Non‐state authoritarianism and diaspora politics

Diaspora politics has been celebrated as a form of transnationalism that can potentially challenge authoritarian regimes. Arguably, opposition groups and political activists can mobilize beyond the territorial limits of the state, thus bypassing some of the constraints to political organization found in authoritarian states. The literature on transnational and extraterritorial repression complicates this model, for it shows that states can use strategies of ‘long‐distance authoritarianism’ to monitor, intimidate and harass diasporic populations abroad. Yet, non‐state actors in the diaspora also sometimes use such repressive strategies to mobilize internally, gain hegemony within the diaspora, and marginalize or eliminate internal rivals. This raises the question of whether such activities can be understood as non‐state forms of authoritarianism. Cases of diasporic politics pertaining to Turkey and Sri Lanka are briefly explored with a view to examining how state and non‐state forms of transnational repression can, under some conditions, result in the dynamics of competitive authoritarianism within a diaspora. In such cases, ‘ordinary’ members of the diaspora may become caught between multiple forms of transnational repression in addition to potentially experiencing marginalization and securitization in their new home.     

Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization,the State and The Extra‐Territorial Conduct of Mexican Politics1

How should we conceptualize membership, citizenship and political community in a world where migrants and their home states increasingly maintain and cultivate their formal and informal ties? This study analyzes the extra‐territorial conduct of Mexican. politics and the emergence of new migrant membership practices and relations between migrants and home states. Standard globalist, transnationalist or citizenship theories cannot properly contextualize and analyze such practices. I propose that we rethink the concept of membership in a political community not only as a Marshallian status granted by states, but also as an instituted process embedded within four other institutions and processes: home state domestic politics; the home state's relationship to the world system; a semi‐autonomous transnational civil society created in part by migration; and the context of reception of migrants in the United States. A main conclusion is that the state itself plays a key role in creating transnational political action by migrants and new migrant membership practices. The article draws on printed sources and interviews and ethnography done since 1990.     

The transnational politics of the Tomato King: meaning and impact

Abstract In this article we deploy transnational ethnography to explore the transnational electoral politics by which Andrés Bermúdez, a successful tomato grower and labour contractor from Winters, California, who came to be called ‘the Tomato King’, was elected mayor of the municipality of Jerez in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. We seek to explain the meaning of his transnational electoral victory and its impact on the role of ‘the migrant’ as a new social actor in Mexican political development. We thus situate the Bermudista phenomenon in the context of the literature on migrant transnational politics. We hope to move the literature on migrant political transnationalism forward by advancing an agency‐oriented perspective that incorporates both the politics of representation of ‘el migrante’ in transnational electoral campaigns and the emerging dynamics of transnational coalition politics. Our approach underlines the need to carefully historicize the relationship between transnationalism and citizenship ‐ namely, to map the contingency and agency underlying the changing practices of states, migrants, and transnational institutional networks vis‐à‐vis questions of transnational citizenship. This is best done by paying close attention to the actual social and political practices whereby human agents pursue historically specific political projects that extend the practices of citizenship across borders.     

Migrant Mobilization for Homeland Politics: A Social Movement Approach

From the campaign of Chilean exiles all over the world to overthrow the regime of Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s to the contemporary mobilization of the Kurdish diaspora in Western Europe, various cases demonstrate the persistence of homeland ties among migrants, especially those who experienced repression and displacement by the government in their countries of origin. Diverse frameworks and concepts in both the humanities and the social sciences have been deployed to explain the involvement of migrants in politics in their home countries, from “long‐distance nationalism” to “transnational activism.” Each points to different dynamic processes and causal mechanisms. In recent years, scholars have advocated the use of a social movement framework in the analysis of migrant mobilization, despite the marginalization of such studies in theory development. In this article, I examine the concepts put forward by the political process model (PPM) as they apply to the analysis of migrants' involvement in politics in their native land. I propose ways for PPM to be useful in the explanation of the dynamics and processes of homeland‐oriented migrant mobilization.     

