In Somalia the boom in labor remittances inflows fueled a different type of informal economy. More specifically, while the oil boom period reduced the Somali state’s ability to regulate the economy as in Egypt and Sudan, the consequences of this development differed. In Somalia informal financial networks facilitated a thriving commercial sector comprised of firms oriented around clan families. It was not religious or class affiliations, but rather ethnic mobilization and conflict that became the most salient. This difference was due to two factors: the dearth of formally organized institutions (i.e., official banks, and publicly registered enterprises); and the fact that President Siad Barre pitted one clan against another in his search for legitimacy and financed a patronage system excluding clans and constituencies that opposed his rule. Thus, with the expansion of the parallel economy, the politics of ethnicity and personalistic networks quickly eclipsed the power of the state.

Failed states, I argue in the conclusion, do not necessarily afford terrorists a conducive context for recruiting new members. This is due to four challenges that confront terrorist organizations. The first challenge is the lack of government-enforced order in failed states that is needed to provide security against local authorities. Second, is the unreliability of local allies, as in the case of Somalia, where local ties of clan and sect overlap in complicated ways. The third challenge is that the better an area is for training recruits, the more remote and sparsely populated it is, the harder it to meet basic sustenance needs. The fourth problem is the challenge of getting fiscal resources in place. Financial services in the region continue to be weak and Islamic militants have not been able to effectively use the Hawalaat to provide key financial services in weakly governed areas of the Horn of Africa.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the varied conversion of diaspora activists' resources—their home-country network ties, social capital, and fungible resources—mitigated their interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni revolutions from the United States and Great Britain.

Chapter 2 provides a brief historical background of Middle Eastern migration to the west and details how authoritarian-nationalist regimes in Libya, Syria, and Yemen pushed exiles and emigrants to the United States and Great Britain. By examining the state of diaspora mobilization from the 1960s to the eve of the Arab Spring in 2010, the author demonstrates anti-regime movements were small, atomized, and considered partisan by their conationals. Neither Libyan and Syrian exiles nor well-resourced white-collar professionals were able to forge public member-based associations or initiate large anti-regime protest events during this period. Yemeni movements, meanwhile, focused on supporting southern separation from the Yemeni state, rather than on the reform or liberalization of the Yemeni government.

The Introduction presents an overview of why diaspora mobilization matters, why the existing literature has not satisfactorily explained its causes and dynamics, and previews the author's key arguments. This chapter justifies the book's comparative framework and details the data collection strategies used to investigate the Arab Spring abroad.

Given the deterrent effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission in the United States and Britain before 2011, what brought anti-regime Libyans, Syrians, and Yemenis together for the Arab Spring? Chapter 4 describes how the Arab Spring mobilized members of the anti-regime diaspora by upending the normative operation and effects of transnational repression and conflict transmission in the diaspora. The Arab Spring did so by reducing the costs of activism, making members willing to take risks, and creating new solidarities against common threats. The extent to which diaspora groups experienced these quotidian disruptions determined whether or not they converted preexisting organizations to the cause and maintained solidarity over time.

Chapter 1 provides the theoretical justification for the book and proposes a new framework for explaining what scholar Albert Hirschman calls "voice" after "exit" against authoritarian regimes.