Soft Power, Hard Borders: The Geopolitics of Diaspora Engagement

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This panel examines how diasporas shape and are reshaped by geopolitics, situating migration studies within wider debates on global power and transnational governance. While scholarship on diaspora politics has highlighted identity, incorporation, and state-diaspora relations, the geopolitical consequences of these processes remain underexplored. Migrant communities often function as symbolic, economic, and political brokers in struggles over legitimacy, sovereignty, and influence. Both authoritarian and democratic states enlist diasporas in projects of soft power and foreign policy, while migrants mobilize homeland ties to navigate inequalities and precarities in host societies. We invite case studies from diverse contexts, including but not limited to China, Turkey, Mexico, and India, to advance diaspora geopolitics as a vital lens for understanding the entanglement of migration, statecraft, and world order.

Sub Unit

• Global and Transnational Sociology Section / Soft Power, Hard Borders: The Geopolitics of Diaspora Engagement

Presider

• Jiaqi M. Liu, Singapore Management University

Individual Presentations

• Accidentally Developmental: How State Fragmentation enabled India’s Diaspora Policy - Nisarg Mehta, University of Chicago

• From Repression at Home to Resistance Abroad: How Politicide Shaped Exile and Diaspora Politics in Argentina - Leydy Diossa-Jimenez, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Global Horizons, Constrained Lives: Generation Z in Iran and the Making of Alternative Normalcy - Mahbubeh Moqadam, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Platformed Chineseness: Algorithmic Re-embeddedness and Identity Scripts among Chinese Diaspora in Europe - Chao YANG, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

• Unequal Safety Abroad: Target Profile and Host Regime Effects on Transnational Repression - Yusuf Karipek, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Session Organizer

• Jiaqi M. Liu, Singapore Management University