Diaspora Entrepreneurs and Contested States by Maria Koinova, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Why do conflict-generated diasporas mobilize in contentious and non-contentious ways or use mixed strategies of contention? Why do they channel their homeland-oriented goals through host-states, transnational networks, and international organizations?This book develops a theory of socio-spatial positionality and its implications for the individual agency of diaspora entrepreneurs, moving beyond considering diasporas as groups. The book develops a novel typology of four types of diaspora entrepreneurs - Broker, Local, Distant, and Reserved -depending on the relative strength of their socio-spatial linkages to host-land, on the one hand, and original homeland (de facto states) and other global locations, on the other. A two-level typological theory captures nine causal pathways unravelling how the socio-spatial linkages of diasporaentrepreneurs interact with external factors: host-land foreign policies, homeland governments, parties, non-state actors, critical events, or limited global influences to produce varying levels of contention. Non-contentious pathways often take place when host-state foreign policies are convergentwith the goals of diaspora entrepreneurs, and when they act autonomously. Dual-pronged contention pathways occur quite often, under the influence of homeland governments, non-state actors, and political parties. The most contentious pathway occurs in response to violent critical events in thehomeland or adjacent to it fragile states. The book is informed by long-term fieldwork and 300 interviews, and based on a dataset of 146 interviews with diaspora entrepreneurs among the Albanian, Armenian, and Palestinian diasporas connected to de facto states, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Palestine respectively. Interviews were conductedin the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as Kosovo and Armenia in the European neighbourhood. | Diaspora Entrepreneurs and Contested States by Maria Koinova, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters