Diaspora Studies 15 (2022) 25–51

brill.com/bdia

Re-orienting the Diaspora–Development Nexus

Sarah Peck | orcid: 0000-0001-5508-5601
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, The Centre for International
Development, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
[email protected]

Abstract

Since the 1990s diasporic communities have increasingly been recognized as agents
of development, with states, citizens, and the global development community keen
to harness their knowledge, skills, and economic capital. Approaches to the ‘diaspora
option’ tend to be rooted in the discourses, practices, and products of neoliberal glob-
alization. Yet the most recent decade of the 21st century has witnessed a backlash
against this cosmopolitanism. This paper pushes for a re-orientation of the diaspora-
development nexus that looks to respond to the contemporary realities of (and the
backlash against) neoliberal globalization: (re)bordering, European and North Ameri-
can ethnonationalism, nativist politics, and anti-migrant discourses. Thinking through
a post-diasporic lens foregrounds the interconnected geographies, the complex tempo-
ralities, and the (racialized) inequalities within the diaspora–development nexus. The
paper concludes that through a post-diasporic lens the diaspora–development nexus
can be centred on everyday social, cultural, material, and political circumstances and
experiences and feelings of belonging through multiple locales, re-orienting the nexus
to advance the everyday socio-economic, cultural, and political liberation of diasporic
communities.

Keywords

diaspora – post-diaspora – global development – transnationalism – migration –

belonging

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1 Introduction

There wasn’t much UK media response. ‘I saw no Dominican pictures, I

saw no Dominican people.’ She was left wondering how a natural disaster
on a commonwealth island, which left over 90 % of inhabitants without
roofs over their heads and claimed many lives in the process, could pass
under the radar in the UK …
Bristol’s response to [hurricane] Maria was solidarity: from bucket col-
lections at church choir performances in St George to fundraisers at the
Watershed, celebrating Dominican culture and raising awareness …
Marie-Annick explains that this ‘material tie’ is part of the diasporic
identity, and it connects Dominicans and other migrants to their home
countries.
There are also ‘spiritual ties’ amongst the community: a sense of
belonging ‘over there’ or ‘back home’. ‘I always saw it as being astride two
worlds. For me it was actually three.’ she says. ‘When you are made to feel
different, you look for your anchor somewhere else.’
‘But the interesting thing is that when I would go back to Guadeloupe, I
would again be made to feel different, because I didn’t master the Creole,
and you do things differently.’
Sherrie explains: ‘growing up in the UK you are loved and accepted,
but not necessarily loved and accepted. There can racism and often there
isn’t—so where do you fit in?’
jemal toussaint and georgia edwards, The Bristol Cable, 15 March 2019

Since the 1990s increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which dias-
poric communities can shape development processes, both in their country of
heritage and of residence.1 This has been considered thorough a variety of inter-
secting scales and spatialities, including the nation state, the global develop-
ment community, grassroots and community organizations, and on a personal
and family level. The comments by Marie-Annick and Sherrie in the excerpt
from the newspaper piece above about their experiences while responding to
hurricane Maria articulate the liminality, the interconnected temporalities, the
racialized inequalities, and feelings and politics of belonging that shape the
nature of diasporic engagement in development processes and humanitarian
responses.

1 Terms such as country of origin, country of heritage, and residence can present a problematic
binary, I use them carefully here to think about the multiple locales associated with diasporic
engagement.

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re-orienting the diaspora–development nexus 27

Dominant discourses of the diaspora–development nexus focus on dias-

poric communities from the ‘global South’2 residing in the ‘global North’ and
frame the relationship as one based on the potential of diasporic communities
to transfer (entrepreneurial) knowledge, skills, and investments, often in order
to offset the global inequalities premised by and accentuated in an increasingly
neoliberal world model (Tan et al., 2018; Trotz and Mullings, 2013). Driven by
Northern scholarship and multi and bilateral aid organizations, the ‘diaspora
option’ was crafted in a context of increasingly rapid and intense neoliberal
globalization, conceptually founded on theories of migration developed in the
global North and viewed through an international development paradigm in
which Southern countries are the recipients of Northern aid (Fiddian-
Qasmiyeh, 2020; Horner, 2020; Tan et al., 2018). Conceptually, the ‘diaspora
option’ is built on limited articulations of diaspora, with understandings
premising diasporic attachment to a static and immutable (Southern) home-
place, of diasporic (neoliberal entrepreneurial) success in their (Northern)
country of residence, and facilitated by the ease, speed, and intensity of trans-
national connections (Ho, 2011; Jons et al., 2015). Yet, the most recent decade
of the 21st century has witnessed unevenly increasing resistance to (aspects
of) neoliberal globalization, particularly evident in the popular discourses of
the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the USA. This
is juxtaposed by calls for scholarly work on migration and mobility to be theo-
rized from the South, a paradigm shift in development to foreground the global
over the international (Horner, 2020), and conceptual shifts in how diaspora
are thought about. The aim of this paper is to consider what more recent the-
orizations of and debates about diaspora may mean for our understandings of
diaspora-centred development.
Responding to concerns about how diaspora can be theorized in the con-
temporary context, recent interrogations of the idea of diaspora have resulted
in the development of post-diasporic theorizing, which aims to move ‘con-
versations about place, time, belonging and displacement into a new con-
ceptual space ‘beyond diaspora’’ (Scafe, 2019: 96; Rollins, 2010: 246). These
scholarly developments in understanding diaspora as a concept are signif-
icant for understanding the diaspora-development nexus in the context of

2 Whilst there is multiple ‘Souths’ (and Norths), the employment of the term in development
discourse equates the global South geographically to countries and regions of Asia, Africa,
Latin America, the Middle East, and the Pacific, but can also be used to connate ‘countries
that have been marginalized in the international political and economic system’ (Fiddian-
Qasmiyeh, 2020; Medie and Kang, 2018: 37–38).