Ambivalent citizenship and extraterritorial voting among Colombians in London and Madrid

In this article, we explore the nature of extraterritorial voting among Colombian migrants in the 2010 elections in London and Madrid. To address the neglected issue of why voter turnout from abroad has been so low, we take into account the views of voters and non‐voters alike to show that, while the external vote privileges the professional and well educated, this does not mean that migrants are not interested in politics back home. Drawing on Bauman (1991), we conceptualize ambivalent citizenship as the paradoxical manner in which, through the external vote, states impose hegemonic notions of citizenship from above, which people embrace in an ambivalent manner from below. We show that the workings of the state make voting a difficult process; they create structural ambivalence for migrants who, even if they practise their citizenship in other ways, exercise individual ambivalence because they find it difficult to engage with a political system back home that they do not trust. The conceptualization of ‘ambivalent citizenship’ therefore encompasses the contradictory complexities inherent in the provision of external voting rights that actively privilege and exclude migrants in mutually constitutive ways.     

Transnational political practices and the receiving state: Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands

This article examines how the social and political contexts in receiving countries affect the transnational political practices of migrants and refugees, such as their mobilization around political events in their homeland. The case study explores the political participation of Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands in its full complexity, that is in both the immigration country and in homeland politics. The findings suggest that transnational political practices should not be reduced to a function of the political opportunity structures of particular receiving countries for two main reasons: (a) more inclusive political structures, which provide for more participation and co‐operation on immigrant political issues, may at the same time, and for that very reason, serve to exclude dialogue on homeland politics; (b) homeland political movements may draw on a different range of resources than their immigrant political counterparts, including those outside the local political institutional context.     

The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identities

In this article I consider the relations between historical and contemporary forms of transnational political networks. I contest accounts that counterpose a networked present against a more settled and bounded past, arguing that this contrast rests on a problematic temporalization of difference in the construction of political identities. I consider how this temporalization produces particular accounts of relations between space, politics and identity. Drawing on the insurgent imaginative geography of resistance in C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, I argue for a focus on the dynamic geographies of connection formed through transnational networks. I develop this position through a discussion of the relations of the London Corresponding Society, formed in London in 1792, to transnational routes of political activists, organizational forms and ideas. This account highlights the multiple political identities crafted through transnational political networks. I conclude by outlining elements of a ‘usable past’ for contemporary counter‐global struggles.     

The Mexicans and “Us Gringos”: A Case Study of Activist Work With Unauthorized Migrants

Lacking access to social services, unauthorized Mexican day laborers constitute a vulnerable population. This case study uses a critical theory perspective to examine activist efforts to support migrants when professional social workers were unavailable. Using qualitative methods, this study sought to answer three questions: (1) What strategies did unauthorized day laborers and activists deploy to contest anti-immigrant sentiments in a suburban community; (2) how were these strategies shaped by the workers' subterranean status as undocumented and poor; and (3) what are the implications for social work practice? This study seeks to delineate interventions and to identify how migrants themselves perceive such efforts.     

Gendered and classed activist identity in the Russian oppositional youth movement

This article examines how activist identity is constructed in the Russian opposition youth movement Oborona. The research is based on fieldwork among youth activists in Moscow and St Petersburg. The author analyses how activist identity is classed and gendered, as well as its relations to the Russian civic field. The article suggests, first, that the activist identity is marked by an affiliation with the intelligentsia: activists have grown up in intelligentsia families and articulate their activities through the intelligentsia's ‘markers’, such as intelligence, discussion skills and education. Secondly, activists follow a dissidents' cultural model, by emphasizing the importance of non‐conformism and traditional dissident values, and draw parallels between the contemporary government and the totalitarian Soviet state. Thirdly, this traditional intellectual dissident identity is associated with cosmopolitanism through the movement's international connections and appropriation of the forms of action of global social movements. Sometimes the activist practices and aspirations conflict with the group's ideals. Furthermore, the activist identity is gendered and embodied in the right activist ‘look’, which is defined by masculinity. Regardless of the movement's liberal ideals in regards to democracy, questions of gender and sexuality are not discussed, and activists do not question traditional understandings of gendered divisions of labour.     

