Debating diaspora: Securitization framework and the Turkish state's making of dissent abroad

A burgeoning scholarly interest in diaspora governance has recently established that state policies of engagement and mechanisms of control exist simultaneously. While the sending state aims at fostering relations with some groups, it devises strategies to monitor and control some others in diaspora. In explaining this discrepancy, the scholarship points at the heterogeneity in diaspora as well as state perception of political migrants as a security threat due to their role in long-distance opposition. Referring to the legitimacy of the political apparatus in defining their subjects, the literature indicates that migrants are framed as dissent when the political authority classifies them as such. This article contributes to the existing literature by examining how certain diaspora groups are politically constructed as dissent. Using securitization theory as an analytical framework and taking Turkish parliamentary debates (1960–2003) as a case study, this research explores the politics of establishing three major dissent groups in Europe, namely the communists, Islamists, and Kurds. The article shows that based on distinct narratives each category has its own course of construction though at times these processes occur simultaneously. It also demonstrates the agreements and conflicts among political parties over how to frame diaspora groups and the role of symbolic power as a constitutive element in the practice of securitization. Finally, it argues that while securitization rests on the symbolic power of political actors, under certain circumstances they do not need to occupy a position of authority as they can mobilize securitization despite being in the opposition.     

Behind the Ties that Bind: Diaspora-making and Nation-building in China and India in Historical Perspective, 1850s-2010s

Whereas the rare existing comparative studies of Chinese and Indian diaspora policies have focused on recent periods following economic restructuring in both countries, this article, using a historical perspective, looks at diaspora policies in both countries from the angle of conceptions of the nation. Comparing three specific periods – the early twentieth century, the period between the 1950s and the 1970s, and the period since the 1970s – the article argues that there was a similarity between China and India in terms of how conceptions of the nation expanded and contracted together with both domestic and international changes during these periods, in spite of differences in nationality laws. As such, it demonstrates that countries with nationality laws based on jus sanguinis are not necessarily always more inclusive towards diaspora populations than those with nationality laws based on jus soli. In both cases, there is a tension at work between a state-led paradigm that is territorial in nature and ethnic and cultural notions of nationhood.     

“Like the father's home:” perceived state of the Turkish-Sunni community in Germany

Focusing on a mosque organization, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), this paper engages with the Turkish-Sunni diaspora's complex perception of the ‘state’ in Germany. DITIB is a Sunni-Islam based mosque organization that oversees over 900 mosques across Germany. However, the Turkish-Sunni diaspora does not consider DITIB mosques as simply religious or cultural spaces but instead attributes a highly complex quasi-stateness to it. My field research between 2016 and 2018 reveals that for this community, DITIB reflects an intimate familial version of the Turkish state in Germany. While DITIB has significant connections to the state in Turkey, based on my findings I argue that these connections alone do not explain why the diaspora perceive DITIB like a state. Rather, DITIB's perceived stateness has been constructed through a historical process that brings to the fore diasporic experiences, feelings, and memories centered at the ethnoreligious spaces of mosques. Thus, this research produces new questions for, and theoretical approaches to geographies of states, extending this literature's emphasis on everyday and intimate perspectives. I build on feminist geopolitics and diaspora studies to contribute to this scholarship by analyzing the role of feelings and memories in forming perceptions of the state. I explain how spaces of perceived states become fluid, cross the borders of officially defined national territories, and exceed the classical spaces and embodiment of states. Instead, spaces like mosques come to be perceived like a state through their association with care, unity, and a home. This analysis points to the emotional and memory-based production of what is perceived as a state and how those perceptions are formed.     

