Handbook on Transnationalism 1789904005, 9781789904000

Citation preview

HANDBOOK ON TRANSNATIONALISM

Handbook on Transnationalism Edited by

Brenda S.A. Yeoh Raffles Professor of Social Sciences, Department of Geography, and Research Leader, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Francis L. Collins Professor of Geography and Director of the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Francis L. Collins 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949015 This book is available electronically in the Geography, Planning and Tourism subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781789904017

ISBN 978 1 78990 400 0 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78990 401 7 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of contributorsviii Acknowledgementsxv 1

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism1 Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Francis L. Collins

PART I

CONCEPTUALISING TRANSNATIONALISM

2

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism David Featherstone

3

What, when and how transnationalism matters: a multi-scalar framework45 Biao Xiang

4

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation Sergei Shubin

60

5

Transnational ageing and the later life course Vincent Horn

77

6

Transnationalism, affect and emotion Raelene Wilding and Loretta Baldassar

93

7

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism Jørgen Carling

PART II

30

110

VARIETIES OF TRANSNATIONALISM

8

Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics Gerasimos Tsourapas

128

9

Transnational migration and homemaking Paolo Boccagni

141

10

Transnational organisations Ludger Pries and Rafael Bohlen

155

11

The politics of transnational activism Michele Ford

169

v

vi  Handbook on transnationalism

12

Transnational families in an age of migration Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam and Shirlena Huang

182

13

Transnational young people: growing up and being active in a transnational social field Valentina Mazzucato and Joan van Geel

14

Transnational urbanism in the South Arnisson A.C. Ortega and Evangeline O. Katigbak

211

15

Transnational higher education Johanna Waters and Maggi W.H. Leung

230

16

Transnational popular culture Youna Kim

246

17

Transnational religion Dominic Pasura

262

198

PART III TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONS 18

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration Matt Withers and Nicola Piper

277

19

International students as transnational migrants Gracia Liu-Farrer

294

20

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction Juan Zhang

310

21

Transnational mobilities and return migration Anastasia Christou and Brenda S.A. Yeoh

325

22

Connecting more than the origin and destination: multinational migrations and transnational ties Anju M. Paul

340

PART IV TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS AND CIRCULATIONS 23

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development Marta Bivand Erdal

356

24

Communications technologies and transnational networks Jolynna Sinanan and Heather A. Horst

371

25

Transnationalism and care circulation: mobility, caregiving, and the technologies that shape them Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding

388

Contents  vii

26

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages Jacob R. Thomas and Min Zhou

404

27

Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles Sin Yee Koh

420

Index433

Contributors

Loretta Baldassar is Professor in the Discipline Group of Anthropology and Sociology, and Director of the Social Care and Social Ageing Living Lab at The University of Western Australia. She has published extensively on transnational migration, with a particular focus on families, caregiving, and the social use of new technologies. Baldassar is Vice President of the International Sociological Association Migration Research Committee and regional editor for the journal Global Networks. Professor Baldassar was recently named Australia’s Research Field Leader in Human Migration. Paolo Boccagni is Professor of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy, and PI of ERC HOMInG – The home-migration nexus. His main areas of expertise include transnationalism, migration, diversity, social welfare and homemaking. His recent research focuses on the experience of home among migrants and displaced persons, in relation to local reception initiatives. Relevant publications include books (Migration and the Search for Home [Palgrave, 2017]; Thinking Home on the Move [Emerald, 2020]) and journal articles (Housing Studies [2018], Migration Studies, Sociology and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies [2020]). Rafael Bohlen, MA, studied Social Science at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany and at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico. He is doctoral fellow at the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research and research associate at the chair of Sociology (Organisation, Migration, Participation) at Ruhr-University Bochum. In his PhD thesis, he focuses on organizational resilience of gangs in Central America. Further, his interests include international development, conflict and forced migration. Jørgen Carling is Research Professor of Migration and Transnationalism Studies at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and Co-Director of the PRIO Migration Centre. His research spans global migration, immobility and transnationalism and seeks to explain how migration arises, and how it affects societies, families and individuals. He combines a background in Human Geography with perspectives from other disciplines and uses both statistical and ethnographic methods. Beyond his thematic specialisms, he has an interest in academic writing, visualisation and research communication. Anastasia Christou is Associate Professor of Sociology, Middlesex University, London, UK. Anastasia is a critical interdisciplinary scholar working across the humanities and the social sciences, engaging in empirical field research and extensively theorising from her findings. She has conducted multi-sited, multi-method and comparative ethnographic research in the US, UK, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, France, Iceland and Switzerland. She has widely published this research, viii

