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Written by Anush Petrosyan Much academic discussion has centered on diasporas in the previous decades, as the interdisciplinary field of diaspora studies continues to develop. As Féron and Lefort write, “the study of the relations between diasporas and conflicts often follows a securitization trope… which is notably fed by, and feeds into, xenophobic discourses about […]

Written by Zahra Edalati and Majid Imani    The death of 22-year-old Mahsa (Zhina) Amini sparked mass protests in Iran that have persisted for about two months in different cities in Iran, as well as far from Iran’s borders. Mahsa was detained, beaten, and killed by Iran’s morality police for what they deemed an inappropriate […]

By Cæcilie Svop Jensen  ‘The Kurds are no longer the forgotten people. The world has opened its eyes to the Kurdish nation and undermined the saying ‘no friends but the mountains’’. The above quote is from an online Facebook post from 2019, in which a Kurdish diaspora organization in Denmark voiced its appreciation of the […]

Written by Bruno Lefort   Because the word diaspora originally designates the dispersion of peoples from their homeland, we commonly think diasporic identities in the light of a triple context: their country of settlement, their country of origin, and the transnational space in-between. This becomes even more evident when it comes to reflect on the […]

By Cæcilie Svop Jensen   Diaspora organizations face constraints in host countries, among other things with regards to their level of access to policy makers, as well to the larger political opportunity structures (POSs) in the host countries (see for instance Baser 2017; Ong’ayo 2019).   Diaspora mobilization and behavior are directly related to the possibilities […]

By Bruno Lefort   In the spring 2017, a few months after I settled in Montreal to conduct fieldwork among diasporic youth form the Middle East, I learned that, in 2009, the city had commissioned a monument to honor its Lebanese heritage. Inaugurated in 2010, the art piece was intended to commemorate the 125th anniversary […]

By Bahar Baser and Élise Féron   Over the past weeks, and even after the permanent ceasefire agreement signed on November 9th under the aegis of Moscow, we have witnessed a strong mobilization among the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Turkish diasporas which has been kindled by the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh. Although the conflict has been […]

By Gözde Böcü (PhD Candidate, University of Toronto) & Bahar Baser (Associate Professor, Coventry University)   In late June 2020, episodes of violent clashes erupted between members of Turkey’s diaspora in the neighborhood of Favoriten in Vienna, Austria. The clashes between Kurdish and Turkish ultranationalist groups lasted for four consecutive days after leftist groups including Austria’s Antifa and several Kurdish and […]

By Cæcilie Svop Jensen and Élise Féron   Over the past few decades, the ways in which diasporas engage with politics in their countries of origin have frequently been explained and understood by researchers through the concept of long-distance nationalism. How has this concept been defined, and is it still useful for understanding today’s diaspora […]

By Anna Quattrone   Despite a three-decade long ethnic conflict, Sri Lanka is a multicultural country characterised by the peaceful coexistence of different religious worships. Although «the social landscape of the country tends to show an association between ethnicity and religion», as Sinhalese people mainly practice Buddhism (70,2%) and Tamils primarily follow Hinduism (12,6%), syncretic […]

By Anna Quattrone   I recently analysed the processes of identification and mobilisation of Sri Lankan diasporas in Italy. It has proved of great interest, given the lack of comprehensive academic work on their political engagement in home and host countries beyond the peace vs war maker dichotomisation and the LTTE’s politics. My objective was […]

By Cæcilie Svop Jensen Methodological nationalism is often mentioned as one of the pitfalls in research on diasporas and although it has been amply problematized in recent years, it continues to pose a challenge to diaspora research. Schrooten notes how moving towards methodological transnationalism opens up possibilities of research and generates new spaces in which […]

By Sofiya Voytiv   Mixed methods research has boomed in recent decades despite a relatively constant presence of different qualitative and quantitative methods in social research before (Creswell, 2015; Greene 2008; Archibald et al., 2017). However, the field of mixed methods research has a relatively short history in terms of establishment, and thus a lot […]

By Élise Féron, Anna Quattrone and Cæcilie Svop Jensen   Like in many other fields of science, the current Covid-19 pandemic raises important challenges for diaspora researchers, as it appears difficult to research diasporas without doing some kind of fieldwork. Ethnography as a method of immersion – not just collecting data, but putting information in […]

By Cæcilie Svop Jensen   The inherent transnational dimension of diasporas brings challenges to the study of these groups. Fallacies include methodological nationalism, ethnic or national essentialism and securitization (see Faist 2012; Féron and Lefort 2019; Féron 2020). As Faist notes, methodological nationalism treats the state as a  semi-natural political and social configuration, while fetishism […]

In Denmark, few studies are concerned with the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora communities despite the fact that they constitute some of the largest ethnic minority groups in the country. As especially Kurdish mobilization has increased since the outbreak of the war in Syria and with the increasing role of Turkey in the conflict, understanding the […]

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