Migrant warriors and transnational lives: constructing a Gurkha diaspora

The Nepalese Gurkhas have often been regarded as brave warriors in the scheme of British military recruitment since the 1800s. Today, their descendants have settled in various parts of South East and South Asia. How can one conceive of a Gurkha diaspora, and what are the Gurkhas and their families’ experiences of belonging in relation to varied migratory routes? This paper locates Gurkhas as migrants by deliberating upon the connection between military service and migration paths. I employ the lens of methodological transnationalism to elucidate how the Gurkha diaspora is both constructed and experienced. Diasporic consciousness and formation undergo modification alongside subsequent cycles of migration for different members of a diaspora. The article thus evaluates the transnational lives of migrants, and how these are connected to re-territorialized dimensions of identity and belonging.     

The bi-national road to immigrant rights mobilization: states,social movements and Chicago's Mexican hometown associations

Although immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) are most often recognized as important for sustaining transnational ties to sending societies, Chicago HTAs took a leadership role in the 2006 marches for US immigrant rights. Employing a binational historical framework focused on the influence of political opportunities and threats on social movement activism, we argue that the involvement of Chicago HTAs in US-oriented mobilization resulted from an evolving series of organizational responses to state actors in both Mexico and the USA. We find that these interactions conferred growing levels of organizational capacity and political legitimacy upon CONFEMEX, the Chicago-based HTA confederation, and played a key role in its embrace of US-centred strategies of popular mobilization in 2006. These findings suggest the utility of a long-term, binational focus on multiple state actors in order to understand the complex political evolution of HTAs and the emergence of the US immigrant rights movement.     

A comparativist manifesto for international migration studies

Abstract

Drawing on thirteen years of fieldwork among Mexican migrants in the United States and Mexico and comparisons of immigration policy throughout the Americas, this paper systematically elaborates the advantages and disadvantages of different kinds of multi-sited studies. A reformed logic of the Millian methods of agreement and difference takes into account the causal connections among the cases. I call for a ‘homeland dissimilation’ perspective and comparisons of internal and international migration as a way to take off the self-imposed national blinders that pre-determine many of the conclusions of the assimilation and even transnationalism literatures.     

“Sending so much more than money”: exploring social remittances and transnational mobility

Based on 324 in-depth interviews with Indian, Moroccan, Ukrainian, Bosnian and Filipino migrants based in four EU countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and the UK), our paper explores the relationship between social remittances and transnational mobility. We develop a new typology of social remittances as based on the principle of mobility. We argue that the degree to which transnational mobility is present in social remittances depends on the agency of the sender and on the nature of the receiving community. We further elaborate on such mobility-related concepts as “transnational re-scaling” (in reference to directionality of social remittances) and “translocal celebrity” (in reference to sender’s role in cultural production). Based on a large qualitative dataset, this study also contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between the local and the global.     

A family affair: how and why second-generation Filipino-Americans engage in transnational social and economic connections

In this article, I argue that second-generation migrants can engage in cross-border ties as a result of first-generation migrants mediating relationships between their children and those abroad. This paper draws on interviews with second-generation Filipino-Americans to demonstrate how and why respondents engage in mediated social and economic cross-border ties collectively with first-generation migrant parents. Second-generation Filipino-Americans feel an obligation, not necessarily to those in the Philippines, but to parents who request that their children engage in transnational social and economic ties. Just as parents serve as the means and reasoning for why these transnational connections persist among their children, parents play a role in why ties fail to manifest. By looking into why some engage in social and economic cross-border ties while others do not, I provide insight into how the children of migrants participate in the transnational social field.     

Politicized and depoliticized ethnicities,power relations and temporality: insights to outsider research from comparative and transnational fieldwork

The insider and outsider positions in migration studies have conventionally been approached in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Recently scholars have problematized the essentialist approaches to these roles by arguing for the inclusion of multiple intersecting social locations that are at play in the constitution of researcher positionality. Less attention has been paid, however, on how different ethnicities are constructed and how they can become politicized and depoliticized at particular moments during the research process. This article discusses the fieldwork experiences of two “apparent outsiders” to the studied diaspora community. Drawing from our experiences in multi-sited and comparative fieldwork on the Kurdish diaspora, we argue that rather than taking insider and outsider positions as a starting-point to understand researcher positionality, scholars need to look at particular moments of insiderness and outsiderness to grasp how the researcher’s assumed ethnicity becomes politicized and depoliticized during ethnographic fieldwork.     

Nation-building,masculinity and entrepreneurship: memories of the “liberation of Kosovo” in Switzerland

Since the end of the Kosovo War in 1999 and the “liberation” of the territory from Serbian forces, narratives about the “freedom struggle” have been crafted and defended both in Kosovo and abroad. The transmission of these memories forms part of a broader effort to create a “national” history of Kosovo and constitute an “Albanian imagined community”. This article scrutinizes the memories of the “liberation” produced by Albanian-speaking migrants who were active on behalf of their homeland in Switzerland. It explores the construction of masculinities within narratives collected via oral history interviews. In line with the literature on “nation” and gender in Kosovo, this research acknowledges the presence of two main forms of masculinity: the “heroic fighter” and the “pacifist”. However, it also demonstrates the crystallization of the “entrepreneur”, an alternative type who integrates the transnational “neoliberal” discourses and proposes a more positive image of “Albanian men” in Switzerland.     

Transnationalism and the state: recurring themes and new directions

Transnationalism is central to our understanding of the impact and experiences of global migration. The paper by Levitt and de la Dehesa (2003) explores the policies and strategies of the sending state in relation to their emigrants and investigates the reasons for policy convergences and divergences. While the issues examined in the paper continue to be relevant there are other areas and methodological approaches that need to be developed and/or included in contemporary studies of sending state led transnationalism explored in this piece. These include the need for research to take a multi-level approach to include the different actors involved and their interactions; longitudinal analysis that examines the heterogeneous and complex nature of contemporary migration flows, the changing situations in sending and destination countries and among migrants and the need to incorporate the second and subsequent generations into research.     

Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle

How do transnational ideas such as human rights approaches to violence against women become meaningful in local social settings? How do they move across the gap between a cosmopolitan awareness of human rights and local sociocultural understandings of gender and family? Intermediaries such as community leaders, nongovernmental organization participants, and social movement activists play a critical role in translating ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up. These are people who understand both the worlds of transnational human rights and local cultural practices and who can look both ways. They are powerful in that they serve as knowledge brokers between culturally distinct social worlds, but they are also vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by states and communities. In this article, I theorize the process of translation and argue that anthropological analysis of translators helps to explain how human rights ideas and interventions circulate around the world and transform social life.