Contributors  ix

edited a number of book volumes and journal special issues and writes poetry which recently has been published by the Feminist Review. Francis L. Collins is Professor of Geography and Director of the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis at the University of Waikato (Aotearoa New Zealand). His research explores the experience and regulation of international migration, migrant aspirations and desires, international student mobilities, and labour migration and marginalisation. Francis is the author of Global Asian City: Migration, Desire and the Politics of Encounter in 21st Century Seoul (Wiley, 2018) and co-editor of Intersections of Inequality, Migration and Diversification (Palgrave, 2020, with R. Simon-Kumar and W. Friesen). Marta Bivand Erdal is Research Professor in Migration Studies at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Co-Director of the PRIO Migration Centre. As a Human Geographer she is interested in the causes and consequences of migration and transnationalism in both emigration and immigration contexts. Her research spans different categories of migrants, including refugees, labour migrants and return migrants, and includes the perspectives of migrants, non-migrant populations, as well as of state and non-state actors. She has published extensively in migration studies and engages regularly with governmental and non-governmental stakeholders. David Featherstone is Reader in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) and Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (Zed Books, 2012). He is currently working on a monograph with the provisional title of Politicising Race and Labour: Seafarers’ Struggles for Equality and the Anti-Colonial Left, 1919–1953. He is a member of the editorial collectives of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. Michele Ford is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include social activism, labour internationalism, labour migration, and women and work. Her recent books include Labor and Politics in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2020 with T. Caraway), From Migrant to Worker: Global Unions and Temporary Labor Migration in Asia (Cornell University Press, 2019) and Activists in Transition: Progressive Politics in Democratic Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019 with T. Dibley). Vincent Horn is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Education, Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany. His fields of interest encompass all aspects related to transnational ageing, transnational family care, migrant care and domestic work, long-term care regimes and older refugees. Amongst his publications are the books Transnational Aging: Current Insights and Future Challenges (Routledge, 2016 with Cornelia Schweppe) and Aging Within Transnational Families: The Case of Older Peruvians (Anthem Press, 2019).

x  Handbook on transnationalism

Heather A. Horst is Professor and Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. She researches material culture and the mediation of social relations through digital media and technology, with a regional focus that includes Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Jamaica. Her books include The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Island Perspectives (ANU Press, 2018, edited with Robert Foster), Digital Anthropology (Routledge, 2012, edited with Daniel Miller) and The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Berg, 2006, with Daniel Miller). Shirlena Huang is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses mainly on issues at the intersection of migration, gender and families, with a particular focus on care labour migration and transnational families within the Asia-Pacific region. More recently, she has looked at eldercare issues and international marriages. She also researches in the area of urbanisation and heritage conservation (particularly in Singapore). Her most recent book is the Handbook of Gender in Asia (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020, co-edited with Kanchana N. Ruwanpura). Evangeline O. Katigbak lectures at the Department of Geography, University of the Philippines (Diliman) and Department of International Studies, De La Salle University (Manila). Her research focuses on the intersections of transnational migrations and emotional geographies with particular focus on transnational families, translocal moral geographies, Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) and overseas Filipinos. Youna Kim is Professor at the American University of Paris, France, joined from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea (Routledge, 2005), Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women (Routledge, 2011), Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media (Routledge, 2017). Her edited books include Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (Routledge, 2008), Women and the Media in Asia (Palgrave, 2012), The Korean Wave (Routledge, 2013), South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea (Routledge, 2019). Sin Yee Koh is Senior Lecturer in Global Studies at Monash University Malaysia. Her work uses the lens of migration and mobility to understand the circulations of people, capital, and aspirations in and through cities. Her recent books in migration studies include Race, Education, and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies, and a Culture of Migration (Palgrave, 2017) and New Chinese Migrations: Mobility, Home, and Inspirations (Routledge, 2018, with Y. W. Chan). Theodora Lam is Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS). She obtained her PhD in Geography from NUS and her dissertation focused on understanding changing gender subjectivities, the web of care and relationships within the family in the wake of transnational labour migration. Her research interests cover transnational migration, children’s geographies and gender

