time that the revolution broke out,
returned to Damascus in the summer of 2011 to join civil disobedience efforts there and co-
organize the Syrian Nonviolence Movement. During this time, he attested that Syrians in the dia-
spora helped him and his colleagues to publicize videos of protests:

They were in the US, in the UK, in Qatar and the UAE and other countries as well . . . I used to ask for
a lot of help from them, especially because they have faster [Internet] connections. In Syria, we used
a kind of VPN to be secure, which made the connection even slower. So anything that needs to be
done online, anyone outside Syria was very helpful, and also to get in touch with the media. So, for
example, when civil disobedience took place in Syria in December 2011, the majority of the work
[publishing] documentation of it and getting in touch with the media was done outside Syria.
Furthermore, as described by Damascus-born college student Alaa Basatneh in a documentary
film (Piscatella, 2013), her role from the US was to act as a receptor of video footage from Syria.
After her contacts in Damascus uploaded videos to YouTube, Alaa downloaded these videos,
added descriptive information, inserted English subtitles, and uploaded the finished products
back to the site. She then sent the links to these videos directly to journalists, and at times
they were broadcasted by mainstream news outlets (see Hänska-Ahy & Shapour, 2013). Alaa
and others in the diaspora also linked trusted individuals inside of Syria with one another,
helped Syrian activists to coordinate protest routes in Damascus using Google Maps, and deac-
tivated the Facebook accounts of colleagues in Syria who had been detained by security forces.
In addition to YouTube, respondents reported that online forums such as the Shaam News
Network and the Syria Day of Rage—English Facebook pages3 were also used as arenas to trans-
mit information to English-speaking audiences. In this way, vanguard activists in the diaspora
played a key role in globalizing the conflict using ICTs in the early days of the uprising.

Digitally-enabled Transnational Repression

Just as activists abroad mobilized to an unprecedented degree during this period, this study finds
that pro-regime agents mobilized to counter anti-regime ‘voice’ and net-activism by revolution
8 D. M. Moss

supporters in the diaspora. I use the term pro-regime agents to refer to a range of persons acting
officially and unofficially in the service of the regime, including paid employees, genuine regime
loyalists, and individuals who may have been coerced in some way to inform, both from within
the home country and abroad. Activists attested that pro-regime agents used ICTs to (i) surveil
the online activities of Syrians abroad; (ii) threaten revolution proponents; and (iii) counter net-
activism by hacking their sites and reporting their activities as offensive or rule-breaking, so that
third-party administrators would dismantle pro-revolution sites and content. Table 1 summarizes
this repertoire, which I detail further below.
The data demonstrate that pro-regime agents monitored the social media accounts of members
of the diaspora and attempted to intimidate and punish them for posting critical content and anti-
regime statements. For those who were not already in exile, the monitoring of activists’ accounts
online could lead to their being blacklisted and prevented from returning home. Activists logi-
cally inferred that their social media posts invited heightened scrutiny at the onset of the revolu-
tion because the regime was in an escalating phase of counter-mobilization against the nascent
uprising at home. For example, Ayman, who was living in Saudi Arabia at the onset of the revo-
lution before he joined his family in the US, reported that expressing his solidarity with Syrian
protesters in Dar‘a on Facebook incurred regime attention, thus forcing him into exile:
At the beginning, at [March] 15th, I was pro-Dar‘a. Everybody started putting videos of what’s going
on on his Facebook, at a high cost . . . [My mom] was flying from Aleppo to Germany to visit my
sister who lives in Berlin. We have a friend who is an Intelligence officer at the airport . . . so she
figured, why shouldn’t I ask him about my son? She thinks because I’m writing something with
pro-Dar‘a . . . I might be in trouble. And she was correct . . . One week after, the 23rd of March,
my mom called me from Germany. She told me never come back [to Syria]. ‘What? Why?’ [I
said.] She said, ‘because you put video of the demonstration in Dar‘a and changed [your] profile
picture to black.’ That’s it. This is how intolerant they were.
Though this kind of confirmation of regime surveillance was rare, respondents reported being
aware that posting online had the potential to invite retribution for themselves and for their rela-
tives. Interviewees cited incidents involving others in their communities whose immediate
family members in Syria had been questioned by Intelligence agents specifically about the
activities of their family members in the diaspora and sometimes harmed as a result (Moss,
2016). These factors led respondents to plausibly assume that their actions online could have
serious direct and indirect consequences.
Second, this study finds that pro-regime agents used ICTs to harass and threaten dissidents
abroad who made their anti-regime sentiments public in the early days of the revolution.
Syrians based in the US attested that their online communications had been hacked by groups
known or perceived to be affiliated with the Syrian regime, and that they had received ‘chilling’

Table 1. Responses by pro-regime agents via ICTs to the expression of dissent and net-
activism among the diaspora