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changing articulations of globalization and migration. The paper begins by

providing an overview of the rise of diasporic-centred development in the
context of neoliberal globalization. It will then move on to examining con-
ceptualizations of diaspora and post-diaspora, contending that engaging with
more recent post-diasporic theorizing foregrounds the interconnected geogra-
phies, the complex temporalities, and the (racialized) inequalities within the
diaspora–development nexus. By thinking with post-diasporic theory, the
diaspora–development nexus becomes centred on everyday social, cultural,
material, and political circumstances, and experiences and feelings of belong-
ing through multiple locales, re-orienting the nexus to advance the everyday
socio-economic, cultural, and political liberation of diasporic communities.
The paper concludes that through this articulation approaching diasporic-led
development by way of post-diasporic theorizing can interrogate the relation-
ship between global development and ‘domestic’ immigration policies, offering
opportunities to resist increasing ethnonationalism and hostile environment
policies through the lens of global development and articulates the wider need
to consider the racialized logics and inequalities that are reproduced via dis-
courses and practices of development.

2 The Creation of Diasporic Development Agents

States, the development community, families, and individuals have become

concerned with how the movement of people (and less tangibly resources)
shapes ‘D/development,’ and how this mobility can be leveraged to be mutu-
ally beneficial (Gamlen et al., 2019). Whilst the idea of what development
is remains contested, this paper is led by Wilson (2012: 4) who conceptual-
izes development as ‘understood broadly as incorporating the whole complex
of unequal material relationships and processes which structure engagement
between the Global South and Global North, as well as the primary discur-
sive framework within which these relationships have been constructed for
over 60 years.’ This conceptualization foregrounds varied inequalities in our
understanding of D/development, as well as articulating that global develop-
ment, and its associated industry, is created within (and sustains) these rela-
tions.
The migration–development nexus considers the impact of migration on
various scales of development through the intersecting lenses of socio-
economic position, gender, race, and labour value, and conversely of devel-
opment on migration. A key feature of the nexus is the development of the
diasporic subject, a group of people outside of their country of origin who are

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actively connected to and invested in it in some way (Tan et al., 2018). While
there are many historical and contemporary examples of diasporic mobiliza-
tions ‘from below’, this paper will focus on how diasporic communities have
been made into agents of development by multi and bilateral institutions and
nation states, with these agencies looking to harness, shape, develop, and repro-
duce organic processes of transnational engagement often based on obliga-
tions and affective connections (Boyle and Ho, 2017). The rise of the dias-
pora as agents for development must be understood contextually, shaped by
the inequalities of contemporary neoliberal globalization, digital technologies,
and international travel, yet also embedded within racialized labour exploita-
tion, colonial pasts, and coloniality in the present (Trotz and Mullings, 2013).
Engaging diasporic communities in development rhetorically aims to respond
to critiques of whiteness, power imbalances, ownership, and participation lev-
elled at the global development industry (Ademolu, 2021; Boyle and Ho, 2017;
Mohan, 2008; Wilson, 2019).
In the development arena, diasporic-led development policy has become
more visible over the last 20 years, part of a shifting trend that attempts to
invert the previous brain drain discourse. In the late 1990s and early 2000s,
key thinkers recognized that diasporic communities continued to be influential
in their homelands in numerous ways, from the transfer of professional skills
from Silicon Valley to developing professional scientific networks (Meyer et al.,
1997; Nyberg-Sorenson et al., 2003; Saxenian, 2007). This placed diasporic-led
development firmly in the international development paradigm, with dias-
poric communities in the global North seen to have a role to play in ‘develop-
ing’ the global South. This echoes wider dominant scholarship on migration in
which the North is positioned as a ‘magnet for Southern migrants’, minimizing
the developmental impact of internal and south–south migration (Chikanda
and Crush, 2018; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, 2018:
9; Pisarevskay et al., 2020). Alongside this linear geography, realization that the
quantity and resilience of remittances are often key for accessing education,
healthcare and other social welfare, pushed the diaspora into being potential
agents for (Southern) development in the eyes of states and multi and bilateral
institutions.
These insights coincided with a policy environment shaped by the good gov-
ernance agenda, ideas of social capital, and a shift towards partnerships and
skills development, with the World Bank describing diasporas as like discov-
ering ‘an untapped pool of oil’ (Trotz and Mullings, 2013: 162), a discursive
reminder of the diaspora as human capital who can repair the damage done
by macro-economic reforms (Boyle and Ho, 2017; Mohan, 2008). Drawing on
experiences from Israel and China, the World Bank was an early and vocal advo-

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cate for the diaspora option, with diasporic communities positioned as having
a comparative advantage through their intimate local knowledge, flexibility,
and ability to transcend a (potentially) corrupt and bureaucratic state (Brinker-
hoff, 2011; Pellerin and Mullings, 2013). With this promotion of the potential
of diasporic communities as agents of development bilateral institutions such
as usaid, dfid, and giz,3 developed and funded diaspora–development pro-
grammes, reinforcing narratives of diasporas as forms of mobile human capital
to be leveraged towards development outcomes in the global South.
Multi and bilateral institutions have engaged with diasporic-led develop-
ment to enhance and facilitate the (neoliberal) logic of their enterprises (Trotz
and Mullings, 2013). These activities have predominantly been based on under-
standings of continued diasporic attachment to a static and immutable (South-
ern) homeplace, of diasporic (neoliberal entrepreneurial) success in their
(Northern) country of residence, and facilitated by the ease, speed, and inten-
sity of transnational connections (Ho, 2011; Jons et al., 2015). Nation states
themselves have also become increasingly engaged with their diasporic com-
munities as they attempt to survive (and thrive) within the global neolib-
eral order, termed by Gamlen (2019) ‘human geopolitics’ (see also Agarwala
2016). The exponential rise of diaspora strategies, infrastructures, and min-
istries in many nations across the world since the 1990s reflects both the impor-
tance of nation-building and the extra-territoriality of the nation state and acts
as an opportunity to increase competitiveness in the global economy (Boyle
and Ho, 2017; Gamlen, 2019; Mullings, 2011). Diaspora engagement includes
facilitating channels for remittances, ease of economic investment and prop-
erty purchase, political interventions, and changes in citizenship regulations
(Agarwala, 2016; Dickinson, 2017; Ho, 2015). These more tangible channels are
supported by state investment to enhance social, affective, and cultural con-
nections between diasporic communities and the nation state, for example
through homeland tourism and investment in new religious architecture over-
seas.
Discourses on diasporic-centred development arose within the context of
neoliberal globalization and a migration–development paradigm that gives
primacy to the global North (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Tan et al., 2018). Theo-
rization about the role of diasporic communities in development processes has

3 usaid: The United States Agency for International Development; dfid: Department for Inter-
national Development (UK), merged with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development
Office (fcdo) in 2020; giz: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (Ger-
man Development agency).