Contributors  xi

studies, and she has also published on themes relating to migration and development, citizenship and education. Maggi W.H. Leung is Professor in International Development Studies at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on the uneven geographies of migration, mobilities and development, internationalisation of education, knowledge mobilities and activism, Chinese migration and transnationalism, migrant investment and engagements in ‘shrinking’ regions in Europe (Horizon 2020 project ‘Welcoming Spaces’) as well as stigmatisation and geographies of social inequities in COVID-19 times. She is one of the editors of Geoforum. Gracia Liu-Farrer is Professor of Sociology at Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migrations at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research investigates international student and labour mobilities in Asia and Europe, and immigration and immigrants in Japan. Her recent books include Handbook of Asian Migrations (Routledge, 2018, with Brenda S.A Yeoh) and Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-Nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020). Valentina Mazzucato is Professor of Globalisation and Development, Maastricht University, The Netherlands and heads the Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development research programme. She is principal investigator of international research projects on transnational families that live between Africa and Europe. She was recently awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to study the mobility trajectories of transnational youth (www​.motrayl​.com). Her research is characterised by multi-sited research designs and mixed-method approaches combining survey and ethnographic methods and interdisciplinary teamwork. Arnisson A.C. Ortega is Assistant Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, New York, USA. Born and raised in the Philippines, he emphasises commitment to place and praxis. His main research interests are urban politics, migration, community-engaged work, and critical demography. His current projects focus on counter-mapping, Global South urbanisation, and transnational migration. Dominic Pasura is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests include migration, diaspora and transnationalism. Dominic has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited books. He is author of African Transnational Diasporas: Fractured Communities and Plural Identities of Zimbabweans in Britain (Palgrave, 2014). He also co-edited the academic volume Migration, Transnationalism and Catholicism: Global Perspectives (Palgrave, 2016, with Marta Bivand Erdal) which explored the intersections of migration, mobilities and transnationalism with the Roman Catholic Church as an institution, community, networks and people. Anju M. Paul is Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. She studies emergent migration patterns to, from, and within

xii  Handbook on transnationalism

Asia. Her recent books include Multinational Maids: Stepwise Migration in a Global Labor Market (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Local Encounters in a Global City (Ethos Books, 2017) and Asian Scientists on the Move: Changing Science in a Changing Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Nicola Piper is British Academy Global Professor Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (UK) and Professor of International Migration at the University of Sydney (Australia). A political sociologist by training, her research interests focus primarily on (gendered) global labour mobility, global and regional migration governance, and advocacy politics. She is (co-)chief editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Global Social Policy and co-editor of the book series ‘Asian Migration’ with Routledge. Ludger Pries holds a Chair for Sociology at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He taught and did research in Brazil, Mexico, Spain and the USA. His main fields of research are sociology of migration in international comparison, transnationalisation, organisations, work and labour regulation. Recent books in English include European and Latin American Social Scientists as Refugees, Emigrés and Return-Migrants (Palgrave, 2019, edited with Pablo Yankelevich) and Refugees, Civil Society and the State: European Experiences and Global Challenges (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018). Sergei Shubin is Professor in Human Geography and Director of the Centre for Migration Policy Research, Swansea University, UK. His research interests are in poverty, migrations and inequality, including migration governance, health and mobility, (in)securities, care and temporalities of movement. He has attracted major research funding and led migration-focused projects in Brazil, France, Portugal, Russia and the UK. Apart from academic publications, he has produced exhibitions, short films, and a multi-lingual children’s storybook to provide inter-disciplinary solutions to international migration problems. Jolynna Sinanan is lecturer in Social and Digital Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on digital media practices in relation to regionally comparative mobilities, family relationships, and work and gender. She has contributed ethnographic studies on Nepal, Trinidad, Australia and Cambodia. Her books include Digital Media Practices in Households (Amsterdam University Press, 2020, with Larissa Hjorth et al.), Social Media in Trinidad (UCL Press, 2017) and Webcam (Polity Press, 2014, with Daniel Miller). Jacob R. Thomas is currently Research Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies in the field of globalisation at UC Berkeley, MA in Social Science at University of Chicago, and PhD in Sociology at UCLA. His areas of specialty are in the sociology of law, international migration and mobility, and social stratification and inequality. His research has appeared in International Migration, Theory and Society, and Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal.