1. Surveilling activists’ communications, websites, and social media profiles online

2. Threatening activists through electronic messages
3. Counter-mobilizing against net-activism by
3a. Hacking websites to deface or dismantle oppositional content
3b. Reporting content and pages to third-party site administrators to prompt administrators to shut down sites and
delete content
 The Ties that Bind 9

threats directed toward themselves and their family members in Syria for speaking out online
(Public Broadcasting Service [PBS], 2012). For example, after respondent Marah Bukai and
her colleagues met with US government officials in 2011 to garner support for the revolution,
pro-regime agents sent her threatening electronic messages ‘warning her of rape, or worse, if
she kept up her anti-Assad activities’ (PBS, 2012). Her colleague Dr Radwan Ziadeh, in exile
since 2005, also received a threatening message via Facebook insulting him as a ‘dog’ and threa-
tening that ‘we will do other things with you’ if he continued his activism (The Telegraph, 2011).
He suspected, but could not prove, that this message came from a regime representative because
he had been photographed outside of the embassy by officials at a protest (Kelemen, 2011).
Though the threats posed by transnational repression had long haunted the diaspora (Moss,
2016), interviewees attested that the onset of the uprising marked the first time they received
harassment and threats online for their activism.
Others experienced targeted threats online after being identified as members of pro-revolution
transnational advocacy networks (see also Mustafa, 2016). For example, after an associate of
Alaa Basatneh’s was forced to reveal his Facebook account to security forces in Syria in
August 2011, regime agents discovered that Alaa was helping him to coordinate protests in
Damascus from the US. As a result, regime agents targeted Alaa online and offline. In addition
to receiving death threats via Facebook, she was approached by a Syrian consulate worker who
threatened her, declaring that the regime knows who she is and is watching her (Piscatella,
2013). After these incidents, Alaa was given security escorts on her college campus and,
along with Dr Ziadeh and others, was a part of an FBI investigation into the Syrian regime’s
illegal intimidation of activists in the US (Dougherty, Cratty, Crawford, & Sterling, 2011).
The investigation led to the arrest and conviction of one DC-area man named Mohamed
Soueid for acting as an illegal agent of the Assad regime by documenting local protests and
sending information to the Syrian Intelligence (al-Mukhabarat) (USA vs. Soueid, 2011).
However, anonymous online threats appeared to be more difficult for domestic law enforcement
agencies to prevent and prosecute. As a result, third parties such as the FBI could do little to
prevent members of the diaspora from digitally-enabled transnational repression.
Third, I find that pro-regime agents worked to counter net-activism in the diaspora by attack-
ing and reporting online content. Respondents attested that their independent websites and Face-
book pages were defaced or dismantled by pro-regime hackers, and that revolution-supporting
content posted on Facebook or YouTube was flooded with complaints that prompted website
administrators to take down their pages and videos. For example, an English-language Facebook
page titled ‘We are all Hamza al-Khateeb’, named after a 13-year-old child who was infamously
tortured to death by regime agents in Dar‘a in 2011, was used to post warning messages to its
followers about ‘Trojan horses’ used by pro-regime agents to hack into Skype communications
(see Figure 1). Later, this page was attacked by regime supporters who flooded Facebook with
complaints about the so-called offensive content of the site, and the page was taken down.
According to Youmans and York (2012), the tactic of flagging anti-regime content in order to
get site administrators to remove pro-Syrian revolution pages, including those established by
the diaspora, was a common counter-revolutionary strategy during the Arab Spring.
Overall, these acts of intimidation did not dampen vanguard activists’ commitment to the anti-
regime cause, nor were they effective deterrents for dissidents who had been exiled before 2011.
However, actions taken by pro-regime agents during the first year of the Syrian revolution were
significant because they evidenced the operation of digitally-enabled transnational repression.
As agents made the regime’s presence known online by surveilling, threatening, and counter-
mobilizing against revolution supporters, this signaled to the broader diaspora that actions
10 D. M. Moss

Figure 1. Facebook pages such as ‘We are all Hamza Alkhateeb’ alerted users to methods used by pro-regime agents to
hack and spy on cross-border Skype communications. However, pages were reported to Facebook for so-called offensive
or rule-violating content, which prompted third-party administrators to dismantle content and pages like this one.

taken online were deemed worthy of attention and backlash. Beyond producing a general sense
of threat and suspicion, the possibility of being subjected to regime oversight online posed sig-
nificant risks to non-exiles and newcomers to activism. I explain the effects of these threats
below.

Transnational Network Erosion

First, the data demonstrate that the threats posed by the presence of pro-regime agents online
contributed to ‘network erosion’ (Pfaff & Kim, 2003) between activists and their family
members in Syria. Fearing that their relatives would be targeted, interviewees reported that
they were unable to communicate with their family members as they would have normally
done through ICTs since the time at which they expressed their pro-revolution sentiments
online. For example, Sarah, a leading youth activist in a number of political advocacy and huma-
nitarian initiatives, described how her decision to announce her support for the revolution from
March 2011 onwards created potential hazards for her relatives in Syria. This forced Sarah to
cease her communications with them during this period:
I was public with my support of the revolution from day one in person and via Facebook, but on
Facebook I had my posts private to only my friends . . . I would try not to talk to my relatives in
Syria via Facebook or any means as to make sure the regime didn’t associate them with me. If
ever questioned, they could claim that they haven’t spoken to me in years, and that I’m just a
cousin who they never see because I live in America. For some time, even my [activist] father
would publish on Facebook under an alias as to protect his family back home. Their safety was
always a concern.
Other respondents reported that coming out online severed their home-country connections
because their family members were afraid of being affiliated with pro-revolution Syrians
abroad. For example, Nour from southern California was inspired by the initial success of the
Egyptian revolution to set up a Facebook page calling for freedom and dignity for Syrians.
Even though this page did not criticize the Assad regime by name, his friends and relatives in
the home country reacted by cutting their ties with him. Nour recalled how one of his closest
friends unfriended him on Facebook, who explained:
‘I’m sorry, just because I don’t want to get in trouble.’ He said, ‘do me a favor, could you remove any
picture that shows you and me in the same picture?’ I said don’t worry about it . . . I started to
 The Ties that Bind 11

unfriend a lot of people just to spare them the headache. And some of them already unfriended me . . .
My cousin, who is ten years younger than me . . . she unfriended me in 2011 . . . And now she is in
Sweden . . . She said we have to remember for some period of time, me being related to you was an
accusation.
Because two of Nour’s uncles were interrogated by the regime as a result of his Facebook page,
Nour posted an announcement on his account ‘that all my family doesn’t want me . . . to make it
known . . . that my family doesn’t want me’. By sending this message to pro-regime agents,
Nour reasoned that if officials interrogated any of his relatives again, they could see that
Nour had been renounced by his family and that his views were independent of theirs. As
such, the threats posed by pro-regime agents online produced what Nour described as social iso-
lation and stigma for activists like him in the diaspora.
Further compromising respondents’ transnational ties was the fact that having pro-regime
Syrians as ‘friends’ on Facebook was perceived as dangerous. If persons who professed loyalist
views were genuine backers of the Assad regime, then having ICT-based connections with them
could expose individuals and others in their contact lists to pro-regime agents. If their Facebook
friends in Syria professed pro-regime views on social media out of fear, these persons could like-
wise be endangered by having web-based ties to pro-revolution members of the diaspora. This
resulted in the social sorting of Syrians into pro-revolution and pro-Assad networks online.
Hannah, a youth activist from California, recalled experiencing this sorting process after
posting on Facebook:
It was a status [stating that] Assad’s next after Gaddafi. And my cousin commented
. . . ‘nobody’s going to bring him down.’ And I was like, [either] this guy’s scared, or he’s really pro-
regime. So I unfriended him . . . And then at one point, my family was like when you talk to them,
don’t mention anything about the regime . . . [so] I haven’t spoken to my cousins since the last time I
was in Syria.
In all, the Syrian revolution prompted activists to express their support for the revolution
using ICTs. However, because doing so could incur potentially costly attention by pro-
regime agents, this produced transnational network erosion between members of the diaspora
and those in the home country, sorting Syrian networks into those who were publicly pro-revo-
lution and those who were not. In all, though ICTs have the potential to counter network
erosion caused by emigration, the presence of pro-regime agents online can also disrupt and
reconfigure transnational ties, particularly during periods when regimes have launched full-
on assaults against political opposition movements and view association with those movements
as traitorous.

Self-censorship and the Suppression of Voice

While some respondents decided to identify with the revolution in its early stages, pro-regime
agents’ overt uses of ICTs also deterred others who feared exile and the repression of their
family members at home from using these technologies to express their opposition online. In
this way, the regime and its various agents succeeded in dampening the ‘voice’ (Hirschman,
1978) of pro-revolution Syrians abroad during the uprising’s escalation. For example, Anisa
from Michigan reported that being publicly active in her community felt safer than doing so
on social media. She recalled:
In the beginning, we were really careful because . . . my mom’s parents were back in Syria. I was not
active on Facebook in the beginning because my mom was always like, ‘Don’t do anything. If
12 D. M. Moss

anything that you say affects my parents, I just wouldn’t want that.’ And then there was the issue of if
we want to go to Syria . . . So in the beginning, it was mostly just watching. If it was something that I
could do in Ann Arbor, then I would do it. But I wasn’t doing any of that social media posting or
anything like that.
Firas from southern California echoed this concern. He recalled that participating in his first-ever
protest—which he did guardedly by wearing sunglasses as a disguise and shielding his face in
photographs—also preceded his identification with the revolution on Facebook. He recalled that:
There was an event page on Facebook . . . We heard about it because my brother got the Facebook
invite after asking around . . . [The organizer] is publicly against the regime, but we didn’t hit ‘going’
on the Facebook page, otherwise we’ll be known.

Omar from Michigan also reported that protesting in person seemed far safer than coming out
online in 2011 because identifying with the revolution on social media was a globalized procla-
mation of dissent. He attested that:
Especially on Twitter . . . I felt like I should just keep my identity hidden at first. And a lot of people
were like that and still are . . . because going to a rally here, it’s probably not going to reach some-
body in Syria. But online, it’s global. I just didn’t want my family [in Syria] to be affected . . . That’s
why I tried to keep my identity more hidden.
Many interviewees were also torn between the desire to support the revolution through local
demonstrations and the risks associated with the incidental revelation of their names and faces
online. This created a dilemma, because those activists who were already ‘known’ as revolution
supporters also documented pro-revolution events across the US and Britain in order to demon-
strate their solidarity with Syrians back home and to encourage others to join them. At the same
time, this risked exposing other members of their communities who wished to guard their iden-
tities during pro-revolution events. Basma of southern California described how these concerns
led her to hide her face during her first in-person flash mob:
I was actually nervous . . . Because the family will sit down and tell you the worst scenarios of what’s
going to happen if you go out . . . to the point where when you go out there, you’re nervous . . . Am I
going to cause anything after this? . . . [So] when I was there at the flash mob, I made sure my scarf
was covering my face . . . And every time I saw someone videotaping, I would get nervous. I would
face the opposite way.
In sum, though the uprising in Syria produced a newfound opportunity for the anti-regime dia-
spora to support their compatriots at home tactically and symbolically using ICTs, pro-regime
agents’ real and perceived presence online forced many members of the diaspora to self-
censor their views and work to keep their pro-revolution identities hidden. This created a
problem for those who sought to support the revolution anonymously in their local communities
because doing so risked accidental exposure by their fellow activists to pro-regime monitors
online. The globalized reach of the Assad regime via ICTs therefore constrained many
members of the diaspora from acting in accordance with their rights of free speech and rendered
what scholars generally consider to be low-risk types of net-activism, such as posting videos or
slogans online, as relatively high-risk acts of dissent.

Conclusion and Discussion

The use of ICTs by diasporas is important for several reasons. New technologies provide immi-
grants and their descendants with increasingly cheap and varied ways to maintain ties to the
home country and with their co-nationals. Dissidents abroad also use ICTs to forge connections
 The Ties that Bind 13

with regime opponents at home, coordinate resistance, publicize atrocities, and counter propa-
ganda and censorship. But despite the fact that ICTs grant diasporas residing in democratic
countries with opportunities and inexpensive methods to contest authoritarianism, this study
finds that ICTs do not provide an uninhibited free space or a risk-free means of mobilization.
On the contrary, the findings demonstrate that the very mechanisms that link members of the
diaspora to their home countries and make them vital members of transnational advocacy net-
works also expose diasporas to authoritarian systems of surveillance, repression, and social
control that operate through ICTs and are pervasive across social media.
Based on the analysis of Syrian diaspora activism during the 2011 uprising from the US and
Great Britain, this study finds that respondents’ uses of ICTs to support the revolution incurred a
number of responses by pro-regime agents, including exile, surveillance, threats, and disruptive
counter-mobilizations against their net-activism. Fearing for the safety of their significant others
in Syria, digitally-enabled transnational repression forced many respondents to cut their ICT-
facilitated communications with family members at home. This contributed to network
erosion (Pfaff & Kim, 2003) and the sorting of social media networks into those who were
‘out’ on behalf of the revolution and those who were not. Fears stoked by the regime’s presence
online also led respondents to self-censor their grievances and withhold publicizing their affilia-
tion with the anti-regime cause. Overall, the regime’s transnational reach via ICTs subjected
populations residing thousands of miles from Syria to the deterrent effects of authoritarian
state repression during the uprising’s escalation in 2011.
This study also suggests that the effects of digitally-enabled transnational repression are not
uniform across the diaspora. Instead, exiled activists who are public in their opposition are unli-
kely to be deterred by online harassment or counter-mobilization, though such incidents may
stoke heightened concerns for the safety of their families at home. On the other hand, those
who maintain membership in the home-country polity and have significant others living there
are likely to fear peaking the regime’s interest. In all, the stronger the transnational ties to the
home country, the greater the probability that diaspora members will self-censor; once these
ties loosen or fade over immigrant generations, concerns about getting on the sending-state’s
radar from abroad are likely to decline (see Waldinger, 2015). Additionally, the dynamics of
ICT-mediated repression will also vary according to conflict cycles taking place in the home
country. While regimes with the capacity and will to repress domestic dissidents at any cost
are also likely to routinely surveil the diaspora, regimes are more likely to make their online pres-
ence known and escalate their approach when facing existential threats to their legitimacy and
survival. As such, this study proposes that regimes’ repressive responses will change over time
in accordance with cycles of protest and violence (McAdam, 1983). At the same time, further
research is needed to identify variation in the operation and effects of digitally-enabled transna-
tional repression within and across populations beyond the single case analyzed here.
The analysis of the Syrian case has several implications for the study of transnational collec-
tive action more broadly. First, while ICT-based activism has been questioned and criticized as
‘slackivism’ or ‘clictivism’ (Carty, 2015), relatively simple acts of posting a video depicting
regime violence to Facebook or YouTube were critical forms of rebellion among the Syrian dia-
spora at the beginning of the uprising. Respondents viewed these actions as important because
the Assad regime was (and still is at the time of this writing) engaged in a campaign of denial,
censorship, and propaganda; as such, Syrians abroad viewed their contributions to the anti-
regime information cascade (Lynch, 2011) as a necessary component of the revolutionary
cause. Second, this study contends that as contentious politics becomes increasingly internatio-
nalized (Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Tarrow, 2005), so too has authoritarianism (Cooley &
14 D. M. Moss

