Blockchains,trust and action nets: extending the pathologies of financial globalization

Blockchains combine digital encryption and time stamping technologies to enable digital exchange to occur in manners celebrated by proponents as ‘trust‐free’. Yet, an increasing range of scholars argue that actual applications of the peer‐to‐peer technology shifts, rather than eliminates, trust. In this article, we draw on organizational theory to argue that efforts to remove trust reorganize the action nets that underpin payment systems in manners that extend rather than eliminate longstanding pathologies afflicting financial globalization. Our analysis supports and extends the critiques that blockchain applications are far from ‘trust‐free’. By tracing how efforts to reconfigure the socio‐technical composition of the humans and objects that underpin payment systems, we illustrate how blockchain applications shift the location and character of the technical vulnerabilities that create market instabilities and concentration, as well as elite‐led governance.     

Ethno‐sectarianism in Iraq,diaspora positionality and political transnationalism

In this article, I draw on the experiences of Iraqi diasporas in the UK and Sweden after the 2003 US‐led intervention to demonstrate how ethno‐sectarianism in Iraq has affected their political transnationalism. Using the concepts of intersectionality and positionality, I show how the reconfiguration of the social positions of individuals and groups in the diaspora affects their types of political engagement and the spaces in which political mobilization takes place. In the case of the Iraqi diaspora, I show how, among other things, the social categories of ethnicity, religion and gender create positions of both subordination and privilege, which inhibit, reshape and empower the political actions of diasporas in both the homeland and host country. In societies divided along ethnic, religious or tribal lines, the social positions of individuals and groups relative to the dominant ethnic/religious political parties and the nationalist ideology they promote determine the nature of their diasporic mobilization.     

Introduction: the absent child and transnational families

This article introduces the concept of the absent child, and shows its importance for understanding experiences of contemporary transnational families. The article moves beyond a dominant scholarly focus on split families of working migrant parents and stay‐behind children in home communities. Instead, it draws out the power of absence in mobile families, focusing on the signs, meanings, imaginations and practices around children who may be hidden, deceased, imagined, abandoned or in other ways not present. It provides an introduction to four accompanying articles based on original research with families from Indonesia and the Philippines. These articles focus on the absent child as prosthesis for families, on the subtleties of affect around absence, and on the impact of normative regulatory practices on child absence.     

Transnational marriages in Yiwu,China: tensions over money

In this article, I explore the role of transnational marriages in the activities and strategies of trading networks, through the lens of money and uncertainty in marriage. I argue that uncertainty in spousal relations challenges the durability of such unions and hence the effectiveness of their role in trading activities. These uncertainties are shaped by intertwined factors, including especially the embedded relationship between commercial and social networks (for example, business partners, kinship, friendship) and spousal relations, the differing cultural values and practices of the partners to such unions, stereotypes, varying forms and degrees of trust and mistrust, and the dynamics of global markets and state policy. Uncertainties driven by these factors exacerbate mistrust in both marriages and trading relations; they also shape shifting orientations toward future life. Therefore, I argue that the role of marriage in trading activities should be neither simplified nor romanticized.     

Social embeddedness in a harmonized Europe: the social networks of European migrants with a native partner in Belgium and the Netherlands

Although intra‐European migration is often considered relatively easy to realize given European citizens' right to freedom of movement, settlement in another European country can still be experienced as socially disruptive. Insights in the insertion processes of European migrants, nevertheless, remain rather scarce. In this study, we analyse the social networks of European nationals with a native partner in Belgium and the Netherlands. The analysis is based on survey data from the EUMARR project (n = 576). First, we study the size and composition of European migrants' local family and friendship networks, and the frequency of contact with these networks. Second, we connect intra‐EU movers' insertion routes to investments in transnational networks in their home country. The results reveal how size, composition and contact with the local and transnational network change over time. Children help to maintain contact with both the local and transnational family network and form a bridge for parents to meet own friends in the host country. Moreover, having own friends and own family around matters for contact frequency with the local networks.     

Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia

Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child‐rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents’ countries of origin for an imagined ‘good childhood‘. I demonstrate that polymedia – SNS and other platforms – sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in transnational parenting. Exploring how families document child‐raising across international boundaries, I show how the trajectories of parenting relationships remain open ended. I counter the predominant focus on transnational parenting as a kind of abandonment attached to left‐behind children. Instead, I refocus the research on the opportunities polymedia give families to create and sustain intimacies, thus making the trajectories of migrant families and children increasingly dynamic. Polymedia create important shifts in global migration – a transformation that requires changes in the way scholars approach transnational families and long‐distance parenting.     

Black Atlantic maritime networks,resistance and the American ‘domestic’ slave trade

This article on the formation and operation of maritime networks of resistance and solidarity during the United States ‘domestic’ coastal slave trade contributes to the history of Atlantic maritime radicalism in the Age of Revolution. After 1807, the legal trans‐shipment of enslaved people from the Chesapeake to the antebellum slave markets enclosed the seas along the Atlantic seaboard and into the Gulf of Mexico. The legal, geopolitical and physical limitations of slavery at sea turned the Florida Straits – a densely trafficked maritime chokepoint – into a contested space. Rather than viewing this globally significant maritime space as primarily a site of contestation between British imperial sovereignty and US internecine national politics, the focus is on the undercurrents of collective black Atlantic political action, memory and connection that shaped the Straits as a transnational maritime route from slavery to freedom.     

The global footballer and the local war‐zone: George Weah and transnational networks in Liberia,West Africa

Abstract Elite sport is the vehicle for global interactions via both its shared practices and the relations engendered by its governing bodies and its global tournaments. This capability has attracted the attentions of those seeking both nation‐building and reconciliation in war‐damaged nations. The narrative that follows has global implications, telling as it does the story of George Weah, a Liberian‐born footballer who became a humanitarian ambassador, and later aspired to become his country's president. Weah's story informs debates on globalization, illustrating the transnational career of a man who developed a keen understanding of institutional politics and patronage and who allowed himself to be courted by various global figures. These scenarios took place in Liberia, a war‐devastated African nation. This tale thus provides for reflection on how sport can encourage and undermine practises of nationhood. As a former World Footballer of the Year, Weah was a Liberian success story and well aware of his populist appeal. However, the issue of who a people are and who is to be their national political representative has proven to be a very fraught issue in the Liberian context. Whether global sporting networks have made the world smaller and the people more knowing in the Liberian context is an issue this article raises in considering its most famous citizen.     

Migrant family visits and the life course: interrelationships between age,capacity and desire

Migrant visits to the country of origin play a crucial role in transnational family cohesion and migrant well‐being; the research on them so far has focused primarily on the relationship between migrant integration and transnational engagement. In this article, I extend the discussion by adding a life course perspective to Carling and Hoelscher's (2013) framework for studying transnational activities, which incorporates capacity and desire. I explore whether age has an independent effect on migrants' family visits and how it relates to socio‐economic resources, migration status and transnational ties. Using data from a survey of Peruvian migrants around the globe (n=7,741), I show that migrants' stage in the life course has a partial effect on their propensity to travel through the interrelationship between age, capacity and desire. The findings show that the capacity and desire of migrants to visit their country of origin are particularly strong after reaching retirement age, suggesting a favourable combination of resources at later stages in life. However, whether this expresses a positive approach to ageing, or is a strategy to balance transnational family obligations and to postpone return decisions, remains open for future research.     

Virtual enclaves: the influence of alumni email lists on the workspaces of transnational software engineers

At the turn of the twentieth century, ethnic enclaves helped immigrants to find jobs and to adjust to their surroundings. In the twenty‐first century, transnational professionals also have other spaces of support: the ‘virtual’ enclaves made possible by new communication tools. Based on interviews with high‐tech professionals over the course of an industry boom and downturn, in this article I trace the institutions that affected structures of online help with work. For some engineers from India and Taiwan, alumni ties, maintained by email lists, were important; these transnational workers had an allegiance to their ‘batch’ (university cohort) that the US‐born workers lacked. Their far‐flung, multi‐tiered alumni lists combined the benefits of strong and weak ties: deep commitments and unique information. This study makes a contribution to theorization of immigrant adjustment, social capital and work technologies.     

