Recasting diaspora strategies through feminist care ethics

The diaspora-centred development agenda holds that migrants lead transnational lives and contribute to the material well being of their homelands both from afar and via circular migration. Concomitant with the ascendance of this agenda there has arisen a new field of public policy bearing the title ‘diaspora strategies’. Diaspora strategies refer to proactive efforts by migrant-sending states to incubate, fortify, and harness transfers of resources from diaspora populations to homelands. This paper argues that diaspora strategies are problematic where they construe the diaspora–homeland relationship as an essentially pragmatic, instrumental, and utilitarian one. We suggest that a new generation of more progressive diaspora strategies might be built if these strategies are recast through feminist care ethics and calibrated so that they fortify and nurture caring relationships that serve the public good. Our call is for an approach towards state–diaspora relationships that sees diaspora-centred development as an important but corollary outcome that arises from prioritising caring relationships. To this end we introduce the term ‘diaspora economies of care’ to capture the derivative flow of resources between diasporas and homelands that happens when their relationship is premised on feminist care ethics. We introduce three types of diaspora economies of care, focusing on the emotional, moral, and service aspects of the diaspora–homeland relationship, and reflect upon the characteristics of each and how they might be strengthened later by foregrounding care now.     

Special issue introduction: New research directions and critical perspectives on diaspora strategies

As more countries acknowledge the potential resources represented by their emigrant populations, the diaspora strategies of migrant sending countries are gaining policy and academic attention internationally. ‘Diaspora strategies’ describe initiatives aimed at mobilising emigrants for the purposes of economic development and/or nation building. This special issue in Geoforum identifies new research directions for the study of diaspora strategies. While extant scholarship has focused on state-driven diaspora strategies so far, this special issue introduction suggests that considering a wider range of social actors that engage in diaspora strategising across different spaces and scales will reveal new and productive insights for the study of diaspora strategies. Framing this introduction is an approach that deploys topological analyses as a way of keeping in view the variety of social actors involved in diaspora strategising, their connections to one another, and an evolving constellation of power relations ranging from contestation to collaboration. The special issue introduction draws attention to, first, the subjectivities constituted by diaspora strategies; second, the array of social actors found within webs of diaspora connections; and third, the ethical considerations arising from the power geometries of diaspora engagement. In so doing, it argues for the importance of studying diaspora formations dialogically which means deploying an analytical lens that is attentive to how the actions of different social actors and institutions from one country towards a diaspora population can influence the attitudes and actions of that diaspora towards another country that also claims their loyalty and contributions.     

Engaging a temporal–spatial stretch: An inquiry into the role of the state in cultivating and claiming the Chinese knowledge diaspora

This paper examines the role of the state in cultivating and claiming the Chinese knowledge diaspora for development, focusing on the Chinese–German academic space. It calls for a temporal–spatial stretch in conceptualising the state in this policy arena. The spatial stretch broadens the usual analysis of the state to go beyond the sending nation-state framework. It illustrates that the state, rather than functioning as a unitary body, comprises different agencies and exists in a multiplicity of forms. Examples demonstrate that the Chinese state at various geographical levels and localities as well as states in other countries engage with one another in making and tapping the Chinese knowledge diaspora. The temporal stretch necessitates an extension of our analytical optic from the conventional focus on how the state claims the diaspora ‘out there’ towards recognising its important role in the strategic and selective production of the diaspora. Furthermore, this paper calls for a higher sensitivity to other temporal characteristics in state policies and practices. Moving away from an expectation of a permanent return of its talents overseas, the Chinese state has turned to the ‘diaspora option’, which refers to regulating and tapping the potential of the Chinese knowledge network that contributes from afar and/or circulates transnationally. Other mechanisms to control the temporality of knowledge diaspora engagement will also be illustrated. Finally, the paper provides an analysis of the complex, sometimes collaborative while other times competitive relationship, between the Chinese and German states in producing and regulating the Chinese knowledge diaspora.     