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re-orienting the diaspora–development nexus 31

primarily been done in and from the perspective of the global North, reflecting
the problematic geopolitics of knowledge production and the uneven nature
of academic scholarship, with approaches to understanding diaspora-centred
development dominated by theorizations of diaspora as a unified group of
migrants tied together by shared ancestry, social and cultural values, and sense
of nationalism, oriented to an immutable homeland (Brah, 1996; Rollins, 2010;
Tan et al., 2018). The idea of diaspora can then (re)produce binaries between
‘home’ and ‘host’, essentializing the homogeneity of diasporic communities
and idealizing their connections to home (Beckles-Raymond, 2020; Rollins,
2010).
While these perspectives have been critiqued by cultural and sociological
scholars (Alexander, 2017; Brah, 1996; Brubaker, 2005), they have continued
to dominate development discourse and policy. Building from more complex
deployments of diaspora, which include engaging with diaspora as a category
of practice to reveal its ‘critical and political potentialities’ (Alexander, 2017:
1547; Brubaker, 2005), invocating diaspora as a conceptual trope to disrupt
racialized claims about the feelings and politics of (national) belonging and
discourses of ‘fixed origins’ (Brah, 1996:180; Hall, 2017; Gilroy, 1993), and using
diaspora to explore the historically contingent ‘migratory grooves’ and capital
that shape diasporic experience (Alexander, 2017: 1553), shows there is a need to
think about how theorizations of diaspora-centred development can respond
to patterns of resistance to globalization, changing geographies and temporali-
ties of migration, and scholarly calls to theorize migration from a Southern per-
spective. As Trotz and Mullings (2013) argue, notions of diaspora have moved
a long way from ideas of exile and the impossibility of return, and as Jons et
al. (2015: 113) comment, ‘Recent geographical studies have thus stressed how
diasporas are socially, culturally and materially constructed and constituted by
identities that are dynamic and often “in-between”’. The next section of this
paper explores the potential of the concept of post-diaspora for further theo-
rizing the diasporic experience.

2.1 Post-diaspora
Diaspora as a concept has mutated, been reconfigured, and revolutionized
since its original deployment, and the recent emergence of theorizations of
the post-diasporic are responding to concerns about how diaspora can be
employed in the contemporary era marked by increase in and velocity of glob-
alization and transnationalism (Alexander, 2017; Brubaker, 2005; Dunn and
Scafe, 2020) with conceptualizations of a post-diaspora or post-diasporic com-
munities and politics increasingly employed to theorize the positions, mobili-
ties, and entanglements within a world in (constant) motion (Lascelles, 2020;

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Pearce, 2020). Post-diaspora draws attention to the geographical fluidities, tem-

poral complexities, inequalities, and emancipatory potential that the current
mobilizations of diaspora, particularly those employed within development
discourse, may lack.
By interrogating the dominance of roots and routes, engaging with post-
diaspora does not dispense with the idea of diaspora, rather it acts as an exten-
sion, a way of going beyond previous invocations of diaspora (Scafe, 2019;
Rollins, 2010). Post-diaspora is not a rejection of the idea of diaspora, but
rather trying to find a way to ‘extend the boundaries to enable inclusion of
new responses to new realities and new ways of being’ (Spencer, 2019: 125).
In its attention to the new realities of globalization, post-diaspora provides a
space to attend to the specifics of contemporary neoliberal globalization and
responses to it. This globalization has taken place, as Yuval-Davies et al. (2019:
10) comment ‘under the hegemony of neoliberal and political economic order’
serving to further entrench inequalities and uneven development whilst also
increasing economic interdependency. Responses to this neoliberal globaliza-
tion and the ‘migration and refugee crisis’ have seen the second decade of the
21st century marked by calls for deglobalization (Bishop and Payne, 2021). This
includes processes of rebordering, with controlling national borders reposi-
tioned as an act of resistance to globalization, and increasingly nativist political
discourses and practices in which the cosmopolitanism of neoliberal global-
ization is reconstituted to include increasingly restrictive border regimes and
racialized hierarchies of mobility (Fraser, 2017; Yuval-Davies et al., 2019). These
transitions are juxtaposed by theorizations of development that have moved
from the international to the global, reinforcing relational understandings of
development that think of the planetary system as an interconnected whole,
alongside scholarly attention that has emphasized the need to decentre north-
ern perspectives on migration (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Horner, 2020). It is in
this context that post-diaspora becomes more relevant for exploring a new con-
ceptual space beyond diaspora.
Post-diaspora is, as Dunn and Scafe (2019: 3) write in their introduction to
a special issue African-Caribbean women: Migration, Diaspora, Post-diaspora,
‘neither a departure, nor a continuation of contemporary uses of diaspora:
rather the “post” signals a new future, by focusing on mobility both as a defin-
ing feature of Caribbean identities and a route to self-fashioning for African-
Caribbean women’. The term post-diaspora has been deployed to extend aca-
demic imaginations into a variety of aspects of more-than-diasporic life, in-
cluding as a way of articulating engagement with second- and third-generation
migrants (Chapman, 2004; Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking, 2011), processes of
assimilation (Laguerre, 2017), conceptualizing a return to the ‘homeland’ (Stew-

