The Conclusion summarizes the book's contribution and details the implications of The Arab Spring Abroad for future studies of transnational activism, diaspora mobilization, and immigrant politics.

Chapter 7 shows how diaspora activists’ interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni Arab Spring were shaped by the relative degree of geopolitical support for the cause from their host-country governments and influential third parties, including states bordering the home-country, international institutions, and the media.

Chapter 3 demonstrates why Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni mobilization was weak before the Arab Spring. The author shows how two transnational social forces--transnational repression and conflict transmission--depressed and deterred anti-regime mobilization by embedding diasporas in authoritarian systems of control and sociopolitical antagonisms through members' home-country ties.

Chapter 5 describes differences in activists’ collective interventions for rebellion and relief. Moss demonstrates how diaspora movements adopted a common transnational repretoire of (1) broadcasting their allies’ plight to the outside world, (2) representing the cause to the media and policymakers, (3) brokering between allies, (4) remitting tangible and intangible resources homeward, and (5) volunteering in person on the front lines and along border zones. However, not all diaspora movements played a congruent role in the uprisings. While Libyans in the United States and Britain played what the author calls a "full-spectrum" role in the revolution for its duration, Syrians and Yemenis did not. The chapters to follow explain how and why.

The case of an African soldier who served with distinction in the Roman army and who retired to his highland home town prompts a consideration of the problems of identity and behavior as they were shaped by an empire with its own fiscal, administrative, and military categories and demands. The question considers the negotiated aspects of identity in which local attachments of language, kinship, and place were made to merge with the categories of name, military rank, language, and armed service imposed by an imperial regime. Rather than one element effacing the other, it is shown how they could coexist in a split sense of identity through many generations over the height of the empire. Perhaps more than is often imagined, it seems that the structure of the empire was itself bifurcated and capable of sustaining such split identities all the way down to the most localized levels of the imperial social order.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Geneva conference of late 1976, as the culmination of American efforts to push forward with majority rule talks, failed to reach any meaningful results. Part of the failure had to do with the end of President Ford’s administration and the end of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s role in the Rhodesia crisis. Much of the chapter analyzes the diplomatic roles of Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, and how they interacted with American, British, and African diplomats and leaders during the conference. The Zairian leader Mobutu was also involved in assessing the African leaders, and his observations of Mugabe and Nkomo are discussed. The chapter shows how Mugabe managed to make the most of the otherwise failed Geneva talks to solidify his leadership role in ZANU, and how after the conference, he and ZANLA leader Tongogara removed the ZIPA leaders by having them imprisoned in Mozambique in early 1977. The chapter also examines British, American, South African, and Rhodesian views of the future prospects of the Zimbabwean nationalist leaders.

The chapter argues against an influential thesis according to which Jews and Judaea were treated with extraordinary harshness in the wake of the Great Rebellion, due to the new Flavian dynasty’s political needs. It is argued that Vespasian enjoyed considerable legitimacy at the beginning of his reign; he did not need to base his legitimacy on a continuous ‘war against the Jews’; nothing he did needs to be explained by attributing this motivation to him. The harshness of the treatment endured by the defeated Jews was, fundamentally, “normal’ imperial harshness.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Roman empire in administrating education in provincial cities during the High Empire, through regulation of exemption from tutelages. It uses the case of Aelius Aristides, who appealed against his own exemption being revoked. The chapter traces the various interests and forces which shaped provincial education both in the civic arena as well as in the imperial one.

Unlike in the West where the Roman municipal model was almost uniformly spread over the various provinces, Greek cities in the East during the Imperial period were very proud of their own centuries-old political traditions and consequently were reluctant to adopt Roman institutions. However, many cities celebrated the emperor as their ‘founder’ or were renamed after a Roman emperor, such as, for example, ‘Kaisareia’. Other cities deliberately chose pictures referring to Roman foundation practices to appear on their coins (e.g. the plowing scene) or took—formally or informally—the title of ‘koloneia’, normally reserved for communities which were part of the Roman State. This chapter aims at examining which cities were ready to comply with the Roman colonial model, why they did so, to what extent, and what the meaning of their claim for Roman origins was. It argues that the issue of the compliance of Greek cities with the Roman constitutional model of a colony was a way for them to negotiate their position within the Roman empire and was an aspect of cultural interaction.

