Diasporic Political Parties

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 12. Global and Transnational Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract: This paper argues that crossborder immigrant political parties constitute a singular arena for the study of the multisite nation. It explains how diasporic organizations depend for their existence not only on compatriots in the site of residency, but also on other diasporic sites for their technical skills, membership, recruitment, fundraising, and political connections in the homeland and host lands. It further examines the deployment of the crossborder infrastructure established to facilitate the network governance of the party, crossborder communication and travel, and the repositioning of the party vis-a-vis other parties, including subsidiaries of mainstream parties in diaspora. It concludes that such parties ideologically relocate themselves in the opposition and are projected as such by their membership and the host land government where the immigrants have resettled. The data for this paper was collected through interviews from January to June 2018 with three prominent members of a Haitian diasporic political party, headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela between 1979 and 1985.

Author

• Michel S. Laguerre, Univ of California-Berkeley