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re-orienting the diaspora–development nexus 33

art, 2019), and the conscious or forced distancing of an emigrated population

from their country of heritage (Laguerre, 2017). Three key features of post-
diasporic theorizing, first the fluidity of the migratory and diasporic expe-
rience, second the interconnected temporalities, and finally the inequalities
engendered by diaspora and the emancipatory hope of the post-diaspora, will
each be explored in turn.
Post-diaspora highlights the liminality, rhizomatic, and liberatory nature of
diasporic experience and the complex geographies of migration (Lascelles,
2020; Scafe and Dunn, 2020). In her reading of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time
through a post-diasporic lens, Scafe (2019) sees the production of a post-
diasporic space that complicates the triangular Black Atlantic. While the novel
explores the geographies of the Black Atlantic, the post-diasporic entangle-
ments develop new spaces from which to speak, spaces through which the
characters are both constructed yet also separated from (Scafe, 2019). For Scafe
(2019), post-diaspora then sees the building of identities through fleeting,
ephemeral moments that are historically contingent and shaped by gender and
generational divides. Fluidity and liminality run through conceptualizations of
post-diaspora, it is about, for Spencer (2019: 126) ‘the formation of a commu-
nity of people who have now begun to embrace notions of difference while
at the same time charting a course of and for unity and togetherness, regard-
less of the “away” space they occupy’. These fluid geographies are exemplified
in Pearce’s (2020) reading of Nicole Awais’ ‘Black Ooze’, with the viscosity of
the ooze in Awais’ pieces representing the interconnected timescapes of the
post-diaspora, the ongoing adjustments of boundaries, and way that aspects
of place adhere to diasporic communities. Post-diaspora then moves away
from defined origins and singular destinations to enable further explorations
of fluid geographies, ‘post-diaspora points to a liminal space which is multi-
plicitous and “rhizomatic” (Dunn and Scafe, 2019: 3), and possibly more lib-
eratory, allowing readers to reimagine diaspora productively’ (Lascelles, 2020:
228).
Post-diasporic theorizations also mark a temporal juncture with theories of
diaspora, not in the sense that the diasporic moment has ended but rather
that diasporic life can be explored through the local conditions that came
after movement and the experiences of living with the legacy of movement(s)
(Noxolo, 2020). Post-diasporic theorizing accentuates the interconnectedness
of diasporic temporalities, exploring the past as it shapes the contemporary
moment (Scafe, 2019), and of reading the past, present, and future together,
understanding them as interwoven (Spencer, 2019). The post-diaspora does not
mark an endpoint rather it can be used to explore ongoing diasporic entan-
glements and understand them to be historically situated (Alexander, 2017;

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Noxolo, 2020). As Noxolo (2020:136) comments ‘the post-diasporic community

is defined in terms of the local conditions that come after movement, the longer
process of settling, building, looking back to the “homeland” and looking for-
ward to life in the “hostland”’. This highlights the intertwined temporalities of
settling and looking forward, whilst also looking back (Noxolo, 2020). The inter-
connected temporalities engendered through post-diaspora are also echoed by
Scafe (2019) with the mother’s Black feminist political stance in Zadie Smith’s
Swing Time reflecting a post-diasporic politics of Black internationalist politics
of the past in the present.
Post-diaspora has also been used to emancipate and extend the spaces of
diasporic activity to reflect a potentially emancipatory ideal, with Laguerre
(2017) mobilizing the term to reject the inequalities inherent in defining the
diaspora and using the term to actively oppose the reductive contours of dias-
pora (Scafe, 2019). Laguerre (2017) understands diaspora to be a mode of
marginalization, both in the country of heritage and of residence, with dias-
poric communities often subjugated in both spaces. Diaspora then reproduces
inequalities and the subordinate position of migrants within many societies,
reproducing hegemonic constructions of white identity with diaspora infe-
rior to those racialized as white (Beckles-Raymond, 2020). Using a citizenship
lens, Laguerre (2017) argues for transnational dual citizenship in which indi-
viduals are able to fully participate in the host and homeland, with notions
of citizenship based on rights, duties, and obligations rather than more fluid
theorizations of citizenship founded on lived experience. In the context of
South Africa, Lee (2009) ponders if post-diasporic considerations can reposi-
tion Africa centrally, rather than at the edges of the Black Atlantic, challenging
global geographies of power. The progressive potential of post-diaspora also
extends to notions of gender with scholars considering how engaging with
post-diaspora interrogates our understanding of diasporic women, engender-
ing emotions and intimacy in diasporic theorizing (Beckles-Raymond, 2020;
Scafe, 2019;). In using post-diaspora to mark a return to a country of heritage,
Stewart (2019) mobilizes the concept to explore the home as foreign, the feel-
ings of fracture and exclusion from the ‘homeland’, and the inequalities expe-
rienced as a female academic situated in both the transnational spaces of host
and homeland.
As Spencer (2019: 125) articulates ‘postdiaspora as a concept contains the
foundation seeds of the concept of diaspora but extends the boundaries to
enable the inclusion of new responses to new realities and new ways of being,
within a space that continues to transform and evolve’. The aim of post-
diasporic theorizing is to extend conceptualizations of diaspora to respond to
the experiences of contemporary neoliberal globalization. In doing so, post-

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re-orienting the diaspora–development nexus 35

diaspora highlights three key features: first the fluid geographies of the migra-
tory and diasporic experience, second the interconnected temporalities, and
finally the inequalities engendered by diaspora and the emancipatory hope of
the post-diaspora. This paper will probe each of these areas in the context of the
diaspora option in global development, aiming to (re)draw attention to three
hitherto neglected dynamics of the diaspora–development nexus.

3 Post-diasporic Theorizing and the Diaspora–Development Nexus

The fourth section in this paper applies post-diasporic theorizing to the

diaspora–development nexus, considering how the insights detailed above
may shape our understanding of diasporic engagement in development pro-
cesses. Diasporic engagement with global development can occur at multiple
interconnected sites, including the development community, the nation state,
through civic space, and in everyday social practices. Dominant development
discourse is predominantly based on instrumentalized and reductive under-
standings of diaspora, with theories of post-diaspora offering an opportunity
to respond to the challenges of contemporary neoliberal (de)globalization.
Bringing post-diasporic theorizing into conversation with the diaspora option
in global development highlights first, the rhizomatic entanglements through
which diasporic engagement with development occurs beyond the home/host
binary, second its shifts the temporalities of the diaspora–development nexus
to articulate the connections between diasporic-centred development and
(post-diasporic) feelings and politics of belonging, and finally post-diasporic
theorizing foregrounds how racialized inequalities are reproduced through
the diasporic-centred development and the emancipatory potential of the
diaspora–development nexus.

