Globalization, Transnationalism, Diasporas: Facing New Realities and Conceptual Challenges (original) (raw)

In recent decades, complex systems of interrelations have emerged and developed on different planes: global, regional, national and local, enhancing the expansion, intensification, and acceleration of interactions, flows, and actors in an increasingly mobile world. Therefore, new conceptual challenges derive from these changes, associated with the multidimensional and multifaceted character of globalization processes. Multifaceted, insofar as they bring together economic, political and cultural aspects, as well as the interdependence and influences between these planes; multidimensional, because they are expressed both in networks of interaction between transnational institutions and agents, and in processes of organizational, institutional, strategic and cultural convergence, alignment and standardization. Globalization processes are also contradictory: they can be intentional and reflexive and at the same time not intentional, with international as well as a regional, national or local scope. Globalization has led to economic, social, political and cultural changes that upset geographical, territorial and temporal referents without which it would be impossible to think the structures and institutions, economies, social relations and cultural spaces today. The concept acquired multiple meanings according to diverse theoretical approaches related to their heuristic scope and their specific focus on the variables of space and time.1 Transnationalism, on its part, points to networks, individuals, groups, goods, commodities and cultural circuits that transcend national borders. It unleashes and accounts for continuous and intense interactions between communal and social, global and local, national and transnational levels. A massive and diversified system of migration, transnational networks developed by national border crossers, and simultaneous social, economic, political and cultural participation in interconnected societies all mark a new era in which territorial spaces are reordered while ascriptions, belongings, and identities are redefined. Prevailing theoretical approaches are thus challenged: on the one hand, de-territorialization and porous borders geographically detach communities and social sectors while simultaneously connecting them with other entities; on the other hand, transnational networks, spaces and social circles are created and bolstered2. Thus, new configurations emerge that claim conceptual shifts. Classical institutional orders see their capacities restricted or modified, while identities develop in diverse ways along national and transnational axes. Ethnic, national, and religious old and new diasporas have been likewise redefining their nature and scope on national and world scenes. The recovery and even resurgence of the concept of diaspora and the emergence of transnationalism as an analytical approach can be used productively to study central questions of social change. In a globalized