New Wars and Diasporas: suggestions for reserach and policy

Abstract

Diaspora organisations are significant, and increasingly politicized players in today’s global world. In order to understand diaspora support for homeland conflicts we have to study the interplay of distinct processes tied to both homeland and host country contexts. The new nature of war and concomitant centrality of identity groups has brought diasporas to the fore as important sources of outside support for parties in conflict. However, diaspora activism should not be understood as a mere response to the ‘Homeland Calling’. Rather, the host country context can be seen as a distinct source of diaspora mobilization and, as this article shows, turns out to play a highly complex and ambiguous role in diaspora strategies of identification and political action.