Diaspora Entrepreneurs and Contested States

Abstract Why do conflict-generated diasporas mobilize in contentious and non-contentious ways or use mixed strategies of contention? Why do they channel their homeland-oriented goals through host-states, transnational networks, and international organizations? This book develops a theory of socio-spatial positionality and its implications for the individual agency of diaspora entrepreneurs, moving beyond essentialized notions of diasporas as groups. Individual diaspora entrepreneurs operate in transnational social fields affecting their mobilizations beyond dynamics confined to host-states and original home-states. There are four types of diaspora entrepreneurs—Broker, Local, Distant, and Reserved—depending on the relative strength of their socio-spatial linkages to host-land, on the one hand, and original homeland and other global locations, on the other. A two-level typological theory captures nine causal pathways, unravelling how the socio-spatial linkages of these diaspora entrepreneurs interact with external factors: host-land foreign policies, homeland governments, parties, non-state actors, and critical events or limited global influences. Such pathways produce mobilization trajectories with varying levels of contention and methods of channelling homeland-oriented goals. Non-contentious pathways often occur when host-state foreign policies are convergent with the diaspora entrepreneurs’ goals, and when diaspora entrepreneurs can act autonomously. Dual-pronged contention pathways occur quite often, under the influence of homeland governments, non-state actors, and political parties. The most contentious pathway occurs in response to violent critical events in the homeland or adjacent to it fragile states. This book is informed by 300 interviews and a dataset of 146 interviews with diaspora entrepreneurs among the Albanian, Armenian, and Palestinian diasporas in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as Kosovo and Armenia in the European neighbourhood.