3.1 Fluid Geographies

‘I always saw it as being astride two worlds. For me it was actually three.’
jemal toussaint and georgia edwards, The Bristol Cable, 15 March 2019

A key tenet of post-diasporic theorizing is the fluidity of diasporic experience,

of moving beyond a single place of origin and destination, to focus on rhi-
zomatic connections, geographies, and entanglements (Lascelles, 2020; Nox-
olo, 2020). This more relational approach is articulated by Tan et al., (2018:
3) in their understanding of diasporic interventions as everyday transnational
social practices, where ‘transnational social spaces are the multiple interlock-

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ing networks that cross borders through which transnational actors operate,
sustained and continuous ties, different institutions, made up of relations (eco-
nomic, social, familial) and symbolic identities (feelings of belonging) and par-
ticipation (actual activities e.g., voting)’. This spatially more expansive sense
of a diasporic community can also be thought of as webs that connect peo-
ple to others and to particular (unsettled) localities. Thinking through these
webs emphasizes diverse linkages and mobilities beyond the economic, paying
more attention to the everyday social, cultural and political connections, flows,
and pathways that are constitutive of and articulate transnational relationships
(Ho, 2017). By engaging with the ideas of the post-diasporic, diasporic engage-
ment in development can be then thought of as a series of entanglements, a
way of conceiving of ties to different unsettled locales (Noxolo, 2020; Tan et
al., 2018). This brings two points to the fore: first the importance of thinking of
the relational geographies of the diaspora–development nexus and second the
entanglements beyond the tangible, particularly the importance of emotions,
intimacy, and care for diasporic-centred development.
Attending to these rhizomatic post-diasporic spaces of the diaspora-
development nexus is important for understanding remittances in the con-
temporary context. It is widely recognized that remittances are a key aspect
of the diaspora–development nexus, contributing to personal and familial
development, particularly in the spheres of education, housing, and healthcare
(Adugna, 2018; Hammond, 2013). Remittances have been conceptualized as
reciprocal affective investments, a form of (unsettled) diasporic agency within
the globalized economy, with money inextricable from guilt, responsibility,
yearning, attachment, and other cultural, social, and political practices (Bur-
man, 2002; Page and Mercer, 2012). Understanding remittances not solely as a
financial transfer between people in different settled locales neglects the geo-
graphical fluidity of these connections, with migration, and subsequent remit-
tances understood as part of transnational family and community strategies
to improve the quality of life and as a reciprocal relationship with the remit-
tee, as a flow of goods between (transnational) migrants and their (transna-
tional) families (Adugna, 2018; Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environ-
ment (ssahe), 2020). Remittances are then intimate transnational entangle-
ments, which are situated in historical patterns of exploitation, migration, and
contemporary racialized global capitalism (Bhattacharya, 2018), unsettling the
artificial binary between the mobile migrant and those who remain at home
and articulating the fluid geographies of diasporic engagement. At the scale of
the nation state the complexity and intimacy of remitting has been reflected
in the ways in which more recent diasporic engagement does not overtly cen-
tre on remittances, but rather on (strategically) engendering a sense of recog-

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nition, connection, and belonging between diasporic communities and the

nation state and the creation of a ‘diasporic identity’ (Abramson, 2019; Agar-
wala, 2016). The importance of nationalism within this diasporic engagement
is countered by arguments that a reliance on patriotism may produce limited
engagement, with states and others instead primarily acting as facilitators to
diasporic (International Organisation for Migration (iom), 2021).
The liminality and fluidity highlighted by post-diasporic theorizing is also
integral to understandings of diasporic civic space and associational life. Schol-
arship on hometown associations has considered how to theorize diasporic
associational life beyond the host/home dichotomy (Mercer et al., 2008).
Notions of liminality must not be restricted to an in-betweeness between a
country of residence and one of heritage, rather liminality allows for explo-
ration of the multiple connections between different diasporic communities
in different locales (Bada, 2015; Lamba Nieves, 2018; Strunk, 2014). Fluidity also
shapes the formation of diasporic associational life, as Mercer et al. (2008:
7) comment, ‘the performance of Bali dances in London and the collection
of money to improve health care in Cameroon are simultaneous and insep-
arable manifestations of the diasporic condition’, with these more fluid con-
ceptualizations of diaspora engagement in development becoming even more
relevant when thinking about the digital spaces of diasporic-centred develop-
ment (Bernal, 2018; Dickinson, 2020). This brings to the fore the interconnected
geographies of the diaspora-development nexus, highlighting that develop-
ment is not just something that happens in the global South (Horner, 2020;
Jones, 2000; Potter, 2001), as Willis (2005: 16) comments ‘This distinction
[between global North and South] fails to recognize the dynamism of all soci-
eties and the continued desire by populations for improvements (not necessar-
ily in material goods). It also fails to consider the experiences of social exclusion
that are found within supposedly “developed” countries or regions.’
The turn to the more unsettled geographies of diasporic engagement in
development processes, emphasized by post-diasporic theorizing, can also be
seen in the desire of some nation states to engage diasporas living in the
global South. Having previously centred people of Jamaican heritage living in
Canada, the USA, and the UK, in 2020 the Jamaica government re-formulated
and expanded its global diaspora council to include people of Jamaican her-
itage living in China, Antigua, Chile, Kuwait, and Namibia amongst others.
This shift from facilitating diaspora engagement solely from those residing in
the global North is also evident in India’s 2021 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Dias-
pora Day) convention, the Know India programme, and the first Girmitiya
Conference held in September 2021, all emphasizing the importance of engag-
ing with the Indian diaspora in Girmitiya countries (countries that Indian-

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indentured labourers were forcibly moved to under colonial rule, such as the
Caribbean islands, Mauritius, Fiji, and Guyana). This emphasis on South–South
and intra-continental diasporic engagement unsettles the traditional scholarly
and imaginary geographies of both migration and development studies, echo-
ing work that emphasizes the reshaping of development imaginaries through
critical engagement with the contemporary role of non-Western actors, show-
ing that solidarity, shared experiences, and identities are important constructs
in South–South development, but that these commonalities can exist in tan-
dem with (new) hierarchies of power (Laurie and Baillie Smith, 2018; Mawdsley,
2014).
Thinking with a post-diasporic lens then has the potential to provide insights
into how the geographically fluid entanglements that span social, political,
cultural, and emotional ties to multiple locales unsettle the binary between
home/homeland and North/South, with diasporic-centred development em-
bedded in and the product of globalized relations. Understandings of the
diaspora-development nexus cannot solely be through flows of resources from
North to South, rather the nexus is influenced by historical and contemporary
global hierarchies of power, shaped by experiences in both global North and
South, and reflects connections to multiple locales.