Praying for success? Faith schools and school choice in East London

The article discusses research undertaken in East London into perceptions of educational choice amongst a group of middle-class parents drawn from all the main ethnic groups. It focuses on the way in which faith schools are slowly being drawn into the mainstream discourse of choice and how many groups are now beginning to regard such schools as their fall back of choice when it becomes apparent that they are unlikely to get their child into a preferred non-selective secondary school (and increasingly a preferred primary school). This mainstreaming of faith schooling is driven by the attractions to such parents of these schools’ ethos, their perception of them as having a favourable social mix of ‘people like us’ and their generally high record of attainment. It is argued that this increase in demand for faith schools is leading to changes in the recruitment patterns away from primarily faith-based criteria to ones based around a more diffuse (and middle-class) ethos and educational potential. In addition, where such schools once served a wider East London geographical area, there is some evidence that they are now becoming more focused around a local ‘catchment area’ in ways similar to the same popular non-selective schools to which the same group of parents aspired.     

Beyond flexible citizenship: Towards a study of many Chinese transnationalisms

Over the last decade, flexible citizenship has contributed much to our understandings of how contemporary Chinese migrate across the world in late capitalism. This corpus has not only called attention to the manifold strategies that these migrants adopt to inhabit multiple spaces, but has also elucidated how transnational migration can be deployed for the purposes of capital accumulation and enhancement of one’s lifestyle. This paper argues that the current fixation on the flexible strategies of the Chinese ‘shuttling’ between the East and West inevitably occludes other logics of mobilities that may be more germane for other (neglected) segments of the ‘new Chinese diaspora’. Through its consistent rehearsal, the present preoccupation may have led to an inadvertent reification of flexible citizenship, as the paradigmatic model of modern-day Chinese mobilities. In an effort to move the discussion forward, this paper weaves a deliberately dissonant story with the narratives of 50 Singaporean Chinese migrants who are living in, or who have returned to Singapore from, New York or the Californian-Bay Area. The viewpoints offered by these less ‘conventional’ Chinese subjects not only diverge from the usual ‘strategic’ or ‘calculative’ storylines among the Hong Kongers and Taiwanese, but also uncover distinctive assemblages that span across multi-sited and transcultural contexts. Although this paper has no intentions to discredit flexible citizenship, it hopes to have begun the process of decentring the locus of our knowledge pertaining to the subject, drawing attention to the possibility of alternative realities within many Chinese transnationalisms.     

Working towards conceptual consistency in discussing “diaspora” and “diaspora strategies”: Ethnicity and affinity in the case of Japan

The terms “diaspora” and “diaspora strategies” are both used in inconsistent, and often, conflicting ways. Who encompasses “the diaspora” and what are “diaspora strategies”? What roles do ethnicity and affinity play in conceptualizing relationships between diasporas and homeland governments? This paper extrapolates from programs and organizations that link overseas coethnic and former resident non-coethnic populations to Japan to offer clarity and consistency in usage by bringing together concepts not typically put in conversation with each other and introducing new terms that conceptualize more specific aspects of who we are referring to as “diaspora” and what we are referring to as “diaspora strategies”. Conceptualizations of diaspora often gloss over internal differences, including whether or not people deemed members of a diaspora actually demonstrate a homeland orientation. Focusing on the difference between ethnicity-based and affinity-based definitions of diaspora, I distinguish between three types of diaspora strategies: “diaspora-connecting”, “diaspora-cultivating”, and “diaspora-creating strategies”. Finally, as a way to discuss the potential contributions of both overseas coethnic and non-coethnic populations to a given nation, I conclude by considering Joseph Nye’s notion of “soft power” in relation to diaspora strategies. By engaging these concepts together, the paper highlights the tensions between considering ethnicity and affinity as factors for deciding who to target for diaspora strategies, and demonstrates how diaspora strategies can also target non-coethnics.     

