Diasporas and Development

Global restructuring across the developing world can have profound, if uneven, political, economic, and social consequences. As such, the relationship between diasporas and development is necessarily complex. The diaspora spans all of the local, national, regional, and global levels, its networks and communities set apart from other migration flows in terms both of geography and time. It is contended that these groupings are constituted by three main elements: dispersion across or within state borders; orientation to a “homeland” as a source of value, identity and loyalty; and boundary maintenance, involving the preservation of a distinctive identity vis-à-vis a host society over an extended time period. Yet each of these core elements has been contested, most especially that of continued loyalty to a homeland and an enduring transnationalism that evokes a regularized range of interactions between the host country and homeland. Moreover, there is no one paradigmatic concept of diaspora. While none of the interpretations in the mainstream scholarship is necessarily wrong, they tend to be grounded in a very basic categorization of diasporic identifications and groupings, thus leading to new questions about how to tackle the issue of diaspora in the development process. And although many of the central traits of diasporas are apparently well understood, new interpretations of the shifting politics of the diaspora in the context of broader liberal processes of globalization are needed.