Global development, diasporic communities, and civic space

Abstract

Over the last twenty years increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which diasporic communities can shape global development processes, thorough a variety of intersecting scales and spatialities. This promotion of diasporic‐centred development has occurred in parallel to a narrowing of civic space and it is these juxtaposing narratives that this paper interrogates. This paper firstly considers diasporic‐centred development before moving on to think about how the contemporary narrowing of civic space may be (re)shaping diasporic civic life and participation in global development processes. The paper concludes that the spaces for diasporic civic participation in development are vulnerable to being squeezed in multiple intersecting ways, including through the racialised marginalisation of diasporic communities in everyday life, restrictions on diasporic associational life, the delegitimising of diasporic organisations in the (formal) development sphere and the extra‐territorial narrowing of diasporic civic space by state (and non‐state) actors. It is imperative that we explore the intersections in the diasporic‐civic space‐development nexus, with further research needed to understand how diasporic communities are responding to these changes, how diasporic civic spaces are reconfiguring and reconstituting themselves in this context, and what this means for global development.