The political geographies of diaspora strategies: Rethinking the ‘sending state’

Abstract

Diaspora strategies have been at the forefront of new studies of the political geographies of state‐led transnationalism, contributing important insights into the widespread socio‐economic impacts of initiatives used to engage émigrés in extra‐territorial nation‐building. The conceptualization of the ‘sending state’ as a central territorialized bureaucratic form has however contributed to binary framings of diasporic space by failing to capture the range of interplays in and between multiple scales and spaces that characterises the formulation of a states’ diaspora strategies, their evolution over time, and their variegated material outcomes. Alternative conceptualizations of the ‘sending state’ as a multi‐sited network of governing entities disrupts binary readings of diaspora space, but it is argued here that such an approach reproduces top‐down views of political agency. The review concludes by suggesting that scholars of diaspora strategies would benefit from exploring assemblage thinking, where a sustained engagement with spatial emergence and distributed socio‐material agencies has the potential to reveal the dynamic topological connections through which diasporic spatio‐political formations emerge, endure and may be unsettled. This has implications for understanding the variegated outcomes of diaspora strategies for individual diasporic subjectivities and ideas of common citizenship.

The spaces of diaspora’s revitalization: Transregions, infrastructure and urbanism

“…Return, once diaspora’s formative taboo that characterized its classic condition of exile (Clifford, 1994), has today become the source for the homeland state’s extra-territoriality. Over the past decade in particular, social scientists have explored homeland state strategies that have targeted diasporas as a new political and economic resource (Cohen, 1997; Dickinson, 2017; Hickey et al, 2015; Ho, 2011; Larner, 2007; Mullings, 2011; Ragazzi, 2014). The folding of diaspora’s search for belonging from the nation-state’s margins onto nation-building strategies as a central component of state power has had significant consequences.…”

“…Christou and Mavroudi (2016), for instance, revisit the ‘routes’ over ‘roots’ distinction as a means to decouple diaspora’s pairing with the homeland and instead place the concept within the diversity of everyday life. In the scholarship on diaspora strategies, Dickinson (2017) has argued that the binary between sending and receiving states obscures diaspora’s multi-scalar political and economic routes through which the nation-state is granted its extra-territorial power. Along similar lines of critique, Collyer and King (2015) have stressed that examinations of diaspora-homeland relations must be expanded to account for the ways in which homeland states appeal to their diasporas through not only material incentives but also imaginative and symbolic attachments.…”

Mobilising diaspora to promote homeland investment: The progress of policy in post-conflict economies

“…Analysis of the effectiveness and impacts of varied diaspora policy initiatives requires that geographical dynamics are taken into account (Dickinson, 2017). At present, there is little research on the dynamics of post-conflict environments and how they seek to engage the diaspora.…”

“…In order to do this, direct forms of support have included policies specifically targeting the diaspora, typically in terms of finance and support, what Gamlen (2014) refers to as ‘diaspora institutions’, defined as offices of state dedicated to emigrants and their descendants. Yet engagement is multifaceted and ‘the state’ is often not an easily identifiable set of institutions or policies, but a dispersed set of everyday practices that cohere in particular socio-temporal contexts into state-like effects, and thus provide scholars of diaspora policy with a more distributed conceptualisation of power and agency (Dickinson, 2017). Indeed, ‘diaspora institutions’ vary widely in form and function, from administrative departments, directorates and other units, with some within the office of the President or Prime Minister, or within labour/employment ministries, as well as digital platforms for engagement which are an attempt to map the diaspora and understand what activities they are willing to engage in more effectively (Brinkerhoff, 2009).…”

“…The majority of lower income countries have policies to welcome and encourage foreign investment, and often find themselves in competition for such investment (Dickinson, 2017; Gamlen, 2014; Gillespie et al, 1999; Riddle and Brinkerhoff, 2011). With increasing movements of people around the world, such transnational economic activity is becoming an ever more important phenomenon (Mohan, 2006; Ram and Jones, 2008; Van Delft et al, 2000; World Bank, 2016) and a key focus for public policy (Kuznetsov, 2006; Nielsen and Riddle, 2010; Wang and Liu, 2015).…”