Conflicts over knowledge transfer across the border: Korean international students and the conversion of cultural capital

It is common knowledge that international students are a major conduit of international knowledge transfer and that they become transnational managerial elites and highly skilled migrants. However, few studies show how this transfer occurs. Moreover, people often assume that knowledge transfer is a smooth process. Drawing on in‐depth interviews of former and current Korean international students and non‐migrant Koreans in the United States and South Korea, my study shows that knowledge transfer can, in fact, be highly conflictual. I argue that conflicts in the country of origin between international students (the transferors) and non‐migrants (the recipients) mediate knowledge transfer. I see the conflicts as struggles over the conversion of cultural capital from the Global North into local power and wealth, which reworks Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital for transnational social fields. In so doing, I develop a framework that links knowledge transfer and transnational social reproduction.     

Transnational Information Politics and the “Child Migration Crisis”: Guatemalan NGOs Respond to Youth Migration

Sharp increases in “child migrants” from Central America detained at the US border in 2014 brought unprecedented levels of attention to long extant social and political issues perceived as causing youth migration. While governments on both sides of the US border faced criticism over responses to the migration “crisis,” the presumed causes of this migration presented in US media discourses went largely unquestioned. This article presents data collected in June 2015 from in-depth interviews with Guatemalan and transnational non-governmental organization (NGO) staff, scholars, lawyers, and activists in order to understand the complex interpretations of child migration by NGO actors in Guatemala. Findings illustrate how NGOs may selectively draw on the power of prevailing media narratives to buttress ideological and programmatic goals while simultaneously contesting how the same media depictions obscure the lived realities of migrants. We consider the transnational information politics of representations of “child migration” across government, media, and civil society sectors and the critical role of NGOs in articulating the complex realities faced by populations vulnerable to migration.     

Transnational activities and aspirations of irregular migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands

The literature on immigrant transnationalism and on irregular immigration suggests irregular migrants engage relatively little in transnational activities because of the obstacles associated with their legal and economic statuses. Drawing on participant observation and in‐depth interviews with a diverse population of irregular migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands, however, I shall demonstrate in this article that irregular migrants do indeed engage in various transnational activities. Moreover, I argue that a focus on aspirations helps to understand why irregular migrants either do or do not engage in specific transnational activities. Distinguishing between investment, settlement and legalization aspirations, I analyse whether and for what reasons irregular migrants carry out economic, social and political transnational activities. I conclude that future research on transnationalism and on the incorporation of irregular and regular migrants alike could benefit from contextualizing the agency of migrants by taking their aspirations into account.     

Determinants of Latin American Activism: Domestic and Transnational Political Opportunities and Threats

For decades Latin America has been and continues to be a vibrant source of activism as democracies emerge, civil societies strengthen, and movements turn an outward eye towards international forces. Social movements, organizations, and activists in Latin America mobilize around a diverse set of issues from neoliberalism to women’s rights and more. Yet, all groups must successfully navigate ever‐shifting domestic and transnational political opportunities and threats. This review first defines the political opportunity approach and discusses debates surrounding its utility and applicability at different phases of social movement activity, as well as growing debates about the importance of domestic versus transnational opportunities and threats for predicting movement mobilization, protests, and outcomes. Next the article discusses changing domestic and transnational political opportunities and threats throughout Latin America. It then turns to empirical application of the political opportunity model to various social movements, organizations, and activist groups working in Central and South America. This paper concludes with a brief revisit of the debate and points to future lines of inquiry. Additionally, it provides an interactive Google Map, which locates the prominent actors involved in Latin American activism, the international institutions that influence them, and Internet links for more information.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

ASSERTING THE POLITICAL SELF: Community Activism Among Black Women Who Relocate to the Rural South

In this article, I address the collective process of politicization in a group of urban working-class black women who have departed from large cities in the northeast United States and resettled in small towns and scattered, isolated rural communities in the Southeast. The study examines how newcomes became politically involved in their new environment and particularly, how social constraints and opportunities embedded within local political culture influenced their experiences of becoming activists. I employ a critical feminist approach in which an understanding of political agency is grounded in culturally and geographically specific social relations. I argue that activist politics of returnees are framed and formed by unequal gender, race, and class relations resonant in the political culture of the rural South. Localized social conventions define and normalize allowable political roles, discourses, and actions for working-class black women. As newcomers and outsiders, women activists and their actions become politicized in the process of encountering, questioning, and ultimately, subverting these conventions. As the women returnees engaged local political culture, their practices were interpreted as a violation of established paternalist norms of community activism by both white power holders and local working-class black women. This transgression influenced the formation of their identities as political agents and may potentially disrupt the power relations in the surrounding community as well. The study's findings demonstrate the importance of situating race, class, and gender relations in the analysis of activist politics in general and among black working-class women in particular. The study is based on participant observation and interviews with working-class black women activists in three counties in southeastern North Carolina.     

