Governing diasporas
11946 mots
48 pages
International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 378–397Governing Diasporas1
Francesco Ragazzi Sciences Po (Paris) and Northwestern University (Chicago)
The study of migration in general and in IR in particular has generally meant the study of immigration. Yet, sending states increasingly manage and govern numerically impressive ‘‘diasporas’’ abroad. This article assesses the importance of the government of emigrants and diasporas, and reviews the meager theoretical literature on the topic. It then proposes a theoretical framework based on the concept of governmentality and outlines some avenues for further research.
In 1992, Martin Heisler noted that the discipline of International Relations, at the time dominated by neorealist and neoliberal approaches, was not only uninterested in but also theoretically ill equipped to make sense of the phenomenon of migration. He advocated an ‘‘Institutional Political Sociology’’ approach, drawing on disciplines from across the social sciences (Heisler 1992:599). More than 15 years later, ‘‘critical’’ and ‘‘constructivist’’ scholarship has managed to impose the topic as an important object of research within International Relations, and the newly created journal International Political Sociology—the journal of the ISA section of which Martin Heissler was a co-founder—hardly publishes an issue without an article on migration, diasporas or mobility. This has been made possible thanks to a vast literature that has progressively emerged in the field.2 More specifically, the subfield of security studies has served as a privileged theoretical laboratory for the introduction of critical and reflexive methodologies. Yet, the critical engagement with the mainstream or ‘‘soft-constructivist’’ brands of IR has not always been entirely satisfactory. Despite the fact that many of these studies self-identify as ‘‘critical,’’ most of them have not escaped one particular bias: a Eurocentric partiality which makes them bedfellows to the