Contributors  xiii

Gerasimos Tsourapas is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. His research interests include the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East and the broader Global South. His first book, The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt: Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), was awarded the 2020 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award by the International Studies Association. His second book, Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa: Power, Mobility, and the State, was published in 2021 by Manchester University Press. Joan van Geel’s PhD and postdoctoral work at Maastricht University centred on young Ghanaians’ mobilities between Ghana and The Netherlands. Her work is published in several international peer-reviewed journals. Van Geel is currently evaluating a pilot for undocumented migrants in Amsterdam involving the Municipality, NGOs, health care services, the police and National Immigration and Naturalisation Service. In this pilot, these parties collaborate for the first time to design new policies focusing on undocumented migrants in The Netherlands. Johanna Waters is Professor of Human Geography, University College London, UK. She is Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at UCL. Her research is concerned with educationally motivated transnational migration and its outcomes, with particular focus on children, young people, and families. She has worked on several projects involving international students and has broad interests in the internationalisation of education. Johanna is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, secretary of the Gender and Feminist Geographies research group of the Royal Geographical Society, and visiting Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. Raelene Wilding is Associate Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research examines the role of new technologies in the social and relational lives of people from migrant and refugee backgrounds and of older Australians. Her interests include the critical analysis of ageing, care, wellbeing, intimacy, digital media and rural and regional settlement, with a particular focus on Australian society and culture. Her most recent book is Families, Intimacy and Globalization: Floating Ties (Palgrave, 2018). Matt Withers is a Research Fellow within the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. His research addresses the developmental implications of temporary labour migration and remittances throughout the Asia-Pacific region, with an emphasis on South Asia and Pacific Island countries. His current research examines the work and care arrangements of transnational migrant households, using the concepts of ‘decent wages’ and ‘decent care’ to frame the need for improved labour governance and gender-equitable policy making in support of sustainable development outcomes. Biao Xiang is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, UK and Director of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. Xiang’s

xiv  Handbook on transnationalism

research addresses various types of migration – internal and international, unskilled and highly skilled, emigration and return migration, and the places and people left behind – in China, India and other parts of Asia. Xiang is the winner of the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize for his book Global Bodyshopping (Princeton University Press, 2007) and the 2012 William L. Holland Prize for his article ‘Predatory Princes and Princely Peddlers’. His 2000 Chinese book Transcending Boundaries (English translation, Brill, 2005) was reprinted in 2018 as a contemporary classic. His work has been translated into Japanese, French, Korean, Spanish and Italian. Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA is Raffles Professor of Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Research Leader, Asian Migration Cluster, at NUS’ Asia Research Institute. Her research interests in Asian migrations span themes including gender, social reproduction and care migration; skilled migration and cosmopolitanism; higher education and international student mobilities; and marriage migrants and cultural politics. Her recent books include Handbook of Asian Migrations (Routledge, 2018 with G. Liu-Farrer) and Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, with R. Sidhu and K.C. Ho). Juan Zhang is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, UK. Her research interests include transnational mobilities, borders, labour migration, and casinos in Asia. She has published in journals including Environment & Planning D, Environment & Planning A, Gender, Place & Culture, and Mobilities among others. Her recent co-edited book is entitled The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Min Zhou, PhD, is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies, Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in US-China Relations and Communications, and Director of the Asia Pacific Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Her main research areas are in migration and development, urban sociology, ethnic entrepreneurship, and Chinese diasporas, and she has published widely in these areas. She is co-author of The Rise of the New Second Generation (Polity Press, 2016, with Carl L. Bankston III) and editor of Contemporary Chinese Diasporas (Palgrave, 2017).

Acknowledgements

As editors, we would like to first and foremost extend our thanks to the contributors who have made this volume possible. We are grateful to all 34 leading scholars in their respective fields for accepting our invitation and contributing a diverse set of voices to the important topic of transnationalism. Working through COVID-19 times with all its multiple challenges was no mean feat, and we salute each and every contributor for their perseverance, equanimity and collaborative spirit. We would also like to thank the editorial team at Edward Elgar Publishing, and particularly commissioning editor, Stephanie Hartley, for their patience and support in the production of this book. We also owe our research assistants, Rohini Anant and Franchesca Morais, many thanks for ably supporting our editorial role and their hard work. Finally, we would like to thank our institutions – the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in Brenda’s case, and the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis at the University of Waikato in Francis’ case – for providing a conducive intellectual environment which was invaluable in bringing this handbook into fruition. Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Francis L. Collins