A diasporic right to the city: the production of a Moroccan diaspora space in Granada,Spain

In this paper, I bring together ideas of ‘diaspora space’ and ‘the right to the city’ and empirically demonstrate how the formation of diasporas is frequently dependent on migrants attaining certain rights to the city. These rights, I argue, are conditioned and attained by the interplay of urban structural context with the place-making strategies of migrants. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that Moroccan migrants in Granada, Spain, have achieved a partial right to a neighbourhood of the city, producing a multi-sensory, self-orientalised diaspora space. First, I show that certain urban conditions in Granada provided a foothold for Moroccan migrants to begin to form a diaspora and transform urban space. Second, I demonstrate that through the mobilisation of a strategically self-orientalised cultural capital, the diaspora have partly appropriated the valuable history of Al-Andalus, a key component in the city’s tourist imagery. These factors and strategies have enabled Moroccan migrants to gain a right to have a visible presence in the city, a right to produce and transform urban space and a right to spatalise diverse identities – all key rights, I argue, in the formation of a diaspora.     

Making and remaking Tibetan diasporic identities

The fifty-year long Chinese occupation of Tibet has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and has produced a refugee flow that continues today. Although the plight of Tibetans commands international attention, this diaspora remains understudied and undertheorized. To speak to this silence, we follow Patterson and Kelley (2000) and argue that the Tibetan diaspora can be analysed as both a condition and a process. Diaspora as condition emphasizes the structural features of an exile population, such as race, gender, class and religion. Diaspora as process draws attention to lived refugee experiences--the making and remaking of diasporic identities. In the Tibetan diaspora, His Holiness the Dalai Lama holds a central position. Through his global profile, and a transnational nationalist political structure, he creates images of Tibet, builds community and works toward Tibetan self-determination. Within this nationalist frame, Tibetan identities assume a singular, unified and homogeneous form. Further analysis that focuses on individual voices, however, shows how Tibetan diasporic identities are contested, complex and embedded in not one but multiple narratives of struggle.     

Who you gonna call? Theorising everyday security practices in urban spaces with multiple security actors – The case of Beirut's Southern Suburbs

Who do urban residents turn to in everyday security incidents? Why do some go to the police in certain locations, others to armed nonstate actors or kinship networks? We explore the ways in which residents and security actors – state and nonstate – negotiate everyday (in)security in contested urban spaces with multiple security actors. We consider how hybrid security assemblages are shaped by physical and social space and how everyday security practices shape space. We use Beirut's Southern Suburbs (Dahiyeh) as a site of theorisation, bringing local vernacular experiences into dialogue with Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus, doxa and field to develop a spatially dynamic analytical framework. Using this framework, we map security actors' different types and sizes of capital and how this capital is affected by residents' habitus and doxa within the everyday security field. We introduce the notion of ‘translocal habitus’ to capture the impact of families' origins outside Dahiyeh on everyday security dynamics. The framework we develop contributes to the spatialisation, vernacularisation and pluralisation of everyday security studies, furthers the spatialisation of Bourdieu and adds to the literature on hybrid forms of governance. Our analysis is based on extensive fieldwork, including over 150 interviews and ‘street chats’ with residents and security actors in and around Dahiyeh.     

Governmentality,Diaspora Assemblages and the Ongoing Challenge of “Development”

Abstract: Drawing on governmentality debates, I argue that skilled members of the Jamaican diaspora are becoming important actors in an ongoing development strategy to extend the rationality of the market into everyday social relations and institutions. Diaspora members are imagined by states and development institutions to be ideal development partners because of their access to potentially lucrative business, knowledge and capital networks, and their desire to direct them towards socially transformative ends. But, as I shall demonstrate, efforts to incorporate skilled émigrés into national development plans raise important questions about the entanglements between diaspora strategies, state power and enduring local patterns of uneven development. Rather than a space of social transformation, diaspora can also function as a space of stasis that reproduces rather than transforms such patterns. By examining Jamaica's emerging diaspora strategy, I examine not only the governmental role that diaspora groups are increasingly beginning to play, but also their potential to support or disrupt the class, gender and racial asymmetries that have historically governed flows of wealth, opportunity and power across the island.     

