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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Imagining ‘home’: Diasporic landscapes of the Greek-German second generation

This article presents research on second-generation Greek-Germans, both those living in diaspora, and those who have ‘returned’ to Greece. The research is multi-sited, with fieldwork in Berlin, Athens, central and northern Greece. After defining and problematising the notions of ‘second generation’ and ‘return’ - especially complex in this context - we focus on the second generation’s diasporic imaginings of ‘home’, particularly their experiences and narrative framings of landscape, space and place. In their narratives, participants ‘remember’ their parents’ narratives about the homeland, and narrate their own experiences of returning to the diasporic hearth. Contrasts are drawn across diverse diasporic landscape imaginings and experiences: between received diasporic memories and ‘pragmatic’ experiences; holiday visits and long-term return; urban, rural and other spaces; and different sites in the diaspora, such as the place of upbringing and the ancestral home.     

Malaysian diaspora strategies in a globalized Muslim market

This paper explores Malaysia’s efforts to develop and dominate a global market in halal (literally, ‘lawful or ‘permitted’) commodities as a diaspora strategy and how Malaysian state institutions, entrepreneurs, restaurants and middle-class groups in London respond to and are affected by this effort. The empirical focus is on London because this city not only holds a special position in the Malaysian state’s halal vision but also historical linkages that evoke diaspora strategies. I argue that Malaysian diaspora strategies should be explored in the interfaces between Islam, state and market. Among the political elite, and, thus, the Malaysian state, there exists a fascination with discovering or even inventing a cosmopolitan ‘Malay diaspora’ and current diaspora strategies try to address this challenge. An important question explored is how the Malaysian diaspora in London understand and practise Malaysian diaspora strategies in the globalized market for halal products and services. This paper is based on ethnographic material from fieldwork among state institutions, entrepreneurs, restaurants and middle-class groups in Kuala Lumpur and London, namely participant observation and interviewing.     

Mobilising generosity, framing geopolitics: Narrating crisis in the homeland through diasporic media

This paper provides an account of the humanitarian interventions enacted by the Croatian–American diaspora during the secessionist conflicts in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Whilst undeniably an act of generosity towards ‘distant strangers’, actions such as these also represent a much more complex reality – they are an outcome of a complex set of relations and processes, in which the ethical choices of individuals become bound up with nationalist ideologies, geopolitical questions and, crucially, knowledge and understanding of distant events. In particular, this paper considers the ways in which generosity is mobilised through the framing of Balkan geopolitics through diasporic media. In so doing, it becomes possible to deepen the dialogue between work on geography and ethics on the one hand, and critical geopolitics on the other. In particular, the paper argues that due attention needs to be paid to the ways in which such ‘networks of concern’ are constructed in a variety of banal and mundane ways.     

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.     

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.     

Re-reading remittances through solidarity: Mexican hometown associations in New York City

This paper analyzes how Mexican hometown associations in New York City practice solidarity so that they might best meet the needs of the transnational communities that they serve. Commonly formed by immigrants in the United States, hometown associations are organizations which send money collectively to their home countries, supporting public infrastructure and community projects. Scholars have debated both the merits of remittance programs that channel migrant funds as economic development and the agency of immigrant economies in neoliberal development structures. Through primary data collected from interviews in New York City, I review the frustrations that hometown associations have with one such program: Mexico's programa tres por uno para migrantes. Concurrently, I examine how the same hometown associations engage ethical economic practices of collective remittance sending and community service provision in New York City. Drawing on feminist literature on diverse economies, I argue that the solidarity work of hometown associations disrupts the dominant remittance as development discourse. Migrants are not content to participate in tres por uno and through practicing solidarity they distance themselves from this neoliberal policy.     

Sibling caringscapes: Time–space practices of caring within youth-headed households in Tanzania and Uganda

This paper investigates the time–space practices of young people caring for their siblings in youth-headed households affected by AIDS in Tanzania and Uganda. Based on qualitative exploratory research with young people heading households, their siblings, NGO workers and community members, the article develops the notion of sibling ‘caringscapes’ to analyse young people’s everyday practices and caring pathways through time and space. Participatory time-use data reveals that older siblings of both genders regularly undertake substantial caring tasks at the very high end of the caregiving continuum. Drawing on rhythmanalysis, the paper explores how young people negotiate emotional geographies and temporalities of caring. The competing rhythms of bodies, schooling, work and seasonal agricultural production can result in ‘arrhythmia’ and time scarcity, which has detrimental effects on young people’s health, education, future employment prospects and mobility. Young people’s lifecourse transitions are shaped to a large extent by their caring responsibilities, resulting in some young people remaining in a liminal position for considerable periods, unable to make ‘successful’ transitions to adulthood. Despite structural constraints, however, young people are able to exercise some autonomy over their caring pathways and lifecourse transitions. The research sheds light on the ways that individuals embody the practices, routines and rhythms of everyday life and exercise agency within highly restricted broader landscapes of care.     