3.2 Interconnected Temporalities

‘how a natural disaster on a commonwealth island … could pass under

the radar in the UK.’
jemal toussaint and georgia edwards, The Bristol Cable, 15 March 2019

One of the main abilities of post-diaspora is its ability to shift the tempo-
ral focus of the diaspora-development nexus. Whilst diaspora is traditionally
associated with movements, journeys, and looking back, post-diaspora marks
a temporal transition. At its simplest ‘post’ conveys the after, but it is impor-
tant to understand the post in post-diaspora as not solely an endpoint or a
period of time that occurs after (re)settlement, but as more complex tem-
poral entanglements that bring together the past, present, and future (Nox-
olo, 2020). Post-diasporic theorizing shifts the tempo-scape of the diaspora-
development nexus to emphasize the ‘conditions that come after movement’,
and the intertwined processes of settling, looking back, and looking forward
(Noxolo, 2020: 136). This is an integral, yet under-recognized, aspect of the
diaspora–development nexus, and particularly crucial at a time of increas-
ing nativist politics and anti-migrant sentiment in much of Europe and North
America.

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The implications of the local conditions after movement are crucial to the
ways in which diasporic communities engage in development process, with
associational life deeply reflective of and connected to experiences of orga-
nizing at home and dependent on the local conditions after movement, with
the economic and social insecurity experienced by many migrants integral to
their engagement with hometown associations, with networks of reciprocity
constrained by the marginalized position of many migrants (Bada, 2015; Mer-
cer, et al. 2008; Strunk, 2014; Lamba Nieves, 2018; Smyth, 2017). Conditions
after movement also shape forms of diasporic civic engagement, with associa-
tional life shaped by the host nation, as recently documented in popular culture
by Steve McQueen (2020) through the police violence directed towards Black
community organizers in his film Mangrove. The temporal interconnections
that shape diasporic engagement in civic space and development are demon-
strated by Chaudhary (2018), who contends that diasporic engagement with
development concerns is linked to historical and contemporary processes of
settlement, with post-colonial ties stimulating the development of diasporic
development organizations through legal status, familiarity, and kinship ties,
as well as greater orientation to the homeland through the discursive posi-
tion of the former colonizer. London is a key locus for diasporic organizations
through both its connections to its former Empire and as its contemporary role
as a major site of the global development industry. This produces an environ-
ment in which the doing of development is normalized and facilitated, with
Chaudhary (2018) commenting that some diasporic organizations are setup by
individuals who have previously worked with other ngo s in the city.
The post-diasporic lens then draws attention to the way historical and
contemporary migration and migration governance shape the diaspora–
development nexus. This is particularly pertinent due to the increase in hostile
Anglo-American and European immigration regimes over the last 20 years. This
increasingly inhospitable environment for migrants has paradoxically coin-
cided with celebrations of the diaspora–development nexus (ssahe, 2020; Wil-
son, 2012). In Great Britain, for example, while the hostile environment termi-
nology is relatively new, the violence directed towards immigrant populations
by the British state is rooted in colonial imaginaries and immigration laws from
the late 1940s onwards designed to restrict immigration to Britain from many
of its (racialized) colonies, conflating Britishness with whiteness, with dias-
poric communities, the racialized other (El-Enany, 2020; Reddie, 2019; Wilson,
2012). This problematizing of migration contributes to the ongoing denial of
the violence and exploitation of colonialism (and contemporary coloniality),
and the links between colonialism, racialized global capitalism, and contem-
porary migration (ssahe, 2020; Gutierrez Rodriguez, 2018; Mayblin and Turner,

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2021), with the discourses and policies associated with the hostile environment
increasing the insecurity, discrimination, and marginalization felt by racialized
communities living in Britain regardless of their immigration status (El-Enany,
2020; ssahe, 2020).
The interconnected temporalities of the post-diasporic lens can reveal how
colonial and post-colonial links, and the denial of this violence, are shaping
both the global inequalities which the diaspora-development nexus is try-
ing to respond to and the migration patterns through which the diaspora–
development nexus is formed. Considering practices of remitting in the context
of local conditions after movement emphasizes the connections between race,
insecurity, and global development, as Mohan (2008: 472) comments ‘demands
from family … as ignoring the real hardship people have to endure in terms of
low incomes, racism and general insecurity’. This is not to demonize the finan-
cial and other demands families may place on diaspora members, rather it is
to highlight the paradoxical nature of their lives, of presumed wealth, and also
hardship. As diaspora members remit to their families and wider communities
in the name of development, they are a part of historical and contemporary
relations based on coloniality. Similarly, migrants and refugees, while coping
with the hostile environment in the UK, continue to engage with develop-
ment in their country of heritage, for example through remittances, political
activism, or civic participation as members of rhizomatic post-diasporic spaces
(Bekaj et al., 2018; ssahe, 2020). Whilst transnational engagement continues in
precarious, marginalizing, and discriminatory conditions, research has argued
that diasporic engagement in development activities is greater when dias-
poric communities experience greater stability in their country of residence
(Kleist, 2014; Mohan, 2008). Yet this stability should be understood transna-
tionally, with Hammond (2013) contending that for some diasporic communi-
ties feeling settled and being able to access welfare, housing, and education is
seen as a way of driving transnational engagement rather than mobilized as
a form of integration into the ‘host’ nation. Greater stability is pursued, not
for the purposes of integration into an unwelcoming culture, but rather as a
way of facilitating transnational activities (Hammond, 2013). The post-diaspora
then situates the diaspora–development nexus within the global inequalities
formed through slavery, exploitation, and colonialism, which underlie much
of contemporary migration and formation of contemporary racialized capital-
ism (Bhattacharya, 2018; ssahe, 2020). This shifts the temporality normally
seen in theorizations of the diaspora–development nexus from an empha-
sis on journeys, movements, and extra-territorial transnational experiences to
approaches that include the more distant legacy of moving and the conditions
after movement.