Historical sources, and epigraphical and archeological finds attest to the presence of the Roman military presence and the establishment of the Roman base at Legio-Kefar ‘Othnay, first by soldiers of the Legio II Traiana, and slightly thereafter by the Legio VI Ferrata. An archaeological survey in the Legio area proposed the precise location of the Roman legionary base. A geophysical survey and excavation seasons allow us to assess that its size resembles Roman legionary bases in other parts of the empire during the second–third centuries CE. In this chapter we discuss the small finds from the site such as roof tiles/bricks with Roman military stamps, coins with countermarks and Roman weapons and assess their contribution to the understanding of Roman military presence by the II Traiana and the VI Ferrata legions at the site from the second to the beginning of the fourth century CE, at the latest.

When Greek historians turned their attention to the Roman Empire, the main question they sought to answer, which they displayed prominently in their introductions, was the reason for the success of the Empire. Success was defined in terms of acquisition, extent, stability and duration of conquest. Polybius, although not the first Greek historian of Rome, was perhaps the first to formulate the question, which he stated like a banner in the introduction to his complex work: his purpose was to explain ‘by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement which is without parallel in human history’. A century later, Dionysius of Halicarnassus did Polybius one better by adding duration of rule to Rome’s achievement: ‘the supremacy of the Romans has far surpassed all those that are recorded from earlier times, not only in the extent of its dominion and in the splendor of its achievements – which no account has as yet worthily celebrated – but also in the length of time during which it has endured down to our day’; and his long preface is filled with other such proclamations. In the second century CE, Appian of Alexandria wrote the same idea in less florid prose: ‘No ruling power up to the present time ever achieved such size and duration’, after stating which he embarked on a long proof. These three historians are representative of a prevailing trend.

This chapter examines the diplomacy before, during, and after the 1980 majority rule elections in Zimbabwe. The pre-election diplomacy focused on ceasefire violations and the large number of unreported South African troops in Rhodesia before the election. The diplomacy of Lord Soames in dealing with this issue, and the issue of violence and intimidation by the different nationalist parties, especially from ZANU, meant that the elections were a tense situation. Lord Soames’ handling of the election observers is discussed, as is his meeting with Robert Mugabe once Mugabe’s overwhelming victory was known. The chapter then looks at Anglo-American relations with Zimbabwe in the first two years of independence. The focus is on the British and American responses to events in 1982, primarily the problems created in Britain among Conservatives over the reports of the torture of detained white officers, some of them British citizens, who were charged with sabotage against Zimbabwe’s Thornhill Air Force base. In addition, the firing of Joshua Nkomo from the government, and his exile to London is discussed.

This chapter addresses what appears to be a puzzling paradox. The Romans enjoyed a reputation for broad-mindedness in matters of religion. Their empire contained a multitude of diverse peoples with varied and sometimes outlandish rites, beliefs, and gods. Far from suppressing such practices, the Romans even imported alien cults and made them part of their own extended system of honoring divine powers. Acceptance and embrace of a wide range of modes of worship characterized Roman image and practice. Could this liberal attitude toward religious pluralism extend even to the Jews, notorious as an exclusivist monotheistic sect? The evidence, on the face of it, suggests hostility among Roman intellectuals toward Jewish separatism and offers disturbing examples of official actions against practitioners of the religion itself. How does one account for this apparent exception to general Roman policy? This chapter questions many of the assumptions behind this ostensible paradox. It argues that Jews were not as separatist as often thought, that their diaspora communities in the empire were acknowledged and supported by Roman authority, that official actions against the religion were decidedly exceptional and not at all characteristic, and that abusive comments by Roman intellectuals were no more meaningful than those expressed about numerous other cults that flourished in the empire.