Europeanizing Timisoara: neoliberal reforms, continuity with the past, and unexpected side effects

This paper analyzes how processes of Europeanization opened up opportunities and generated ideals, which in turn changed the articulation between political and economic powers in the city and county of Timisoara, Western Romania. It builds on case studies of local government agencies and foreign investors from Italy. In doing so, it discusses the circular relationship between the European and the local levels of governance: European governance affected the interactions between firms and institutions in the city, while at the same time city authorities used different understandings of ‘Europe’ to pursue their own agenda. It also shows some of the unexpected side-effects of Europeanization, due to the political activism of Italian investors. Beck and Grande’s concept of ‘reflexive modernization’ and the literature on regional economies frame the discussion.     

Placing sexuality in health policies: feminist geographies and public health nursing

Despite the increasing public profile of same-sex issues, health policies are often shaped by heteronormative assumptions. The health concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual/transgender, two-spirit, intersex, queer and questioning (LGBTTTIQQ) people are complex and require broadening from an often exclusively sexual health and risk focus to a more holistic approach. In this context, this paper illustrates how a critical feminist geography of health, with its focus on the mutual construction of gender relations, space and place, potentially enhances and extends current understandings of public health policy and practice. Moreover, the use of a policy lens foregrounding gender and other power relations suggests that feminist research and coalitions facilitate participatory processes that address “the politics of discourse.” In particular, public health nursing practice can enhance the construction of spaces of resistance that challenge heteronormative discourse through research strategies focused on sexual minority communities’ health experiences and their visions for supportive care. In this respect, two strategies consistent with public health priorities to increase knowledge and participate in alliances are described. Ethnographic research with childbearing lesbians demonstrates that attention to institutional dynamics that foster safe spaces can facilitate access to public health services. Public health nurses’ involvement in community coalitions can enhance dissemination of community knowledges. The implications for gender inclusive and place-sensitive public health nursing practice include the development of sensitive educators, meaningful educational curriculum and related program planning, explicit policies, community partnerships and political leadership in institutional and research venues.     

Palestinians and pragmatic citizenship: Negotiating relationships between citizenship and national identity in diaspora

This paper puts forward the notion of pragmatic citizenship and forms part of the ongoing re-appraisals of citizenship in relation to national identity in an attempt to make it more relevant and inclusive for those with complex identities, legal status and, in particular, the stateless. Using the case study of Palestinians in Athens to discuss relationships between citizenship, identity and statehood, this paper argues that the notion of pragmatic citizenship can be useful in such re-conceptualisations as it can take into account the potentially ambivalent and multiple feelings of belonging that migrants and those in diaspora may have. In the process it stresses that strong notions of belonging and attachment to a territorialised homeland do not have to be exclusive or problematic. The paper outlines the complexity of Palestinian legal status in Athens and the feelings of injustice statelessness can provoke; it then describes the process of Palestinian acquisition of pragmatic citizenship in Greece. However, the final section of the paper highlights that such a notion of citizenship can have positive repercussions in terms of inclusive visions of a future one-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.     

Vancouver’s newest Chinese diaspora: settlers or “immigrant prisoners”?

This study seeks to reground concepts of “diaspora” and “transnationalism” in the realities of everyday life through examining the lived experiences of immigrants. Based on in-depth household interviews and focus groups, it examines the newest Chinese diaspora in Vancouver—skilled immigrants from the People’s Republic of China. It explores the challenges that they face in an unfamiliar city, including employment and language barriers as well as domestic anxieties surrounding childcare, education and marital difficulties. The strategies that they adopt to counter these problems are at times transnational—in the form of astronaut families or transnational childcare—but almost always familial. Ultimately, the settlement challenges that they face, coupled with the available transnational possibilities, raise the question of whether they are settlers or “immigrant prisoners”, temporarily serving their time in Vancouver before a further relocation.     