Heathershaw, 2017; Diamond et al., 2016). The Russian regime under Vladimir Putin engages in
digitally-enabled transnational repression against a range of targets (Higgins, 2016), for
example, and pro-regime agents troll and target Eritrean dissidents overseas with death
threats (Shearlaw, 2015). This suggests that the tactics employed by the Syrian regime and its
varied agents are common to other non-democracies and affect other diasporas accordingly.
However, not all authoritarian regimes will have the will or ability to counter-mobilize
against their critics abroad to the same degree. For these reasons, regimes’ varying degrees of
authoritarianism and their dynamic relations with the diaspora are likely to shape the operation
and effects of digitally-enabled transnational repression across cases.
This study also contends that it is not only non-democracies that perpetuate authoritarian
forms of repression on and offline. Instead, ICT-based surveillance and counter-mobilizations
of authoritarian regimes and their agents are enabled by a broader set of third parties and spon-
sors of cyber warfare (Heydemann, 2013). A range of states and corporations the world over
make the means of repression available to non-democracies to use against dissidents and journal-
ists. In the case of the Arab Spring, for example, Western-based corporations have been compli-
cit in the facilitation of political repression in Syria, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere, and even
when they do not directly engage with these states, intermediaries can sell and transfer lawful
interception software to these regimes (Horwitz et al., 2011). Scholars should therefore take
into account how authoritarian repertories of repression are themselves the products of globa-
lized systems of information, best practices, and for-profit exchange.
Additionally, though regimes are significantly advantaged in cyberwarfare against dissidents,
both activists and pro-regime agents alike are constrained by the structures and rules governing
ICTs. This is because these technologies are typically constructed for wider publics and in the
service of for-profit corporations. As Youmans and York (2012, p. 317) argue, ‘Changes in plat-
form architecture may introduce new or expand previous constraints for activist users, thus
affecting the risks and effectiveness of their efforts.’ Facebook prohibits anonymity in personal
pages, for example, which is often necessary to protect activists facing domestic and transna-
tional repression. On the other hand, its administrators have also worked selectively to
remove pages belonging to the pro-regime groups such as the Syrian Electronic Army. In a
counter example, YouTube took down the video of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb’s mutilated
body because the content was deemed offensive and as violating the site’s terms of service. As
The Nation reported, ‘The temporary blockage of the brutal video, which YouTube has since
restored, is another reminder that the same social media platforms which help spread protests
can also seriously hinder activists’ (Melber, 2011). As a result, both activists and pro-regime
agents cannot always count on ICTs as uninhibited free spaces or tools for mobilization.
Accordingly, this study suggests that direct and indirect regime surveillance, harassment, and
the deployment of hackers and electronic armies will prevail as a dominant mode of transna-
tional repression in the future because such methods allow regime representatives to easily
deny their culpability. As quickly as activists innovate work-around and offensive online
tactics, therefore, states can readily deploy resources and adherents to meet these challenges
(Deibert et al., 2011). As a result, activists, domestic law enforcement agencies, and institutional
defenders of free speech will continue facing significant obstacles in holding regimes accounta-
ble for repressive tactics deployed online. Nevertheless, continued efforts by third parties are
needed to develop technical safeguards to shield activists abroad from digitally-enabled transna-
tional repression. Without protective measures, members of diasporas will be forced to continue
to fend for themselves against the attacks of pro-regime agents and the corresponding censorship
of their sites by social media administrators.
 The Ties that Bind 15

Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Marlies Glasius, Adele del Sordi, Nils Weidmann, Maria Koinova, Ger-
asimos Tsourapas, Marcus Michaelsen, Jeffrey Lane, Meta de Lange, the participants in 2015
University of Amsterdam Conference on ‘The Authoritarian Governance of Overseas Citizens’,
the participants in the 2016 ISA workshop entitled ‘Unpacking the Sending State: Regimes,
Institutions and Non-state Actors in Diaspora and Emigration Politics’, and to the anonymous
reviewers for their thoughtful comments. A previous version of this article was presented at
the 2016 International Studies’ Association meeting in Atlanta, GA.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research was made possible by funding from the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement
Grant 2014– 2015 (#1433642), the University of California, Irvine’s Kugelman Citizen Peacebuilding Research Fellow-
ship, UC Irvine’s Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies’ Research Award, and UC Irvine’s Center for the Study of
Democracy.

