Transnational Immigrant Narratives on Arab Democracy: The Case of Student Associations at UC Berkeley Tamirace Fakhoury* ABSTRACT This article analyses the discourse of Arab transnational student associations at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB) on Arab democratization. It places focus on their narratives during the 2011 uprisings. Its findings, based on interviews and qualitative data, show that these student associations craft a discursive and broader conception of Arab democracy not confined to suffrage and institutions, and extending beyond the borders of the Arab world. They further draw on various indirect mechanisms in their host land to convey their discourses and impact homeland democratization. Still, their agency remains constrained by several struc- tural factors. INTRODUCTION Democracy is an idea that walks upon the earth (Blaug, 1996: 49) The present article contributes to the underdeveloped literature exploring the linkages between transnational immigrant movements and the construction of democracy in the Arab world. Adopting a transnational 1 analytical frame (Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2004), I look at transnational student associations as an important – albeit under-explored – category of immigrant actors 2 acting as diffusers, negotiators and contesters of democratic notions. Although the relationship between migration and democracy has been examined in various contexts (Rueland et al., 2009), there is little scholarship regarding the impact of Arab migrant communities on eroding authoritarianism. This may be explained by the fact that, until recently, the Arab region was considered unreceptive to democracy (Diamond, 2010). The recent revolts, however, call for “imagining the ‘political’ otherwise” (El Shakry, 2011). In particular, they draw attention to the role of “ordinary people” in contesting power structures (Bayat, 2011: 386). The agency of Arab youth in these revolts has elicited particular interest (Al Momani, 2011). This article reports on the results of a case study focused on Arab transnational student associations at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB). The analysis restricts itself to these associations’ engagement in the discursive core of democracy, 3 and does not pretend to assess their capacity to impact democratization at institutional levels. Rather, it seeks to explore whether, and if so how, these youth associations circulate notions on democracy, on the one hand, and contest certain political perspectives on the other. * Lebanese American University, Lebanon. doi: 10.1111/imig.12164 © 2014 The Author International Migration © 2014 IOM International Migration Vol. 53 (3) 2015 ISSN 0020-7985 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.