xv

1. Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Francis L. Collins

INTRODUCTION In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the proposition that a wide range of social, cultural, economic and political phenomena emerge and operate across national borders seems decidedly axiomatic. Notwithstanding the ongoing power exercised by nation-states, the strictures of border control and the impact of resurgent nationalism, global society is characterised by diverse and uneven flows and connections that underpin interdependence across borders. Since the 1990s, the recognition of transnationalism, a marker for people-led cross-border connections and activities particularly associated with migration (Al-Ali et al. 2001; Basch et al. 1994), has been critical in establishing the character, extent and contours of such connectivities. More than just an empirical observation, however, transnationalism has also altered the way in which researchers conceive of key features of social life. A transnational ‘lens’ has challenged the predominance of methodologically nationalist analyses (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), questioned the presumed linearity of migratory processes and migrant identity and cultural formation (Glick Schiller et al. 1992), and drawn attention to relations between places at a range of scales and across multiple territories (Smith 2001). Transnationalism has, however, also become rather wonted as a term and concept over the last three decades while also being subject to substantial critique. The term is sometimes simply deployed as a replacement for international, multinational or global and thus can lack precision either as a signifier for certain observable phenomena or as a referent to a particular theoretical approach. For some time, researchers have questioned whether the notion of transnationalism has analytical purchase because of its broad employment, particularly in migration studies, at times running the ‘risk of becoming an empty conceptual vessel’ (Guarnizo and Smith 1998, p. 4). Furthermore, the overriding emphasis on connectivity in studies of transnationalism, or indeed within the deployment of transnationalism as a theoretical frame, has sometimes obscured the significance of place and locality, and the way in which cross-border activities and connections are always facilitated, configured and impeded by states, institutions and social formations of various kinds. Studies of transnationalism are at their strongest when place is foregrounded and when the tension between fluidity and friction in cross-border lives, practices and institutions is prioritised. 1

2  Handbook on transnationalism

In curating this Handbook of Transnationalism and writing this introduction, we have sought to highlight the uneven connections and emplacements that characterise transnationalism. We also place emphasis on recognising the diversity of ways in which transnationalism is employed in research while paying particular attention to the potential for accounts of transnationalism to intersect with and give shape to broader empirical and theoretical discussions. Given their predominance in transnationalism studies, migration and migrant lives inform a significant component of the material gathered here, in relation to different forms of migration and their transnational dimensions as well as the networks and circulations that emerge through migrant activities. Transnationalism has much more variety than this though, emerging in state and organisational practices, activism, urban transformation, higher education, popular culture and religion, to name a few. There is also variety in the conceptual concerns that are raised in relation to transnationalism and in particular the way in which different geographies or scales are involved, the temporality of transnationalism, connections to life course, and the articulation of affect and emotion across borders. In order to situate the diverse accounts of transnationalism in this handbook, we first trace the lineage and critique of transnationalism as a concept and an approach from its emergence in the 1990s.1 We then provide an overview of the chapters in the handbook under four main themes: conceptualising transnationalism, varieties of transnationalism, transnational migrations, and transnational networks and circulations. The account of transnationalism in this handbook is therefore intended to reflect the voluminous and far-ranging literature in transnational studies. In closing, we reflect on the implications for transnationalism in a world profoundly changed by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Written in 2020, this handbook emerged against the backdrop of the developing pandemic, which led to a completely unprecedented and unexpected closure of borders and suspension of travel around the world. As we discuss in the final last section, the pandemic and government responses that have impeded mobility raise some significant questions about the future of migration in particular. They also, however, highlight how embedded transnational practices and lives have become around the world and as such draw attention to the importance of transnationalism as a theoretical and analytical lens for social scientists and others grappling with a range of phenomena.