Sovereign Power,Biopower, and the Reach of the West in an Age of Diaspora‐Centred Development

Why at this particular historical moment has there emerged a rousing interest in the potential contribution of diasporas to the development of migrant sending states and why is this diaspora turn so pervasive throughout the global South? The central premise of this paper is that the rapid ascent of diaspora‐centred development cannot be understood apart from historical developments in the West's approach to governing international spaces. Once predicated upon sovereign power, rule over distant others is increasingly coming to depend upon biopolitical projects which conspire to discipline and normalize the conduct of others at a distance so as to create self‐reliant and resilient market actors. We argue that an age of diaspora‐centred development has emerged as a consequence of this shift and is partly constitutive of it. We develop our argument with reference to Giorgio Agamben's “Homo Sacer” project and in particular the theological genealogy of Western political constructs he presents in his book The Kingdom and the Glory (2011). We provide for illustration profiles of three projects which have played a significant role in birthing and conditioning the current diaspora option: the World Bank's Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D); the US‐based International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA); and the EU/UN Joint Migration and Development Initiative Migration4Development project (JMDI‐M4D). Drawing upon economic theology, we make a case for construing these projects as elements of the West's emerging Oikonomia after the age of empire.     

Authoritarian power in space,time and exile

Autocrats have been shown to exert influence over their populations and dissidents abroad through strategies such as ‘transnational repression’ or ‘diaspora engagement’ policies, demonstrating that authoritarian power carries across borders. But existing work on extra-territorial authoritarian power has tended to view state power as a stand-alone variable that endows regimes with a relatively free hand to make their own diaspora policies. This is despite that studies of authoritarianism inside states, including those observing the ‘dynamics of contention,’ have consistently highlighted the relational and contingent nature of authoritarian power. This paper asks whether the iterative dynamics of contention that describe regime-opposition relations within state boundaries endure between authoritarian regimes and their exiles? It brings together the literatures on extra-territorial authoritarian power and the topology of power with that on contentious politics in authoritarian regimes to undertake a case study on the relationship between the Syrian government and the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. It finds that extra-territorial authoritarian is relational and contingent on the political context and its recipients, and shares many of the characteristics of authoritarian power inside state boundaries.     

Diaspora policies in comparison: An application of the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX) for the Latin American and Caribbean region

In this paper we present the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX), an index that summarizes the emigrant policies developed by 22 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) states. In recent decades sending states have increasingly adopted policies to keep economic, political or social links with their emigrants. These “emigrant policies” vary in scope and nature between different countries and include measures as diverse as dual citizenship policies, programs to stimulate remittances, the right to vote in the home country from abroad, and the creation of government agencies to administer emigrant issues. The EMIX proposes a useful tool to condense and compare a wide spectrum of policies across countries. Its development involved the collection of official data, as well as a critical review of secondary literature and input from experts as complementary sources. Through a rigorous framework for constructing the index, we show how emigrant policies can be aggregated to measure the overall degree and volume of emigrant policies in LAC states. The results of the EMIX portray a region that has indeed made serious efforts to assist their diaspora in the states of reception and to encourage their involvement in the political, economic and social fabric in the states of origin. The results, however, also reveal great variation in the emigrant policies and the administrative setting adopted by LAC states.     

Building homeland heritage: multiple homes among the Chinese diaspora and the politics on heritage management in China

Community involvement is arguably a key component behind sustainable heritage management. Under strict government control, however, local community-led initiatives are difficult to find in China. Nonetheless, through remittances and philanthropic contributions to their respective communities, the Chinese diaspora have long been seen as an important source of foreign capital and a driving force behind homeland development. A transregional study (mainland China, Hong Kong and Canada) was carried out to explore the relationship between local communities in China and the diaspora, how each party was involved (or not) and the factors that affect their engagement in a government-initiated clanship heritage project in post-reform China. Investigating how different ‘associated people’ perceive, construct and even manipulate heritage, this study found that participation is not only related to wealth, success or status, but also to residential orientations, self-perceptions of the motherland and notions of authentic and/or symbolic roots. The study offers insight into the nature and politics of heritage management in contemporary China. Furthermore, it contributes to our understanding of how multiple homes can affect diasporic interpretations of, and connections with, the homeland.     

