Transnationalism and Citizenship (original) (raw)
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Diaspora and transnationalism are widely used concepts in academic as well as political discourses. Although originally referring to quite different phenomena, they increasingly overlap today. such inflation of meanings goes hand in hand with a danger of essentialising collective identities. This book therefore analyses diaspora and transnationalism as research perspectives rather than as characteristics of particular social groups. Its contributions focus on conceptual uses, theoretical challenges and methodological innovations in the study of social ties that transcend nation and state boundaries. Bringing together authors from a wide range of fields and approaches in the social sciences, this volume is evidence that studying border-crossing affiliations also requires a crossing of disciplinary boundaries.
Globalization, Transnationalism, Diasporas: Facing New Realities and Conceptual Challenges
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
American Journal of Sociology, 2004
This article seeks to critically engage the new literature on immigrant transnationalism. Connectivity between source and destination points is an inherent aspect of migrations, but migration networks generate a multiplicity of "imagined communities," organized along different, often conflicting principles. Consequently, what immigration scholars describe as transnationalism is usually its opposite: highly particularistic attachments antithetical to those by-products of globalization denoted by the concept of "transnational civil society." Moreover, migrants do not make their communities alone: states and state politics shape the options for migrant and ethnic trans-state social action. International migrants and their descendants do repeatedly engage in concerted action across state boundaries, but the use, form, and mobilization of the connections linking "here" and "there" are contingent outcomes subject to multiple political constraints.
Editorial: Constructing Citizenship and Transnational Identity
Systemic Practice and Action Research, 2009
The landscape of democracy and governance spans local and national boundaries. People are enmeshed in multiple contexts (Held et al. 1999; Held 2004; Held et al. 2005) and their associations (past and current) shape their identity. Some of the contributors to the journal have dual citizenship; they live and work in different places with family spanning continents. Some have experienced being non citizens in their place of birth or citizens without rights. The most vulnerable include the outsiders (immigrants and refugees, for example).
MIGRATIONS, TRANSNATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
MIGRATIONS, TRANSNATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2024
In the twenty-first century, migrations have transcended their traditional conception, configuring a global phenomenon that transforms not only physical borders, but also notions of identity, belonging and citizen rights. In this context, transnationalism emerges as a key to understanding how migrants become actors that influence multiple spheres: the country they left behind and the one that welcomes them. They are not mere individuals who leave one place to settle in another; they are transnational citizens who negotiate and build their citizenship across various geographies, contributing to the social, economic, and political fabric of more than one state. The concept of transnational social citizenship, addressed in this essay, redefines the relationship between migrants and nation-states. Through new forms of political participation, such as voting from abroad, and the vindication of social rights in multiple contexts, twenty-first-century migrants are positioning themselves as global citizens, capable of exercising their rights and duties in an increasingly interconnected environment. Citizenship ceases to be exclusive to a territory and expands towards a flexible model that responds to the dynamics of a world where borders, although they continue to exist, are increasingly permeable. This essay seeks to analyze how contemporary migrations, and the transnationalism that accompanies them, have generated a paradigm shift in our conception of citizenship. We will explore how migrants not only retain ties to their country of origin, but also develop new hybrid identities, participate in politics from abroad, and reconfigure their relationship with the state, demanding recognition, and rights in various territories. Thus, transnational social citizenship not only forces us to rethink the boundaries of the nation, but also to imagine a new kind of participation and belonging in the globalized world.
2010
Abstract Focusing on the interaction between migrants and stay-at homes, this paper shows how the host country experience at once facilitates and structures immigrants' involvements with the countries from which they come. The vehicle is a study of a migration universal: the associations that bring together migrants displaced from a common hometown. These associations provide a strategic research site, allowing us to take apart the two very different aspects–namely, state and nation–that the transnational concept conflates.
Geographies of Citizenship and Identity in a Globalizing World
Geographies Handbook Geographies of Globalization, 2018
Globalizing processes of the last half a century have thoroughly reshaped social life around much of the globe. Transformations of citizenship, understood usually as membership in a political community, have been amongst some of the most tangible and contested components of this reshaping. This chapter traces the most important ways in which citizenship, the way it is governed, practiced and imagined in the everyday life, has changed. At the same time, it highlights the most important shifts in how social scientists’ understanding of citizenship has changed in the process. In a chronological fashion, the chapter opens with the early concerns about the challenges that transnational migration has been posing to citizenship, understood throughout the last century as a national institution. Following upon the critiques of initial assessments of such challenges as amounting to denationalization of citizenship, I next discuss the relationship between contemporary cities and citizenship. Here the chapter stresses geographic and explicitly spatial approaches that have unveiled citizenship as a multi- and inter-scalar political as well as social relation between a subject and the state. The last segment discusses the implications of integrationist turn in state-migrant population relations of the last two decades for contemporary citizenship formations, including how they are tightly enmeshed with the neoliberalization of citizenship that has been profoundly changing parameters of membership and belonging for populations across the global north, migrant and non-migrant alike.
Review Article: An Excellent Introduction to Diaspora Theory and Transnationalism
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
While discussing human migration, scholars such as Stuart Hall and Simon Gikandi agree that the absent nation stands for the ideology into which the migrant had been interpellated before his or her journey away from the homeland. Speaking in the context of postcolonial diaspora in the new globalized order, Gikandi (2005) argues that these cultural or national ideologies become objects of transnational border crossings: "in the old global order, the nation was the reality and the category that enabled the socialization of subjects and hence structuralization of cultures; now, in