Notes
1 I included those engaged in humanitarian work since humanitarian efforts launched outside of the regime’s purview
have been treated as traitorous and targeted with violence in Syria. Additionally, many respondents engaged in a
combination of explicitly political activism and humanitarian advocacy as the severity of the conflict escalated
over time.
2 Blue Coat Systems and NetApp were accused in 2011 of violating the United States’ trade embargo with Syria; it was
later determined that neither had done so directly (Privacy International, 2013). However, other corporations have;
according to a 2011 report, ‘The Syrian Internet surveillance project, headed by the Italian company Area SpA, is
designed to intercept and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country, and workers have been
installing it under the direction of Syrian intelligence’ (Elgin & Silver, 2011). Public outcry pressured Area SpA
to reconsider its partnership with the regime soon after (Freedom House, 2015).
3 See https://www.facebook.com/ShaamNewsNetwork/?fref=ts; the latter has since been dismantled for reasons
unknown to the author.

References
Adamson, F. B. (2002). Mobilizing for the transformation of home: Politicized identities and transnational practices. In
N. Al-Ali & K. Koser (Eds.), New approaches to migration? Transnational communities and the transformation of
home (pp. 155–168). London: Routledge.
Aday, S., Farrell, H., Lynch, M., Sides, J., Kelly, J., & Zuckerman, E. (2010). Blogs and bullets: New media in contentious
politics. United States Institute of Peace Report No. 65. Retrieved from www.usip.org/sites/default/files/pw65.pdf
Alinejad, D. (2011). Mapping homelands through virtual spaces: Transnational embodiment and Iranian diaspora blog-
gers. Global Networks, 11(1), 43–62.
Alonso, A., & Oiarzabal, P. J. (2010). Diasporas in the new media age: Identity, politics, and community. Reno: Univer-
sity of Nevada Press.
Al-Saqaf, W. (2012). Circumventing internet censorship in the Arab World. In L. Diamond & M. F. Plattner (Eds.), Lib-
eration technology: Social media and the struggle for democracy (pp. 124–138). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Anden-Papadopoulos, K., & Pantti, M. (2013). The media work of Syrian diaspora activists: Brokering between the
protest and mainstream media. International Journal of Communication, 7, 2185–2206.
16 D. M. Moss

Anderson, B. (1998). The spectre of comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the world. New York, NY: Verso.
Bauböck, R. (2008). Ties across borders: The growing salience of transnationalism and diaspora politics. International
migration, integration and social cohesion in Europe policy brief no. 13.
Bernal, V. (2005). Eritrea on-line: Diaspora, cyberspace, and the public sphere. American Ethnologist, 32(4), 660– 675.
Bernal, V. (2006). Diaspora, cyberspace and political imagination: The Eritrean diaspora online. Global Networks, 6(2),
161– 179.
Bernal, V. (2014). Nation as network: Diaspora, cyberspace & citizenship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bob, C. (2005). The marketing of rebellion: Insurgents, media, and international activism. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Brainard, L. A., & Brinkerhoff, J. M. (2006). Sovereignty under siege, or a circuitous path for strengthening the state?
Digital diasporas and human rights. International Journal of Public Administration, 29(8), 595– 618.
Brand, L. A. (2006). Citizens abroad: Emigration and the state in the Middle East and North Africa. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Brinkerhoff, J. M. (2004). Digital diasporas and governance in semi-authoritarian states: The case of the Egyptian copts.
Public Administration and Development, 25(3), 193– 204.
Brinkerhoff, J. M. (2009). Digital diasporas: Identity and transnational engagement. New York, NY: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Bruns, A., Highfield, T., & Burgess, J. (2013). The Arab Spring and social media audiences: English and Arabic twitter
users and their networks. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 871– 898.
Brysk, A. (1996). Turning weakness into strength: The internationalization of Indian rights. Latin American Perspectives,
23(2), 38– 57.
Carty, V. (2015). Social movements and new technology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Los Angeles, CA:
Sage.
Conrad, B. (2005). ‘We are the prisoners of our dreams’: Exit, voice and loyalty in the Eritrean diaspora in Germany.
Eritrean Studies Review, 4, 211– 261.
Cooley, A., & Heathershaw, J. (2017). Dictators without borders: Power and money in central Asia. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
De Angelis, E. (2011). The state of disarray of a networked revolution: The Syrian uprising’s information environment.
Sociologica, 3, 1 –24.
Deibert, R., Palfrey, J., Rohozinski, R., & Zittrain, J. (2010). Access controlled: The shaping of power, rights, and rule in
cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Deibert, R., Palfrey, J., Rohozinski, R., & Zittrain, J. (2011). Access contested: Security, identity, and resistance in Asian
cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Deibert, R., & Rohozinski, R. (2012). Liberation vs. control: The future of cyberspace. In L. Diamond & M. F. Plattner
(Eds.), Liberation technology: Social media and the struggle for democracy (pp. 18–32). Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Della Ratta, D., & Valeriani, A. (2012). Remixing the spring!: Connective leadership and read –write practices in the
2011 Arab uprisings. CyberOrient: Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East, 6(1). Retrieved from www.
cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=7763
Den Bos, M. V., & Nell, L. (2006). Territorial bounds to virtual space: Transnational online and offline networks of
Iranian and Turkish-Kurdish immigrants in The Netherlands. Global Networks, 6(2), 201 –220.
Desmukh, F. (2014, August 7). Bahrain Government hacked lawyers and activists with UK Spyware. Bahrain Watch.
Retrieved from https://bahrainwatch.org/blog/2014/08/07/uk-spyware-used-to-hack-bahrain-lawyers-activists/
Diamond, L. (2010). Liberation technology. Journal of Democracy, 21(3), 69–83.
Diamond, L., Plattner, M. F., & Walker, C. (2016). Authoritarianism goes global: The challenge to democracy. Balti-
more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dougherty, J., Cratty, C., Crawford, J., & Sterling, J. (2011, July 21). FBI probes suspected harassment of Syrians in the
U.S. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/21/syria.protests/
Earl, J., & Kimport, K. (2011). Digitally enabled social change: Activism in the internet age. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Elgin, B., & Silver, V. (2011, November 11). NetApp role in Syria spy project spurs demand for U.S. inquiry. Bloomberg
News. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-10/netapp-role-in-syria-spy-project-spurs-
demands-for-u-s-inquiry
Everett, A. (2009). Digital diaspora: A race for cyberspace. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Freedom House. (2015). Freedom on the Net: Syria. Retrieved from https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/
syria
 The Ties that Bind 17