TRANSNATIONALISM IN PERSPECTIVE Transnationalism is an overarching scholarly signifier for a bundle of concepts – transnationality, transnationalisation, transmigrant, transnational fields/spaces – that emphasise transversal dimensions of cross-border practices, lives and connections. The usage of these terms has grown enormously since the early 1990s, when the term ‘transnational’ featured in fewer than 100 publications a year, to a situation where large tracts of the arts, humanities and especially the social sciences now make regular reference to transnational phenomena (featuring in nearly 3,500 publications

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  3

in 2020).2 Although our account of transnationalism in this handbook, and that of a majority of chapter authors, emerges from migration-related research, it should be noted that there are other lineages to this term that shape its contemporary usage. There has been, for example, important scholarship on transnational corporations (Sauvant 2008; Yeung 1997), accounts of international relations and transnational state practices (Babic et al. 2020; Ougaard 2018) and transnational law (Graubart 2004; Heyvaert 2017), amongst others. While important, the background and current debates in these areas are beyond the scope of this introduction. Instead we focus here on the way in which notions of transnationalism took shape in new approaches to migration, placing particular emphasis on its emergence in the 1990s, followed by a period of debate and critiques, before the increasing normalisation of transnational terminology and the development of new conceptual directions. The emergence of transnationalism as a key concept in migration studies occurred at a time of increasing focus on globalisation in the social sciences as well as shifting disciplinary boundaries. For migration scholars, new analyses of global capitalist systems and in particular of interlinked cultural and economic globalisation (e.g. Appadurai 1991) raised questions about how migrants, as key mobile subjects, might be contributing to ground-up processes beyond national territories (Rouse 1991). Concomitantly, for migration researchers and anthropologists in particular (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), recognition of globalisation shifted the focus of research away from distinct accounts of migrant sending and receiving societies to the lived experiences of migrants across territories. In highlighting the problems of the ‘assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 7) it became apparent that accounts of international migration as a linear, distinct undertaking followed by conclusive processes of settlement or return were not empirically accurate or theoretically tenable (Rouse 1991). In retrospect, many scholars have noted that ‘migration has never been a one-way process of assimilation into a melting pot or a multicultural salad bowl’ (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007, p. 130). However, it was only at the beginning of the 1990s that this presumption started to be prominently challenged (Nowicka 2020). The popularisation of transnationalism as a term and its introduction into the lexicon of migration studies is often credited to anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc. Their landmark 1994 text Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States set the agenda for an enduring shift in migration scholarship. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research among Caribbean and Filipino populations in New York, Basch et al. (1994) demonstrated the need for migration studies to take a wider view of the field of action that migrants inhabit while recognising the flexible and fluid identities emergent in migration and cross-border connections. Their account thus problematised the dichotomy between ‘immigrant’ as an individual who moves wholesale from one country to the next and a ‘migrant’ who is transient and thus not connected to places of temporary life away from home. The emphasis on transnationalism demonstrated that migrants commonly traverse both of these subject positions, not least because of the ways in which different kinds of migrations

4  Handbook on transnationalism

are articulated through social and economic relations that cross borders between countries of origin and destination. This insight gave impetus to a rethinking of international migration in at least two ways: first, it drew attention to the wider field of action that migrants inhabit beyond the container of the nation-state; and second, it foregrounded the multiple forms of identification in relation to ethnicity, class and nationalism that migrant subjects potentially embrace (Collins 2009). In migration studies, Basch et al.’s (1994) arguments and broader discussions of transnationalism were particularly influential in developing new accounts of the ways in which migrant lives and relations take shape across borders. As Glick Schiller (2018, p. 201) reflected more than two decades later, studies of transnationalism have led to a ‘rich descriptive literature on transnational families, hometown association, transnational politics and long-distance nationalism, status, multiple types of organizations, gender, remittance economies, religions, social security and diasporic identities’. A particularly important theme that emerged through this early work was an emphasis on gender and the way in which transnationalism also comes to reshape women’s and men’s identities and participation in householding (Giles 1997; Mahler 1999; Suzuki 2000; Yeoh and Willis 1999). Notions of ‘transnational motherhood’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997, p. 550), for example, highlighted that transnational lives are not only about crossing borders but rather also constituted as ‘circuits of affection, caring, and financial support that transcend national borders’. Early insights into transnationalism also highlighted the wider impacts of migration in sending-country communities, not only financial remittances but also the cultural diffusion and change enabled through social remittances, ‘the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities’ (Levitt 1998, p. 926). Another dimension of earlier transnationalism studies were accounts that drew attention to how migration, displacement, cultural change and connection created scope for hybrid identities, often framed as resistant to or at least subverting essentialised notions of culture and identity such as those associated with nationalism (Kaplan 1996; Hannerz 1996). Technology was another important feature of early accounts of transnationalism, with faster and more affordable air transportation alongside information technologies such as email, phone and fax providing a foundation for the establishment of transnational interactions as part of daily activities (Mountz and Wright 1996). By the turn of the twenty-first century, a special issue on ‘transnational migration’ published by the International Migration Review signified ‘the importance and growing acceptance of a transnational perspective among migration scholars’, while acknowledging the continuing critique and the need for further work (Levitt et al. 2003, p. 565). There was thus something of a celebratory tone about these early accounts of transnationalism. These accounts demonstrated the agency of migrants as transnational actors, often highlighting how transnationalism seemingly operated against the repressive forces of nation-states and global capitalism. While understandable from a political perspective, criticisms also emerged, especially from the late 1990s that questioned both the extent of transnationalism as a set of phenomena as well as the emancipatory conclusions that some scholars had drawn. Of particular note, it was