Shopping in Mumbai: transnational sociability from the Netherlands

In this article, I present the concept of sociability as a preferable alternative to current network theories. I apply Simmel's concept of sociability to the bonding that occurs among ethnic networks at both the community and global levels. I argue for the need to separate the sociability elements of enjoyment and pleasure in time and place. I focus on the diaspora tourism of Dutch Hindustanis to show that joy and pleasure occur both when shopping in India and when giving gifts in the Netherlands. Furthermore, I argue that gifts purchased in India create bonding within close ethnic circles. As a result, these gifts become part of the material culture of the group, contributing to a feeling of home, ethnic consciousness and transnational bonds. Finally, I suggest that this joy and pleasure can be repeated because many of these moments are recorded with video cameras and photographs. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that transnational sociability, exemplified in diaspora tourism (specifically in shopping and gift giving), generates bonding both at the ethnic group and global level. I thus aim to add specificity to studies of transnational ethnic networks.     

Transnational social movements and changing organizational fields in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political arena, including shifts in geopolitical arrangements, increases in popular mobilization and contestation over the direction of globalization, and efforts by elites to channel or curb popular opposition. We explore how these factors affect changes in global politics. Organizational populations are shaped by ongoing interactions among civil‐society, corporate and governmental actors operating at multiple levels. During the 1990s and 2000s, corporate and government actors promoted the ‘neoliberalization of civil society’ and the appropriation of movement concepts and practices to support elite interests. Not all movement actors have been passive witnesses to this process: they have engaged in intense internal debates, and they have adapted their organizational strategies to advance social transformation. This article draws from quantitative research on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and on qualitative research on contemporary transnational activism to describe changes in transnational organizing at a time of growing contention in world politics. We show how interactions among global actors have shaped new, hybrid organizational forms and spaces that include actors other than states in influential roles.     

Power,capital, and immigration detention rights: making networked markets in global detention governance at UNHCR

With the expanded use of immigration detention and migration management practices worldwide, detention has emerged as a key issue for United Nations and international human rights institutions. A growing international rights movement seeks to make the practice fairer and more humane, leading to the dominance of a mainstream detention rights agenda and counter‐hegemonic system of governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Geneva and elsewhere, this article examines the capital, knowledge, and technological expertise that went into the construction of UNHCR's Global Detention Strategy. I highlight the rational calculation undergirding this global detention rights agenda, including the transnational policy networks of NGOs, INGOs, and academics that facilitate the movement's moral authority and capitalist growth. Their practices have become powerful neoliberal development tools, which give veracity to human rights agendas and attract oppositionally‐figured abolitionist praxis.     

Diasporas and transitional justice: transnational activism from local to global levels of engagement

Scholarship on transitional justice, transnational social movements, and transnational diaspora mobilization has offered little understanding about how memorialization initiatives with substantial diaspora involvement emerge transnational and are embedded and sustained in different contexts. We argue that diasporas play a galvanizing role in transnational interest‐based and symbolic politics, expanding claim‐making from the local to national, supranational, and global levels of engagement. Using initiatives to memorialize atrocities committed at the former Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we identify a four‐stage mobilization process. First, initiatives emerged and diffused across transnational networks after a local political opportunity opened in the homeland. Second, attempts at coordination of activities took place transnational through an NGO. Third, initiatives were contextualized on the nation‐state level in different host‐states, depending on the political opportunities and constraints available there. Fourth, memorialization claims were eventually shifted from the national to the supranational and global levels. The article concludes by demonstrating the potential to apply the analysis to similar global movements in which diasporas are directly involved.     

Affects of unease: mother–infant separation among professional Indonesian women working in Singapore

The extent of systemic forms of mother–child separation has received insufficient attention in research on migrant families. In this article, I explore the little‐studied phenomenon of mother–infant separation among professional women migrants. I draw from in‐depth interviews with Indonesian professional women working in Singapore who have lived apart from their infant children to pursue work and education. Narratives of separation illustrate a complex transnational network of care built around an availability of support offered by spouses or extended kin. Women experience unease about separation, which emerges in how they talk about their absent infants. Mothers articulate ambivalence about the potential cost of their decisions, positing infants as able to pass judgement on them, with potential rejection and disengagement causing them potent concerns. The unease of these mothers moderates claims that transnational separation is readily managed and highlights the ambiguity embedded in an increasingly common form of transnational mother–child separation.     