Futrell, R., & Simi, P. (2004). Free spaces, collective identity, and the persistence of U.S. White Power Activism. Social
Problems, 51(1), 16–42.
Greitens, S. C. (2013). Authoritarianism online: What can we learn from internet data in nondemocracies? PS: Political
Science and Politics, 46(2), 262–270.
Gunitsky, S. (2015). Corrupting the cyber-commons: Social media as a tool of autocratic stability. Perspectives on Poli-
tics, 13(1), 42–54.
Hafner-Burton, E., & Tsutsui, K. (2007). Justice lost! The failure of international human rights law to matter where
needed most. Journal of Peace Research, 44(4), 407–425.
Hänska-Ahy, M. T., & Shapour, R. (2013). Who’s reporting the protests? Journalism Studies, 14(1), 29–45.
Helland, C. (2007). Diaspora on the electronic frontier: Developing virtual connections with sacred homelands. Journal
of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), 956–976.
Heydemann, S. (2013). Syria and the future of authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy, 24(4), 59–73.
Higgins, A. (2016, May 30). Effort to expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ draws vicious retaliation. The New York Times.
Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/world/europe/russia-finland-nato-trolls.html?_r=0
Hirschman, A. O. (1978). Exit, voice, and the state. World Politics, 31(1), 90–107.
Horwitz, S., Asokan, S., & Tate, J. (2011, December 1). Trade in surveillance technology raises worries. Washington
Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trade-in-surveillance-technology-
raises-worries/2011/11/22/gIQAFFZOGO_story.html
Howard, P. N. (2010). The digital origins of dictatorship and democracy: Information technology and political Islam.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Howard, P. N., & Hussain, M. M. (2011). The role of digital media. Journal of Democracy, 22(3), 35– 48.
Howard, P. N., & Hussain, M. M. (2013). Democracy’s fourth wave?: Digital media and the Arab Spring. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Kelemen, M. (2011, October 3). Syrian exiles fear long reach of secret police. National Public Radio. Retrieved from
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/03/141014954/syrian-exiles-fear-long-reach-of-secret-police
Khamis, S., Gold, P. B., & Vaughn, K. (2012). Beyond Egypt’s ‘facebook revolution’ and Syria’s ‘YouTube Uprising’:
Comparing political contexts, actors and communication strategies. Arab Media & Society, 15, 1– 30.
Koinova, M. (2010). Diasporas and international politics: Utilizing the universalistic creed of liberalism for particular-
istic and nationalist purposes. In R. Bauböck & T. Faist (Eds.), Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories
and methods (pp. 149– 166). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Koinova, M. (2012). Autonomy and positionality in diaspora politics. International Political Sociology, 6(1), 99– 103.
Lofland, J., Snow, D., Anderson, L., & Lofland, L. H. (2006). Analyzing social settings: A guide to qualitative obser-
vation and analysis (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Lynch, M. (2011). After Egypt: The limits and promise of online challenges to the authoritarian Arab state. Perspectives
on Politics, 9(2), 301 –310.
MacKinnon, R. (2011). China’s ‘networked authoritarianism’. Journal of Democracy, 22(2), 32– 46.
Madianou, M. (2012). Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood: The role of ICTs in Filipino transna-
tional families. Global Networks, 12(3), 277–295.
McAdam, D. (1983). Tactical innovation and the pace of insurgency. American Sociological Review, 48(6), 735– 54.
Melber, A. (2011, June 1). YouTube reinstates blocked video of child allegedly tortured in Syria. The Nation. Retrieved
from http://www.thenation.com/blog/161050/youtubereinstates-blocked-video-child-allegedly-tortured-syria
Miller, M. J. (1981). Foreign workers in Western Europe: An emerging political force. New York, NY: Praeger.
Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: The dark side of internet freedom. New York, NY: Public Affairs.
Morozov, E. (2012). Whither internet control? In L. Diamond & M. F. Plattner (Eds.), Liberation technology: Social
media and the struggle for democracy (pp. 47–59). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Moss, D. M. (2014). Repression, response, and contained escalation under ‘liberalized’ authoritarianism in Jordan.
Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 19(3), 489–514.
Moss, D. M. (2016). Transnational repression, diaspora mobilization, and the case of the Arab Spring. Social Problems,
63(4), 480– 498.
Mustafa, N. (2016, October 18). Life in the digital shadow of the Syrian war. Open Canada. Retrieved from https://www.
opencanada.org/features/life-digital-shadow-syrian-war/
Østergaard-Nielsen, E. (2001). Diasporas in world politics. In D. Josselin & W. Wallace (Eds.), Non-state actors in world
politics (pp. 217– 235). New York, NY: Palgrave.
18 D. M. Moss