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  5

asserted that the term transnationalism had become all too popular, being deployed without analytical clarity in relation to migration and migrant lives. As Portes et al. (1999, p. 219) put it in a seminal article, ‘if all or most things that immigrants do are defined as “transnationalism”, then none is because the term becomes synonymous with the total set of experiences of this population’. Their proposal was that researchers need to more clearly define the specific occupations and activities that were significant in transnational life and place much more emphasis on their frequency and endurance (see also Guarnizo and Smith 1998). Another concern related to the way in which some accounts of transnationalism had prioritised abstracted, dematerialised flows that privileged hybridity and the emancipatory potential of transnationalism while not accounting for concrete changes in people’s lives, or power relations involved in uneven access to mobility (Mitchell 1997; Ong and Nonini 1997). Lastly, and particularly poignantly for migration researchers, early studies of transnationalism often appeared to jettison a focus on the nation and state actors while privileging ‘bottom-up’ insights into cross-border lives and identities. Instead, the relationship between State/Nation/Transnation (Yeoh and Willis 2004) is crucial as transnationalism leads to reconfigurations, but not the eradication, of the role of nation-states in migration and cross-border lives. For all the talk of fluidity and porosity, nation-states still effectively govern who can legally enter national space, often through carefully calibrated immigration policies to manage differential incorporation of migrant groups into nation-states (Castles 2004). Scholars arguing for the continued importance of the nation-state saw this as a key feature of ‘transnationalism’ that distinguishes the term from the more deterritorialised concept of ‘globalisation’ (Willis et al. 2004). More broadly, notions of freedom and flexibility implicit in transnationalism must also be interrogated alongside the frictional effects of prevailing migration regimes and differential access to capital. One of the consequences of these critiques has been a greater focus on refining the conceptual understandings of the character and extent of transnationalism. For scholars like Portes et al. (1999; see also Portes 2001), the measurability of transnationalism was particularly important, a stance that led them to propose defining ‘the individual and his/her support networks as the proper unit of analysis’ while confining the term to refer to ‘occupations and activities that require regular and sustained social contacts over time across national borders’ (Portes et al. 1999, pp. 219–20). Agreeing that it is the scale of intensity and simultaneity of cross-border activities that distinguished the ‘transnational’ from other related phenomena, Vertovec (1999, p. 448) nevertheless advocated leveraging on the term’s ‘multi-vocality’ in proposing a conceptual catalogue to bring order to a broad spectrum of transnational processes: social morphology; type of consciousness; mode of cultural production; avenue of capital; site of political engagement; and (re)construction of place. Meanwhile, Faist (2000) offered a different typology of transnationalism based on spatial-temporal variations in the degree of simultaneous embeddedness and the strength of transnational social ties: (a) dispersion and assimilation (weak embeddedness, short-lived ties); (b) transnational exchange and reciprocity (strong embeddedness, short-lived