Making a homeland,constructing a diaspora: The case of Taglit-Birthright Israel

The study of diaspora policies in political science, international relations, and political geography has moved away from conceiving diasporas as bounded entities to conceptualizing diasporas as a process to be made. One body of literature maps different strategies employed to bond diasporas to their country of origin, while another body of literature pays specific attention to diasporic identities and the ways such identities are reproduced and constructed abroad. This article seeks to bring these two literatures together by focusing on homeland tourism as a diasporization strategy, i.e. the construction, reproduction, and transmission of diasporic identity. Through the case of Taglit-Birthright – a free educational trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults – the article identifies the specific mechanisms and micro-practices used in order to transform Israeli territory into a Jewish homeland, reproduce the narrative of dispersion, and demarcate group boundaries. Incorporating insights from theories of territorialization and based on the program's educational platform and existing ethnographies of Taglit-Birthright, this article unpacks the notion of the homeland and demonstrates how the homeland itself – as an embodied, affective, and symbolic site – is strategically used in order to cultivate diasporic attachments.     

Competing entanglements in the struggle to save the Amazon: The shifting terrain of transnational civil society

Transnational civil society has often been conceptualized as a third sector, buffered from the power politics of nation-states and global capital. The relative autonomy of this sector has been seen as key in empowering the voices of marginalized peoples and in advocating new counter-hegemonic agendas on the world stage. Recent research, however, has begun to explore power imbalances within the transnational civic sphere, and how different transnational NGOs' modes of articulation with political institutions and market actors inform those power dynamics. We suggest here that the concept of “entanglements,” recently introduced within political geography, can offer a useful spatial imagery in assessing the effects of these varied lines of influence. The article first traces the evolution of the Amazon Alliance, a transnational network of environmental and human rights NGOs and Amazonian indigenous federations. It then examines a countervailing nexus of governmental and corporate entanglements that have been drawing conservation NGOs away from indigenous eco-political engagement in recent years. To understand the waning salience of the eco-indigenous conservation agenda, we argue, requires analysis of the shifting terrain of civil society, and of the articulation of different NGOs with institutions beyond the frontiers of the third sector.     

Local government reforms in Georgia and their impact on state-society relations

Abstract

This paper studies how the local governance reforms carried out between 1997–2014 shape state-society relations at Georgia’s local level. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I analyze how the reforms shape practices and actors at the local level. Research interviews with state officials at the national and subnational levels and citizens of the Georgian district Marneuli highlight both government rationalities and how people react to them. I argue that the reforms, which have been declared to promote participation and accountability, hardly contribute to bridging the huge gap between state and society, particularly with respect to the case of the Azeri minority in Marneuli. Thus far, the newly introduced formal actors at the local level, the municipalities, lack power. Societal action in absence of the state and interaction with the state via informal networks remains dominant. The study contributes to literature on state-building and transformation in Georgia by shedding light on the often-neglected local level and to the debate on external democracy promotion and policy transfer by empirically studying the effect of a policy transfer.     

Financialisation through Microfinance: Civil Society and Market-Building in India

Abstract

Microfinance does not reduce poverty, but it does successfully construct economic relations between owners of capital and borrowers of capital, allowing surpluses to accumulate through finance. It does so by drawing on the agency of financialised civil society actors who facilitate financialisation by working around the state to build new markets in finance and other goods. This article understands financialisation as the expansion of the frontier of financial accumulation. Microfinance is shown to achieve this expansion by establishing credit-based linkages between owners and borrowers of capital, allowing surplus accumulation to take place via the credit relation. Underlying this material relationship, there is also a level at which financialisation motivates and pressures civil society actors to bring microfinance to the poor. By becoming financialised agents themselves, civil society organisations act as conduits for an expansion of financial markets and the construction of new market relations for other goods. A case study of microfinance for water and sanitation in India shows in detail how this construction of markets via civil society works in practice, highlighting the pressures and opportunities presented by microfinance as a vehicle for building markets.     

