Governing Diasporas in International Relations: The Transnational Politics of Croatia and Former Yugoslavia (Routledge Studies in Liberty and Security) by Francesco Ragazzi

Author:Francesco Ragazzi [Ragazzi, Francesco]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781351709439
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: diasporas and ethnic conflict

Generally speaking, the literature on diaspora and conflict is primarily concerned with the normative question of whether diasporas are a positive or negative factor in ethnic and civil wars (Lyons 2004; Mohamoud 2005; Smith and Stares 2007; Shain 2002). Yet, except in very few cases, no theoretical framework has been proposed to understand how, why, and under which conditions diasporas come to exist in the first place—namely, when diasporic mobilization occurs. For example, Paul Collier argues that diasporas are always a source of conflict:

There is little mystery about this effect. Diasporas sometimes harbor rather romanticized attachments to their group of origin and may nurse grievances as a form of asserting continued belonging. They are much richer than the people in their country of origin and so can afford to finance vengeance. Above all, they do not have to suffer any of the awful consequences of renewed conflict because they are not living in the country. Hence, they are a ready market for rebel groups touting vengeance and so are a source of finance for renewed conflict.

(2000: 14)

This chapter has demonstrated that almost all of these generalizing assumptions are wrong in the Croatian case. First, no single political or even “romantic” stance of the different Croatian organizations exists abroad, even if at a given historical time a convergence of opinions might have occurred. Second, a strong socio-economic divide emerged in the composition of the Croatian populations abroad; only some members of the elite of the transnational political field have important means, but they represent a single digit percentage of the group of reference. Third, many of those actively engaged did return to the country and—far from suffering from the consequences of the conflict—actively benefited from it, obtaining important positions in a newly independent state apparatus.

More importantly, this chapter has shown that these assumptions reverse the logic of the actual social processes taking place. No Croatian “diaspora” as such existed in the mid-1980s, but it did suddenly appear in 1990. Thus, the Croatian “diaspora,” as such, did not contribute to the war simply because it was not a relevant unit of analysis in the social and political processes that took place. Diaspora is the category of mobilization through which a certain number of transnational actors involved in competing networks mobilized symbolic and material resources to finance a war and reach power. Moreover, the Croatian diaspora was mobilized by political actors coming specifically from the homeland; most of the social actors involved in the events of the 1990s were both in the “domestic” political field and the “diasporic” political field. This situation further underlines another weakness of the literature on diasporas and conflict as pointed out by Hägel and Peretz (2005: 468): by assuming that diasporas exist a priori—or at least are a separate entity from home states or domestic societies—these approaches preclude us from understanding the processes through which the mobilization of symbolic categories operates within a transnational political field that encompasses diasporic institutions, political parties at home, and competing political networks that are constituted across borders.

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