Migration and diaspora

Geography has long played a key role in understanding migration, as spatial inequalities explain to a large extent why people move in the first place. Rather than addressing the causes of migration, this chapter centres around the socio-spatial consequences of human movement across international borders. We particularly focus on the question of how the notions of migration and community relate to each other. In so doing, this chapter deliberately does not start from the dominant position of the migrant-receiving society. This implies two shifts in our thinking. First, we move away from conventional “sedentarist” thinking that considers being in a place (e.g. a country) as normal and treats cross-border mobility as abnormal and exceptional. Instead, we build a perspective on migration that is based on the mobilities turn in social sciences. The second, and related, shift is that we move away from policy-oriented discussions on community-building that expects migrants to fit in the countries they now live in. As an alternative, we start from a different social space: diaspora. This age-old term denotes a transnational space of community-building where parts of migrant identities and senses of belonging are formed, contested and reformed. However, like other forms of community, there are questions to be raised about boundaries, representation and belonging.