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3.3 Foregrounds Inequalities and Emancipatory Hope

‘growing up in the UK you are loved and accepted, but not necessarily
loved and accepted.’
jemal toussaint and georgia edwards, The Bristol Cable, 15 March 2019

The third insight from post-diasporic theorizing this paper will probe is how it
foregrounds and makes visible inequalities within the diaspora–development
nexus, and the emancipatory hope it offers. In Laguerre’s (2017) critique of dias-
pora, he articulates how diaspora is synonymous with racialized hierarches
of belonging, boundary maintenance, and projections of deserving migrants.
International agencies have engaged in various ways with diasporic communi-
ties, with for example Justine Greening, the then secretary of state for Interna-
tional Development in Great Britain stating in 2014:

There is no doubt that African diaspora are absolutely key to achieving

this, the diaspora have played and will continue to play a huge role in
Africa’s rise … I’ve said the diaspora play a fundamental role in devel-
oping their countries of origin. I believe this is because, quite simply,
diaspora organizations thoroughly understand both the challenges and
the opportunities in Africa. You have more natural links than any other
organizations. You have the unique insights, perspectives and extensive
in-country networks.
justine greening, 18 June 2014

A key aspect of engaging with the post-diaspora is the attention it allows us

to pay to the inequalities engendered through diaspora, encouraging a critical
engagement with how the global development community mobilizes diaspora
groups. Diaspora initiatives, such as those governed by the World Bank, can be
seen as oikonomic projects, attempting to modernize, civilize, and reproduce
Western values in the global South (Boyle and Ho, 2017). The development of
the diaspora–development nexus then can be understood as part of an exten-
sion of Western governmentality and biopower on to states in the global South,
with the aim of civilizing and normalizing economies and polities that are seen
as threatening and as a means through which to securitize development (Boyle
and Ho, 2017; Hammond, 2013; Kleist, 2014; Wilson, 2012).
For international development agencies, their diaspora engagement pro-
grammes have the potential to reinforce diasporic inequalities and racial hier-
archies, reproducing ideas of what it means to be a migrant, the contributions
required to be a ‘respectable’ racialized person, and the desire to promote a

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(white) version of civility and modernity (Wilson, 2012; 2019). This is partic-
ularly the case for the Muslim community in Great Britain who are repeat-
edly given the job of ‘civilizing’ those at home and taking Western values with
them, whilst paradoxically being further excluded from British society through
schemes such as Prevent, and other Islamphobic rhetoric linking Islam to ter-
rorism and gendered inequalities (Wilson, 2012; 2019). The racial logics integral
to the diaspora–development nexus are perhaps more contradictory because
the nexus itself has been positioned as an antidote to the whiteness of devel-
opment, bringing racialized communities into the global development com-
munity, yet these attempts to engage the diaspora can also be understood as
reproducing racialized hierarchies of belonging (Ademolu, 2021; Mercer et al.,
2008; Wilson, 2012; 2019). Inequalities and hierarchies of belonging are also
integral to the crafting of diasporic identity by nation states, with diaspora com-
munities created on the basis of socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, and
respectability (Agarwala, 2016; Ho, 2011; Jons et al., 2015; Dickinson, 2012; 2017;
Wilson, 2012).
Whilst providing a space to attend to the inequalities reproduced by the
diaspora–development nexus, post-diaspora also provides some direction for
emancipatory hope (Laguerre, 2017; Lee, 2009; Scafe, 2019). In foreground-
ing inequalities, the post-diasporic lens encourages viewing the contemporary
migration environment as a key facet of global development, acknowledging
that increased interest with diasporic-led development has co-existed with
enhanced anti-immigration policies in many countries of the global North, sus-
tained at both national and supranational scales (Wilson, 2012; 2019). At the
scale of the nation state and the global development industry, a post-diasporic
lens draws attention to the potentially extractive nature of diasporic-led devel-
opment. Responding to the conditions experienced by diasporic communi-
ties then becomes an important aspect of diasporic-led development, with
Kamina Johnson-Smith, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade in
Jamaica explicitly connecting diasporic wellbeing with sustainable develop-
ment in Jamaica’s recent draft (version 11) of its diaspora policy:

The policy embodies the commitment of the Government of Jamaica to

the nation’s development and the Diaspora’s well-being. In particular, it
addresses issues and concerns of the Diaspora while assisting them to live
in harmony and to prosper in the countries where they and their descen-
dants reside. Secondly, it seeks to optimize the Diaspora’s contribution to
Jamaica’s sustainable development.
Government of Jamaica, 2 March 2020