The liminality of training spaces: Places of private/public transitions

This paper draws upon research, conducted for the London West Learning and Skills Council, on the training experiences of women with dependent children. One of the striking revelations of the research, we suggest, is the way in which training spaces are used and perceived by women, which are often at odds with government intentions. To help make sense of women’s use of, and motivation for, training we utilise the concept of ‘liminality’ and the private/public imbrication to explain the ways in which women use, or are discouraged from using, training spaces. Further, how the varied and multiple uses women in our research have put training to in their own lives has encouraged us to rethink the relationship between the private and the public more generally. In the light of this, we suggest that training and the places in which training take place, have been neglected processes and spaces within feminist geography and might usefully be explored further to add to an extensive literature on women’s caring and domestic roles and their role in the paid workplace.     

Developing markets for water reallocation: Revisiting the experience of Spanish water mercantilización

Economic instruments are being promoted as a desirable alternative to public sector action in the allocation and management of natural resources. A wide body of literature has developed that critically analyzes this phenomenon as part of a wider project of ‘neoliberalization of nature’, trying to uncover the underlying rationale and commonalities of geographically specific phenomena. The case of water is at the vanguard of these processes and is proving to be particularly contentious. In the European Union water policies are increasingly emphasizing the application of economic instruments to improve the allocative equity and economic efficiency in the use of scarce resources. However, there are few analyses of how these instruments are really working on the ground and whether they are meeting their objectives. This paper aims to contribute to this debate by critically analyzing the experience with water markets in Spain, the only country in the European Union where they are operative. It looks at water permit sales during the 2005–2008 drought period using the Tajo–Segura transfer infrastructure. The paper describes how the institutional process of mercantilización of water works in practice in Spain. It shows that the use of markets requires an intense process of institutional development to facilitate and encourage their operation. These institutions tend to favor the interests of clearly identifiable elites, instead of the public interest they supposedly promote.     

Performative justice: New directions in environmental and social justice

New explorations of justice are arising in the wake of post-structuralist and feminist critiques of abstract, generalized notions of justice in Western liberal democracies. These interventions are opening new avenues of study on discursive practices and performances that contest social and environmental injustices in everyday life. Feminist scholars argue for greater attention to the local and the particular, the embodied, gendered, emotion-based, ethnic subject of justice and injustice. Yet, limited research has been conducted on performative and performance-based relationships to justice, despite its potential to inform matters related the use and conservation of public goods and common spaces in everyday life. This critical review examines the notion of performativity and its application to justice, aiming to clarify and advance understanding and theorizing of a potentially valuable direction in environmental and social justice at the local level. We draw on Hobson’s articulation of performative justice, as it offers some useful insights into how injustices related to the appropriation of public green spaces agendas are being identified and new meanings are being constituted through local-level citizen practices. We argue, however, that such attempts appear to be identifying injustices and demonstrating the ‘what is’ of environmental and social justice, but not ‘what ought to be’. Directions for future research are offered, which include clarifying the application of performative theories to the study and practice of justice at the local level.     

Migrant pathways to resource access in Lampung’s political forest: Gender, citizenship and creative conjugality

An important theme in studies of enclosure and resource access in Southeast Asian hinges on the concept of the ‘political forest’, a particular constellation of power constituted by ideas, practices and institutions that seek to regulate peoples’ access to resources, providing recognition and legitimacy to some, whilst excluding and criminalizing others. Whilst issues of class and ‘race’ underpin work in this vein, in Indonesia, much less attention has been directed towards the ways in which gender inheres in the regularisation of land and livelihood, and the ordering of upland spaces. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theorizing of the links between citizenship, recognition and hetero-normativity, and on analyses of the social relationships through which resource access is negotiated and realized, the paper presents a feminist political ecology of the gender dynamics inherent in the power plays of resource access as land-poor rural migrants negotiate a shifting landscape of enclosure in Lampung province. Through an analysis of three periods of resource governance and control in the province, the paper shows how the negotiation of resource access is simultaneously a process of self-regulation and subject-making that draws on particular ideas about family and conjugal partnership, inculcating gendered and hetero-normative ideologies of the “ideal citizen”. Through particular representational strategies - positionings - necessary to qualify for resource access, and through the material practices necessary to realize the benefits of resource access, conjugal partnership is reiterated and remade as an important social relationship through which resource access may be realised, for men as well as for women.