Transnational parenting and the well‐being of Angolan migrant parents in Europe

Studies on the transnational family highlight the emotional difficulties of migrant parents separated from their children through international migration. This article consists of a large‐scale quantitative investigation into the insights of transnational family literature by examining the well‐being of transnational parents compared with that of parents who live with their children in the destination country. Furthermore, through a survey of Angolan migrant parents in both the Netherlands and Portugal, we compare the contexts of two receiving country. Our study shows transnational parents are worse off than their non‐transnational counterparts in terms of four measures of well‐being – health, life satisfaction, happiness, and emotional well‐being. Although studies on migrant well‐being tend to focus exclusively on the characteristics of the receiving countries, our findings suggest that, to understand migrant parents' well‐being, a transnational perspective should also consider the existence of children in the migrant sending country. Finally, comparing the same population in two countries revealed that the receiving country effects the way in which transnational parenting is associated with migrant well‐being.     

The global corporate elite after the financial crisis: evidence from the transnational network of interlocking directorates

What impact did the recent financial crisis have on the corporate elite's international network? Has corporate governance taken on an essentially national structure or have transnational networks remained robust? We investigate this issue by comparing the networks of interlocking directorates among the 176 largest corporations in the world economy in 1976, 1996, 2006 and 2013. We find that corporate elites have not retrenched into their national business communities: the transnational network increased in relative importance and remained largely intact during the crisis lasting from 2006 to 2013. However, this network does not depend – as it used to do – on a small number of big linkers but on a growing number of single linkers. The network has become less hierarchical. As a group, the corporate elite has become more transnational in character. We see this as indicative of a recomposition of the corporate elite from a national to a transnational orientation.     

Transnational networks and transcultural belonging: a study of the Spanish second generation in Switzerland

Migration scholars often assume a close association between transnational social practices and transcultural forms of belonging. Nonetheless, we argue that the distinction of both concepts is analytically important and helpful in understanding the transnational lives of second‐generation migrants. To analyse the biographical accounts and network maps of second‐generation Spaniards living in Switzerland, we draw a theoretical distinction between social practice (transnational networks) and forms of belonging (transcultural belonging). Our analysis shows second‐generation migrants maintaining social networks over time, interrupting them, or reconnecting with them. Their sense of belonging may either endure or fade. Although the interconnection between social networks and the sense of belonging is neither straightforward nor causal, we can nevertheless identify five types of network/belonging combinations. These types describe the various ways in which second‐generation migrants are likely to articulate transnational networks and transcultural belonging in their lives.     

Immigration,trade and ‘ethnic surplus value’: a critique of Indo–Canadian transnational networks

It is often argued that countries hosting large populations of skilled immigrants might benefit from their cultural and economic competencies in the development of international trade networks. Yet, in so doing, the state can be criticized for fetishizing the ethnic immigrant in market terms in order to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. In this article, I examine these debates empirically in the case of India–Canada immigration and trade using interviews with traders, officials and immigrant entrepreneurs in British Columbia, Canada. Findings suggest that the supposedly positive relationship between trade and immigration is not obvious in the India–Canada case and there is no convincing evidence of the state managing successfully to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. Rather, what appears most compelling is evidence of what can be termed a discourse of regional disadvantage circulated by immigrant and non‐immigrant business actors alike regarding the nature of India–Canada relations. Interview respondents link this discourse of disadvantage to the regional history of Indian immigration to Canada, which has traditionally comprised Sikhs from rural Punjab, and it functions to essentialize Indian immigrant ethnicity spatially within both the Indian and Canadian contexts. I focus on the theme of the extraction of ‘ethnic surplus value’ and regional disadvantage to reveal the limitations of both arguments about the economic nature of immigrant‐led network development. In both cases, I challenge these ideas with a critical emphasis on the role of immigrant agency and offer a more nuanced and complicated reading of the role of the state. As a result, I offer a detailed reading of how socio‐spatial immigrant networks are formed and operate at the regional scale, and how this complicates more abstract theoretical formulations regarding the trade and immigration nexus.