Youth politics as multiple processes: how teenagers construct political action in Sweden

Alternative approaches to power in youth politics are needed to overcome the conceptual dichotomy between youth political action that is either linked to – or delinked from – state institutions. This paper offers an alternative drawn from a study that sought to empirically explore, and build theory upon, how teenagers construct their political action. Our qualitative study among 10 activists aged between 17 and 19 in a medium-size city in Northern Sweden found that youth constructed their political action as four different processes: moving from consciousness to action, moving from personal experience to shared goals, moving from social activities to political activities, and moving from single to multiple arenas. We integrated these processes in the concept Youth Politics as Multiple Processes. Youth efforts to bring about these processes were not always fruitful because, as their political action gained complexity, youth faced greater constraints for recognizing, addressing and challenging power from age-based exclusion, state-centered definitions of politics, and adult disinterest in youth demands. According to our findings, youth constructed political action based in an approach to power that was not state-centered. We linked our findings to youth politics research and social movement theory that similarly proposed alternative approaches to power.     

The Politics of Migrants' Transnational Political Practices

This article critically examines transnational political engagement of migrants and refugees in local, national and global political processes. Based on inductive reading of existing scholarship and in particular the author's own research on Turks and Kurds in Europe, the article discusses key concepts and trends in our understanding of why, how and with what consequences migrants engage in transnational political practices. These practices, this article suggests, are influenced by the particular multilevel institutional environment, which migrant political actors negotiate their way through. This environment includes not only political institutions in the sending and receiving country, but also global norms and institutions and networks of other nonstate actors. Finally, the article argues for critical examination of the democratic transparency and accountability of migrants' transnational networks in any analysis of their long and short‐term impact on domestic and global politics.     

In between leaving and being left behind: mediating the mobilities and immobilities of Indonesian non‐migrants

In this article, I consider how and why some non‐migrants partially inhabit migrant subjectivities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Central Java, Indonesia, I describe the experiences of those who embarked on pre‐departure migration processes, but failed to leave the country. Men were often victims of fraud; women typically ran away from the confines of training centres. When redirected away from the border spaces of airports and recruitment centres, they typically identify themselves and are perceived by kin and neighbours as ‘former’ transnational migrants. I analyse how migration infrastructure – intersecting institutions, agents and technologies – produces such subjectivities in‐between conventional migrant and non‐migrant categories. These positions in between leaving and staying illuminate the infrastructural conditions that enable, constrain and mediate transnational mobilities. These cases of non‐departure show the expansive social and spatial effects of migration infrastructure beyond the facilitation of transnational movement. Such less considered (im)mobilities of non‐migrants point to the diverse ways in which migration institutions and agents mediate the circulation of persons between and within national borders.     

Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

Indigenous activism in Bangladesh: translocal spaces and shifting constellations of belonging

Taking the movement for the rights of indigenous people in Bangladesh as an example, this article elucidates how recent attempts to institutionalise the concept of indigenous people at the global level relate to local claims. These attempts are intrinsically interlinked to identity politics targeting the national political arena, and by adopting the conceptual offerings provided by the UN system as well as those from other parts of the world, activists seek to promote more inclusive approaches. Contemporary translocal indigenous activism, however, is prone to contradictions. On the one hand, identity politics rely upon old-established images of indigenous people with essentialist connotations. On the other hand, it can be observed that the activist configuration, thought in ethnic terms, becomes increasingly porous, for a variety of reasons. After providing an overview of the way indigenous activism in Bangladesh has unfolded recently, the conditions under which the boundaries of belonging to the activist movement are stretched or confined will be discussed. The final part deliberates the findings in relation to the ways in which the social order of the movement may change over time.