Globalising knowledge networks: Universities,diaspora strategies,and academic intermediaries

As diaspora strategies have become an integral aspect of national economic development strategies, so too have universities begun to formally identify and mobilise diasporic scientists, researchers and scholars in an effort to create global knowledge networks. This paper will identify this new role for diasporic academics. It begins by emphasising the increasing internationalisation of the academic labour market, arguing that an increasing number of researchers have multiple national affiliations and relationships. It shows how diasporic academics have become central to the creation of global knowledge networks. These knowledge networks derive from multiple sources including the institutional ambitions of universities who are seeking to expand their research remits in increasingly resource constrained environments, international and national funding bodies who are increasingly focused on research ‘grand challenges’, and the aspirations of individual researchers for whom global networks are increasingly important to successful careers.     

The rise of territorial eco-certifications: New politics of transnational sustainability governance in the fishery sector

Eco-certifications have become an important site of power struggles in commodity sectors such as forestry, fisheries, aquaculture, palm oil, and soy. In each, multiple eco-certification initiatives have been developed and resisted through interactions among non-governmental organizations, governments, and commercial actors. This paper contributes to understanding how power is embodied in certifications by exploring how territoriality manifests in the international struggle over defining what products are ‘sustainable’ and which producers will have access to markets that require ‘sustainable’ products. Focusing on the wild capture fisheries sector in which the non-governmental Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) administers the preeminent eco-certification initiative, we explore the emergence of new fisheries eco-certification initiatives in Japan, Iceland, Alaska, Canada, and the US that insist there is no transnational monopoly on judgments over fisheries sustainability. We argue that these new eco-certifications attempt to defend and embed territorial social and regulatory relations of production within the contested domain of transnational sustainability governance. The initiatives accommodate both the territorially embedded material interests, institutions, and discursive strategies of producers (and their state supporting agencies) and transnationally embedded governance norms for assessing and communicating sustainability. They also counter the globally applicable institutions of the MSC in favor of making space for state and non-state actors to contend with demands for sustainability in the global seafood market by combining place-specific attributes with transnational governance norms.     

Welcome to the Gig Economy: neoliberal industrial relations and the case of Uber

The competitive pressures of neoliberal economies have compelled employers to devolve responsibilities to contractors and subcontractors. The rise information technology platforms have significantly accelerated this trend over past decade. “Sharing economy” companies have such widespread adoption of neoliberalism’s industrial relations that a new moniker—“the Gig Economy”—has taken root. Although shareholders and consumers have benefited, middle-class jobs have been squeezed in the process. This paper uses Uber as a case study to discuss how Sharing Economy entities are merely the latest iteration of companies to enact the neoliberal playbook, including (a) (mis)classifying workers, (b) engaging in regime shopping, and (c) employing the most economically vulnerable, rather than giving rise to a new world of work altogether. The result is a crowding out of middle-class employment by precarious ‘gigs’ that lack legal protections and benefits.     

Regulating the farmers’ market: Paysan expertise,quality production and local food

This paper considers the meaning of local, quality food in the context of a farmer’s market in Montpellier, France. The focus is on understanding how farmers conceptualize ‘local’, how they perceive and cater to their clients’ demand for quality food, and what mechanisms are deployed to ensure a joint approach to these conventions. With a market association capable of carrying out site inspections to weed out ‘fake-farmers’ and an expectation that each vendor would participate in staged demonstrations of agrarian competency, the market emerges as an exclusive and tightly regulated commercial space that promotes both local protectionism and alternative consumption practices.     

