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Abstract
Building on cases of conflict-generated diaspora groups, the article proposes to understand diaspora politics as a co-construction between a series of actors that is not limited to home and host states. It argues that repeated attempts to understand diaspora politics as mostly produced by home or host countries is the result of an unwillingness to embrace the fundamentally disruptive nature of diasporas in interstate politics. Diasporas are hybrid political actors that have connections, not only with their countries of origin and of residence, but also with other diaspora groups located in the same country or elsewhere as well as with other actors at the transnational level. Taking stock of state-based approaches to diaspora politics, as well as of analyses focusing on internal diaspora matters, the article shifts the focus towards the interstate and transnational dimensions of diaspora politics and emphasises their potential to move across levels and spheres of engagement.
Keywords: diasporas; politics; transnational; hybridity; engagement.
Introduction
Traditional academic understandings of diaspora politics build upon a paradox. On the one hand, they acknowledge and sometimes even tend to overstate, their "hybrid" nature (see, for instance, Ang, 2003; Kalra et al. 2005; Laffey and Nadarajah, 2012; Werbner and Modood, 1997), their "neither here nor there" transnational positionality and their capacity to disrupt international politics fundamentally, still structured around the idea of nation-states. On the other hand, however, most attempts to understand and analyse diaspora politics propose doing so from the perspective of countries of origin, and/or of countries of residence, thus seemingly reducing diasporas' politics to bilateral linkages. What these attempts usually lack is a readiness to embrace the complexity of internal diaspora politics and cleavages, whilst also factoring in, at the same time, their connections with countries of origin, with countries of residence, with international organisations, as well as with other (diaspora) groups active on the transnational political scene. The unwillingness to take seriously the specific positionality of diaspora groups, leads to severely understating the complexity of factors that shape, influence, and determine diaspora politics. It also fundamentally fails to grasp the challenging and potentially revitalising nature of diasporas for national, international, and transnational political spheres. The key hypothesis developed in this article is, therefore, that the ways in which diasporas are being...