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Maria Koinova, Autonomy and Positionality in Diaspora Politics, International Political Sociology, Volume 6, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 99–103, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00152_3.x
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During the past decade, few scholars have been seeking to establish viable theoretical connections between diaspora politics and international relations theory. Reaching to classic IR paradigms, Shain and Barth argued that constructivism can account for the diasporic identities, motives and preferences, and liberalism for their actions once preferences are settled (2003:451). Adamson and Demetriou challenged a widely accepted assumption in IR that there is a “fit” between a national and state identity. They proposed that IR treats the concept of “diaspora” as a useful tool to contrast the deterritorialized and network-based collective identities of diasporas with the territorially defined and institutionalized collective identities of states (2007:491). A third group focused on the autonomy of diasporas vis-à-vis their original homelands. Diasporas are seen as either autonomous agents in world politics (Shain 2002), or more passively accepting pressures from their original homelands seeking to expand their governance over their identity-based populations abroad (Haegel and Peretz 2005; Ragazzi 2009), or as acting but depending on the location of the main mobilizing agents (Shain and Barth 2003; Koinova 2009, 2011; Lyons and Mandaville 2010). Most of these authors also acknowledge that diasporas should not be treated as monolithic entities, but the concept needs to be “unpacked” to account for the activities of diasporic individual actors, institutions, and networks. The latter is easier said than done in theoretical terms, since major IR theories—and especially realism and liberalism—are not well equipped to account for international relations involving ethno-national diversity on levels different than the “group.” Hence, they essentialize diasporas.
