Expatriates and Home State Political Development

Authors

  • Laurie A. Brand

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24847/55i2018.158

Keywords:

diaspora, MENA region, state formation, out-of-country voting, citizenship, political parties, sovereignty, state institutions

Abstract

Recent scholarship on diaspora-host state relations has increasingly examined the many dimensions of the involvement of communities abroad on the sending state. Much of this literature has focused on economic, political, and sociocultural remittances. This article shifts the focus to more structural elements as it seeks to read in various sending state institutions the very presence of a diaspora. Examples of institutional developments dating from independence to the present in government ministries, political parties, electoral and nationality laws, national boundaries, and sovereignty itself, are taken from the cases of Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. The analysis is intended to serve as a first step in establishing a new research program aimed at discerning the deeper structural impact of diasporas on state formation in the sending country.

 

Cover Image: The Mogamma Building in Cairo, May 2015.Image source, https://tinyurl.com/y9emz699.

Author Biography

Laurie A. Brand

Laurie A. Brand is the Robert Grandford Wright Professor of International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California, where she has directed the Center for International Studies, served as Director of the School of International Relations, and, most recently headed the Middle East Studies program. Brand has also served as president of the Middle East Studies Association (2004), and has chaired MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom since 2006. Her articles on migration and diaspora have appeared in Comparative Politics, Political Geography, and The International Migration Review; and she is the author of Citizens Abroad: States and Emigration in the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

The Mogamma Building in Cairo, May 2015. Image source, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mogamma_Cairo_in_May_2015.JPG.

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Published

2018-01-25 — Updated on 2018-01-25

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2018): Special Issue: Migration and Transnational Governance

Section

Special Section: Migration and Transnational Governance

License

Copyright (c) 2018 Laurie A. Brand

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The content of this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.