The Overseas Citizen of India and Emigrant Infrastructure: Tracing the deterritorializations of diaspora strategies

This article introduces the conceptual notion of Emigrant Infrastructure to further debates on diaspora strategies, extraterritorial belonging, and citizenship. Diasporic strategies are altering the possibilities for transnational citizenship and redefining belonging through the introduction of emigrant documentary schemes aimed at formalizing relationships with the diasporic subject. Using India as a case study, this article examines the historical development of the Overseas Citizen of India and Overseas Indian Card, state technologies that transformed emigrants from unwanted others into desired diasporic subjects. Outlining historical spatio-temporal junctures of the legal, policy, and bureaucratic engagements between the Government of India and emigrants reveals a deep Emigrant Infrastructure erected through three phases: active, reactive and hyperactive (linked to the colonial, post-colonial, and post-liberal Indian state). Tracing emigrant—government engagements, the article reveals how India actively constructed itself as a homeland with a diaspora. Understanding the formalization of a diasporic subject de-naturalizes the spatial assumptions linking nation, state, territory, citizenship, and people. Emigrant Infrastructure understood through diasporic subjectivity and identification cards reveals the spatiality of diaspora strategies and a changing relationship between the reterritorializing nation and the deterritorializing state.     

Mimicking state diplomacy: The legitimizing strategies of unofficial diplomacies

Diplomacy and recognition play central roles in the conventional conferral of state legitimacy and functioning of the inter-state system. In broadening the diplomatic frame by stepping outside the conventional state-system, this paper brings a poststructuralist and performative toolkit to mimetic diplomatic practices. Adapting Bhabha’s notion of mimicry to diplomatic discourse, it demonstrates how non-state diplomacies draw on, mimic and intervene in the realm of formal political action in ways which both promote ‘official’ state diplomacy as an ideal and dilute its distinction from other, ‘unofficial’ diplomacies. In thereby examining the enactment of international diplomacy in unexpected spaces, this paper brings together three empirical studies: a Government-in-Exile, a religious community and micropatrias (self-declared parodic nations). In each of these cases, attention focuses on: discourses of recognition; sovereignty and legitimacy; the diplomatic relationships fostered and institutions of diplomacy constructed; and the strategic position of such diplomacy vis-à-vis the conventional state-system. Unpacking the relationship between legitimacy, recognition and diplomacy and exploring the tension between state-centric and non-state diplomatic practices, this paper foregrounds the points of connection between the official and the unofficial. As a result, this paper expands the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies while incorporating lessons from the margins into our understandings of legitimacy, recognition, statecraft and sovereignty.     

Water reform governmentality in Ecuador: Neoliberalism,centralization, and the restraining of polycentric authority and community rule-making

In most Latin American countries, issues concerning water governance and control also reflect broader conflicts over authority and legitimacy between the state and civil society. What lies behind the diverse water policy reforms is not simply a question of governing water affairs but also a drive to control or co-opt water user groups. This paper examines the efforts by the present Ecuadorian government to ‘control water users’ through new forms of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991). We use the ‘cathedral and bazaar’ metaphor (Lankford and Hepworth, 2010) to illustrate government rationale and practices in water governance shifts in the last decades. We analyze how Rafael Correa’s government sets out to reshape the relations between state, market and society. In its ‘Twenty-first Century Socialism’ project, based on a proclaimed ‘Citizen Revolution’, actual policy reform does not reverse but rather transforms the process of neoliberalizing water governance – creating a hybrid bazaar-cathedral model. We argue that the current water govermentality project implements reforms that do not challenge established market-based water governance foundations. Rather it aims to contain and undermine communities’ autonomy and ‘unruly’ polycentric rule-making, which are the result of both historical and present-day processes of change. Interestingly, water user federations that emerged during the neoliberal wave of the last two decades now claim water control space and search for new forms of democratizing water governance. They act as agents who fiercely – yet selectively and strategically – oppose both elements of the State-centered (cathedral) and market-based (bazaar) water governance models.     

New local state power through administrative restructuring – A case study of post-Mao China county-level urban entrepreneurialism in Kunshan

By focusing on Kunshan, an economically advanced county-level city in the Yangtze River Delta, this paper aims to answer how, why, and under what circumstances the territorial power of Chinese urban entrepreneurial states is created in response to the dynamics of spatial economic development in the context of market transition and globalization. Although Kunshan is merely a county-level authority administratively, its economic performance in 2011 was better than that of several poor provinces, such as Hainan, Tibet, Qinghai, and Ningxia. Kunshan’s successful urban entrepreneurialism presents a unique ‘mismatch’ between ‘low’ administrative rank and ‘great’ economic performance (a big foot in a small shoe, dajiao chuan xiaoxie). I argue that Kunshan has developed several new local state powers through flexible administrative restructuring that explains the ‘mismatch’ puzzle and includes the following characteristics: (1) reclassification of Kunshan from county to county-level city, (2) relational adjustment by officially or informally raising Kunshan’s place rank and the cadre rank, and (3) boundary revision by virtual enclave enlargement. I conclude that the Chinese party-state system plays a role in Chinese county-level urban entrepreneurialism.     

Articulating an Indian diaspora in South Africa: The Consulate General of India,diaspora associations and practices of collaboration

Engagements between sending states and their diasporas have come under increasing critical scrutiny. Whilst political geographers have driven critical analysis of national level policies, debates have largely overlooked the broader range of actors, transactions and practices involved in implementing national policies in a geohistorically diverse array of diasporic contexts and settings. Over the last decade, the Indian government has invested significant resources in overseas diplomatic missions, consulates and high commissions to administer its diaspora outreach strategies. This paper examines the role of the Consulate General of India (CGI) in Durban, South Africa, focusing in particular on the networks of agents, associations, groups and political actors involved in collaborating with the CGI Durban in diaspora outreach practices. This paper draws on two periods of fieldwork in Durban between 2004 and 2005 and was supplemented by ongoing visual and textual analysis of news articles, promotional material, reports and websites. Using the concept of articulation, the paper highlights the discursive and performative practices involved in bringing together the agendas of the GOI with those of South African Indian diaspora associations through the outreach practices of the CGI in Durban. It argues that articulatory practices are essential to resolving some of the subjective and embodied dilemmas and contestations of belonging inherent in South African Indians’ participation in diaspora outreach initiatives. Investigating how articulation contributes to drawing diverse and even competing agendas together makes room for further understanding the ways in which diaspora outreach practices can travel across a wide network, and the diverse agencies that can become catalysed in the process.     

Pudrición del Cogollo and the (post-)neoliberal ecological fix in Ecuador's palm oil industry

This paper examines the variegated natures of (post-)neoliberal environmental governance in Latin America using environmental crisis as an entry point. It examines the institutional measures put forth by Ecuador’s government, in concert with other actors, to contain and manage the damaging effects of an insidious palm oil plant disease known as Pudrición del Cogollo (PC). Using empirical data collected through qualitative means, my analysis demonstrates that nature’s biophysical processes – in particular, disease ecologies – can play a crucial role in the pursuit and achievement of national accumulation goals. Specifically, I argue that the ecologies of the PC crisis have been rendered functional to the Ecuadorian government’s current political and economic strategies of intensified accumulation and market competitiveness. By making environmental crisis the basis of key accumulation strategies, the state is able to convert negative environmental outcomes into opportunities for profit-generation. Utilizing the notion of the ‘ecological fix’, this paper reveals two major conclusions: (1) plant health emergencies and the actions used to mitigate environmental crises are not only challenges but opportunities that can be mobilized to support further accumulation strategies and (2) the study of PC and Ecuador’s palm oil industry provides new fruitful terrain to examine the connections between the deepening variegated effects of neoliberalism through nature and environmental crisis solutions in Latin America.     