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The policy goes onto detail particular host country challenges, the Windrush
scandal in Britain, immigration legislation in the United States, and racially dis-
criminatory carding in Canada. For Laguerre (2017), the emancipatory nature
of the post-diasporic condition articulates the arrival of a (citizenship) status
in which full participation in both the country of heritage and of residence
is possible. This stance encourages states and bilateral and multilateral agen-
cies to understand development beyond the leveraging of diasporic communi-
ties through remittances, knowledge transfer or homeland tourism, but rather
as (full) participation in society, thinking about the ways in which peoples’
social, cultural, political, and material circumstances may affect their experi-
ences, and ‘how people negotiate rights, responsibilities, identities, and belong-
ing through (transnational) relations with others’ (Kallio et al., 2020: 1). The
diaspora–development nexus then becomes oriented to everyday social, cul-
tural, material, and political circumstances, and experiences and feelings of
belonging through multiple locales, articulating more readily with the idea
of global development (Horner, 2020; Willis, 2005). The emancipatory hope
engendered through post-diasporic theorizing can re-orient the nexus to con-
test the discrimination felt by diasporic communities in everyday social life and
to advance the everyday socio-economic, cultural, and political liberation of
diasporic communities in multiple unsettled locales (Laguerre, 2017).
It becomes then important to question what a post-diasporic approach to
the diaspora–development nexus may do to conceptualizations of develop-
ment. The argument put forward above, that a post-diasporic lens has the
potential to understand development as the advancement of the everyday
socio-economic, cultural, and political liberation of diasporic communities in
multiple unsettled locales resonates with post-development theories in trying
to shift development away from Western theories of modernization and recog-
nizing the importance of everyday experiences, subjectivities, and materiali-
ties. In the post-diasporic–development nexus, development has the potential
to become about economic, political, and social inequalities and relations that
intersect on a global scale, their histories, and contemporary resonances. This
perhaps also resonates with some of the elements of degrowth theories, for
example conviviality and wellbeing and of pluriversal scholarship (Escobar,
2015; Hickel, 2020).

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4 Conclusion

This paper has considered how post-diasporic theorizing can reorient the
diaspora–development nexus. Developed in an era of rampant neoliberal glob-
alization, based on an international development paradigm and Northern the-
ories of migration, the diaspora option has traditionally focused on how dias-
poric communities can be leveraged for development to offset the inequal-
ities driven by racialized historical exploitation, global capitalism, and con-
temporary neoliberalism, with the nexus embedded in migration patterns that
are driven by these inequalities. Dominant theorizations of the diaspora–
development nexus, and those often mobilized within development discourse
and practice have instrumentalized the diaspora, placing them as economic
subjects oriented to an immutable homeland. This has led to constraints in the
way diasporic-led development has been mobilized, neglecting the multiple
spatialities and temporalities that constitute and reproduce the nexus.
In looking to respond to the new realities of contemporary neoliberal
(de)globalization; (re)bordering, European and North American ethnonation-
alism, nativist politics and anti-migrant discourses, and shifts in migration and
development studies that articulate the changing relationships between North
and South, the concept of post-diaspora challenges the traditional emphasis
on diasporic roots and routes. Post-diasporic theorizing attempts to respond to
both the limitations of diaspora as a concept and the call to respond to rapidly
shifting global contexts, by providing insights into three hitherto neglected
dynamics: the geographical fluidity, the interconnected temporalities, and the
inequalities that are part of the post-diasporic condition. Bringing post-
diasporic theorizing into conversation with the diaspora option in global devel-
opment articulates three key points. First, it accentuates the rhizomatic geo-
graphical entanglements through which diasporic engagement with devel-
opment occurs beyond the home/host and North/South binary. Second, the
post-diasporic shifts the temporalities of the diaspora–development nexus to
articulate the connections between diasporic-centred development and (post-
diasporic) feelings and politics of belonging. Finally, post-diasporic theorizing
foregrounds how racialized inequalities are reproduced through the diaspora–
development nexus. By articulating these inequalities, post-diaspora then leads
to probing the emancipatory potential of the diaspora–development nexus,
articulating the way the nexus can be mobilized to further push for the full
everyday participation of diasporic communities in multiple locales, artic-
ulating the ‘global’ in global development, and the need to theorize devel-
opment relationally (Horner, 2020; Willis, 2005). The diaspora–development
nexus then constitutes everyday social, cultural, material, and political experi-

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ences and feelings of belonging through multiple sites, and can be re-oriented
to advance the socio-economic, cultural, and political liberation of diasporic
communities in multiple locales (Laguerre, 2017).
Mobilizing the concept of post-diaspora in the context of diasporic-led
development helps thinking on the diaspora–development nexus to respond to
the challenges of (de)globalization, as witnessed by the rejection of free trade
and movement of people and increasingly restrictive and exclusionary migra-
tion regimes. Thinking through a post-diasporic lens, diasporic-led develop-
ment has the potential to bring everyday racialized life into conversation with
global development and connect diasporic-centred development with histori-
cal and contemporary migration governance. By extending the usual temporal-
ities associated with the diaspora–development nexus, post-diaspora connects
diasporic life after movement with historical and contemporary injustices and
considers how these acts of violence may shape the diaspora–development
nexus. In the context of increasing Anglo-American and European ethnona-
tionalism, post-diaspora, as the ssahe (2020: 9) call for, has the potential to
help in ‘unravelling the paradoxes between hostile national environments and
their co-existence with other transnational paradigms around migration’.
This begins to develop a research agenda that asks about the diaspora–
development nexus in the current context, including questions about how the
contemporary and historical politics of migration intersect with diasporic con-
tributions to global development, how engagement in development is shaped
by the interconnected temporalities of emotional, social, political, and cultural
entanglements, what the complexity and multiplicity of migration journeys
and notions of return mean for development, and how is the colonial past
and contemporary coloniality relevant for diasporic-led development? And
how do colonial and racial histories and present-day logics order and shape
global development? It also calls for further ‘researching up’, examining how
states and the global development industry may reproduce racialized hierar-
chies of belonging and injustice through diasporic-centred development and
critically engaging with the geopolitics of knowledge production on diasporic-
centred development (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Pailey, 2021; Wilson, 2012).
Post-diasporic theorizing interrogates the relationship between global devel-
opment and domestic immigration policies, for example how anti-migrant
policies intersect with global development, articulating development relation-
ally, and not just as something that happens ‘over there’. This offers opportu-
nities to resist increasing ethnonationalism and hostile environment policies
through the lens of global development and articulates the wider need to con-
sider the racialized logics and inequalities that are reproduced through dis-
courses of development.

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Acknowledgements

The development of this paper was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early

Career Fellowship [ecf 2019–331]. I would also like to thank Prof. Matt Baillie
Smith and Prof. Steve Taylor for their support and guidance during the fel-
lowship. My thanks also go to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their
thoughtful and constructive comments on this article.

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