略论二战以来老挝华人社会地位的变化

华人在老挝一向安居乐业。二战以后 ,老挝华侨华人社会经历了较大的变化。 1 975 -1 986年 ,老挝当局在越南政府排华政策的影响下 ,基本上铲除了华人赖以存在的经贸根基 ,大部分华人离开了老挝。当今的老挝华侨华人社会 ,无论在经济基础和籍贯结构方面 ,基本上都不是历史上华侨社会的延续 ,而是由少数留在本地的华人、 80年代后期回归的华人以及来投资的新华侨重新建构的。当前 ,老挝华侨华人主要从事商贸活动 ,有较高的经济地位和社会地位 ,但尚少有政治诉求。     

“You Cannot Trade What Is Not Yours”: Indigenous Governance and the NAFTA Negotiations

ABSTRACT

Contemporary International Relations scholars and practitioners generally recognize that substate governments affect the state’s international affairs; however, there is less acceptance of Indigenous governments as global actors that meaningfully impact the state. After all, the expectation would be that central governments, with considerably more resources and power, would be unlikely to face a challenge from an Indigenous government. However, Indigenous governments are negotiating new relationships with foreign and domestic governments, forming economic development corporations, hiring private firms to raise capital, funding trade missions, and even opening offices in key international locales such as Beijing to engage in trade promotion and push investment opportunities in projects such as resource extraction. Applying paradiplomacy theory, which argues that International Relations cannot be properly explained absent the global affairs of substate governments, this article analyzes the effect of Indigenous peoples and governance in the Canada–US trade relationship. It specifically considers how Indigenous engagement in the global economy affects the bilateral trade regime, foreign direct investment, and cross-border trade. The driver for these analysis centers on demands for the inclusion of a so-called “Indigenous chapter” in the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations in 2017 and 2018.     

(Re)membering diaspora: Uneven geographies of Indian dual citizenship

Although the concept of diaspora is sometimes regarded as oppositional to the interests of existing political regimes, we argue that it can become a site where the negotiation of new terms of membership embraces the transnational and de-territorialized networks of overseas populations. Drawing on work on transnational governance, we explore the uneven geographies that accompany India's recent discussions of its dual citizenship provisions. Constructions of diaspora membership are revealed by mapping the discourses contained within the Dual Citizenship legislation of 2003, the 2003 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Overseas India Day) campaign, and the 2001 report of the Diaspora Committee onto the case of South Africa. The results suggest that the construction of diaspora membership focuses on professional success, ecumenical Hinduism, and multicultural incorporation. We also trace how diaspora membership betrays a continuing anxiety over the terms of Indianness. The results remind us that diasporic times and spaces mediate transnational governance.     

Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania

In contemporary discussions of “resource nationalism,” sovereignty is often imagined as the exclusive control of national states over internal resources in opposition to external foreign capital. In this paper, we seek to draw attention to the specifically national territorial forms of sovereignty that - rather than hindering the flow of capital - become constitutive to the accumulation of resource wealth by states and capital alike. Drawing from political geographical theorizations of sovereignty, we argue that resource sovereignty cannot be territorially circumscribed within national space and institutionally circumscribed within the state apparatus. Rather, sovereignty must be understood in relational terms to take into account the global geography of non-state actors that shape access to and control over natural resources. Specifically, we engage national-scale state sovereignty over subterranean mineral resources in the form of legal property regimes and examine the mutually constitutive set of interdependencies between mining capital and landlord states in the accumulation of resource wealth. Using Tanzania as a case study, we argue that national-scale ownership of subterranean mineral resources has been critical to attracting global flows of mining capital from colonial to contemporary times. We first examine the history of the colonial state in Tanganyika to illustrate how land and mineral rights were adjudicated through the power of the colonial state with the hopes of attracting foreign capital investment in the mining sector. We then examine contemporary efforts on the part of the independent United Republic of Tanzania to again enact legislation meant to attract foreign mining companies - and the consequences for local populations living near sites of extraction.