Leveraging the diaspora for development: lessons from Ethiopia

This paper uses investment data for the period 1994–2008 and information from in-depth interviews with key informants in Ethiopian government agencies and 15 entrepreneurs who returned to Ethiopia to start business ventures, to assess the success of the Ethiopian government in attracting diaspora investment. The study found that diaspora investment was highly concentrated geographically and sectorally. Among the significant issues facing diasporan investors were access to land, access to finance, lack of reliable information, poor contract enforcement and frequent changes in government policies and sectoral priorities. The authors recommend the development of frameworks for the enforcement of laws and standards to make investing in Ethiopia more attractive. They also propose that the government consider the long-term sustainability of policies before they are implemented, foster diversification and the better use of the country’s natural resource clusters, and establish policies that facilitate the circulation of knowledge and skills through input from expatriate professionals and experts.     

Juxtaposing Pakistani diaspora policy with migrants’ transnational citizenship practices

Through a juxtaposition of diaspora policy with migrants’ transnational citizenship practices, this article explores how peoplehood, nationhood and citizenship are articulated, justified and enacted. The article draws on the politico-spatial context of Norwegian-Pakistani transnational social space, analyzing the Pakistani Origin Card (POC), remittances and return mobilities as transnational citizenship practices. The elusiveness of residency becomes apparent, underscoring the salience of territoriality, for both diaspora strategies and transnational citizenship practices, involving the co-constitution of formal membership and everyday citizenship practices. Through this overlaps, frictions and disruptions in conceptions of citizenship and of nationhood are revealed, underscoring their non-static nature. Whilst questions of who is included within the people are more commonly approached from the vantage point of immigration contexts, they share key tenets of struggles over conceptualizations of citizenship, and more plural ideologies of nationhood, in emigration contexts, exposed by a juxtaposition of diaspora policies and migrants’ transnational citizenship practices.     

"Welcome in my backyard"…but on my terms: making sense of homeless exclusion from renewed urban spaces in Copenhagen

Based on a Danish case study of urban renewal in Copenhagen’s Sundholm District, this paper examines, (a) how present urban regeneration efforts in a historically welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalized state context, is contributing to more or less spatial exclusion of the homeless, and (b) to what extent this may be associated with a revanchist/punitive stance of the Danish state. Using an urban political ecological lens, this paper highlights a relational understanding of the apparently dualistic/competing public and civic discourses shaping the Danish urban regeneration program. Revealing the complex ways that public socio-environmental policies and middle-class civic environmentalism/activism intersect with state-entrepreneurialism within such regeneration efforts, this paper presents an instance of a historically and geographically distinct process of neoliberal disciplining of the poor in Sundholm District. The paper shows that while such disciplining of the homeless is not driven by a purely punitive state, it results in soft, green-coded, nonetheless exclusionary implications for the homeless and their socio-spatial practices within the renewed urban spaces.     

REDD+ for Red Books? Negotiating rights to land and livelihoods through carbon governance in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

In Vietnam, initial programs to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) have proliferated through international finance and new governance regimes for climate change mitigation. National capacity and legal frameworks have been adjusted to make the country eligible for REDD+ financing. In some local areas, activities have been implemented to ‘produce’ carbon credits intended for the international voluntary carbon market. Through a case study of a pilot REDD+ project in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, we examine how REDD+ has intersected with property rights institutions and agrarian change to influence changing property relations and commodity markets. Our findings show that REDD+ implemented through state and local institutions has articulated with the local political economy to coproduce conditions that embody local norms, needs, and desires. Specifically, local actors negotiate state-sanctioned tenurial instruments used for REDD+ governance, not for the purposes of carbon sequestration but instead in order to reassert their rights to land and forest for the cultivation of boom crops—the antithesis of REDD+ objectives. In the fine balancing act of adjusting local forestland holdings, REDD+ implementation has effectively facilitated increased opportunities for upland villagers to strategically claim land titles from local political authorities in the form of communal land certificates for forests called ‘Red Books’. In securing communal Red Books, villagers redefine or co-constitute the purpose of REDD+ to secure land for cash crop and commercial timber production. As with other forms of environmental governance, REDD+ is thus co-constituted locally in line with state and local institutions and histories and present day realities.