Parham, A. A. (2004). Diaspora, community and communication: Internet use in transnational Haiti. Global Networks,
4(2), 199– 217.
Paul, J. (1990). Human rights in Syria. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch.
Pearlman, W. (2016). Narratives of fear in Syria. Perspectives on Politics, 14, 21– 37.
Peel, C. (2010). Exile and the internet: Ndebele and mixed-race online diaspora ‘homes’. In J. McGregor & R. Primorac
(Eds.), Zimbabwe’s new diaspora: Displacement and the cultural politics of survival (pp. 229–245). New York, NY:
Berghahn Books.
Pfaff, S. (2001). The limits of coercive surveillance: Social and penal control in the German democratic republic. Punish-
ment & Society, 3, 381– 407.
Pfaff, S., & Kim, H. (2003). Exit-voice dynamics in collective action: An analysis of emigration and protest in the East
German revolution. American Journal of Sociology, 109(2), 401–444.
Piscatella, J. (2013). #chicagoGirl: The social network takes on a dictator. Documentary.
Polletta, F. (1999). ‘Free spaces’ in collective action. Theory and Society, 28(1), 1 –38.
Portes, A., Guarnizo, L. E., & Landolt, P. (1999). The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promises of an emergent
research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(2), 217–237.
Privacy International. (2013, April 24). US government cracks down on surveillance technology reseller; HMRC remains
silent in similar case. Retrieved from https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/384
Privacy International. (2014, October 13). Bahraini Government, with help from FinFisher, tracks activists living in the
UK. Retrieved from https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/460
Public Broadcasting Service. (2012, January 3). Are Syrian Spies keeping tabs on opposition activists in U.S.? News
Hour. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world-jan-june12-syria_01-03/
Shain, Y. (1989). The frontier of loyalty: Political exiles in the age of the nation-state. Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press.
Shearlaw, M. (2015, August 18). From online trolling to death threats—The war to defend Eritrea’s reputation. The Guardian.
Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/18/eritrea-death-threats-tolls-united-nations-social-media
Smith, R. C. (1998). Transnational localities: Community, technology and the politics of membership within the context
of Mexico and U.S. migration. In M. P. Smith & L. E. Guarnizo (Eds.), Transnationalism from below (pp. 196 –241).
New Brunswick: Transaction.
Son, J. (2015). Immigrant incorporation, technology, and transnationalism among Korean American women. Journal of
International Migration and Integration, 16(2), 377– 395.
Tarrow, S. (2005). The new transnational activism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
The Telegraph. (2011, August 18). FBI probes threats against Syrians in US. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8708897/FBI-probes-threats-against-Syrians-in-US.html
United States of America v. Mohamad Anas Haitham Soueid. (2011, October). U.S. District Court of Alexandria, VA.
Retrieved from www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/1714.pdf
Vegh, S. (2003). Classifying forms of online activism: The case of cyberprotests against the World Bank. In M.
McCaughey & M. D. Ayers (Eds.), Cyberactivism: Online activism in theory and practice (pp. 71–96).
New York, NY: Routledge.
Vertovec, S. (2004). Cheap calls: The social glue of migrant transnationalism. Global Networks, 4(2), 219– 224.
Waldinger, R. (2015). The cross-border connection immigrants, emigrants, and their homelands. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Wayland, S. (2004). Ethnonationalist networks and transnational opportunities: The Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Review
of International Studies, 30, 405– 426.
Yang, G. (2009). The power of the internet in China: Citizen activism online. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Youmans, W. L., & York, J. C. (2012). Social media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the
information infrastructure of modern social movements. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 315– 329.
Ziadeh, R. (2013). Power and policy in Syria: Intelligence services, foreign relations and democracy in the Middle East.
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dana M. Moss is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current
research examines the transnational dimensions of authoritarianism and anti-authoritarian col-
lective action among Middle Eastern populations. Her work has been published in Social Pro-
blems, the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Mobilization: An International
Journal, among other venues.