6  Handbook on transnationalism

ties); (c) transnational networks (weak embeddedness, long-lived ties); and (d) transnational communities (strong embeddedness, enduring ties). In the formative times at the dawn of the twenty-first century, interest in conceptualising the ‘transnational’ continued to expand its reach. Scholars who were critical of focusing primarily on migrant practices called for moving the locus of attention to transnational social spaces, formations and fields. Faist (1998, p. 217), for example, called for attention to be trained on ‘transnational social spaces’ which are constituted by ‘the various forms of resources or capital of spatially mobile and immobile persons, on the one hand, and the regulations imposed by nation-states and various other opportunities and constraints, on the other’. Building on this interest in the mechanisms behind institutional change and social transformation, Faist (2010, p. 1673) proposed understanding ‘transnational social formations’ as ‘located in between the life-world of personal interactions … and the functional systems of differentiated spheres, such as the economy, polity, law, science and religion’. For Faist, transnational studies as an ‘ecumenical field’ needs to leave ‘conceptual and methodological space for both top-down/outside-inside views’ (2010, p. 1682). Also concerned with deepening transnationalism studies beyond the focus on the individual migrant, Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004) offered a transnational social field approach that unhinges notions of society from the boundaries of a single nation-state, and instead foregrounded the significance of multiple interlocking sets of social relationships that are not coterminous with state boundaries. As a domain of practice in which unequally positioned social agents may act, compete, collaborate or exchange ideas and resources across borders, the concept of a transnational social field challenges the ‘neat divisions of connection into local, national, transnational, and global’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, p. 1010). As Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004, p. 1010) go on to explain, ‘In one sense, all are local in that near and distant connections penetrate the daily lives of individuals lived within a locale. But within this locale, a person may participate in personal networks or receive ideas and information that connect them to others in a nation-state, across the borders of a nation-state, or globally, without ever having migrated.’ The approach hence brings migrants, their family members, and non-migrants into the same social field; at the same time, a distinction is made between more practical ‘ways of being’ where individuals are embedded within a field without identifying with what it represents, and meaning-laden ‘ways of belonging’ where individuals engage in social relations and practices with the awareness of what kind of identity action signifies. As the literature on transnationalism grew exponentially as the twenty-first century progressed, scholars became less concerned with defining and delimiting the scope of transnationalism and instead drew on transnationalism as an analytical framework or ‘optic’ that can be applied to a widening range of spaces (e.g. public space, political space, the home and spaces of return), networks (e.g. business, family and friendship networks) and actors (e.g. elite, middling and capital-poor subjects) operating within and across national borders (Collins 2009). A quarter of a century after its initial efflorescence, transnationalism studies have moved considerably from the earlier preoccupation, particularly in the US-centric literature, on immigrant

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  7

ties within homeland-host society relationships to a much broader conception of social ties including transnational connections forged by businesses, the media, politics, religion, family, kinship and all manner of social experience (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007; Tan et al. 2018). Used extensively in migration studies in particular, transnationalism has become something of a shorthand, underpinning research in multiple domains including the growing significance of migrant remittances in migration-and-development discourses, studies on dual, multiple and flexible citizenship and sense of belonging, and transnational parenthood, care chains and the social reproduction of the family, to name a few. In turn, the expanding corpus of transnationalism studies has also helped to refine our understanding of the term by distinguishing between various types of transnational linkages (e.g. familial, socio-cultural, economic and political); specifying distinct levels of transnationalism (e.g. above/below, or micro, meso and macro levels); and identifying multiple transnational actors (e.g. individuals, families, communities and organisations) (Tan et al. 2018). In recent years, as the ‘transnational’ gains currency in the lexicon of migration studies and related fields of research, it has also given impetus to new directions for research. While some scholars fear that the concept is at risk of degenerating into an empty ‘catch-all’ term in a field that is ‘descriptive’ and ‘context-dependent’ (Dahinden, 2017, p. 1475, citing Pries 2008 and Waldinger 2015), others regard the transnational optic as a paradigmatic shift heralding new theoretical and methodological approaches that have made a fundamental difference to the way social processes are understood. In their review of 60 influential papers, Tan et al. (2018, p. 13) concluded that despite important lacunae, ‘the influence of transnationalism [on development studies] has been profound, stimulating an innovative body of work on changing migration patterns, the linkages between diaspora and their homelands, and the impact of these linkages on development’. Focusing on social theory, Dahinden (2017, p. 1482) argued that applying a transnational perspective means ‘adopting an explicitly de-nationalized epistemological stance [i.e. new frames outside ‘national containers’] and concomitant methodologies [e.g. mobile methods, multi-sited approaches] in order to investigate and theorize cross-border social phenomena by non-state actors’. While transnationalism studies have explicitly focused on non-state actors in writing against or beyond the state, Collyer and King (2015) highlighted the need to bring the transnational practices of the state back into the fold in geopolitical analysis through giving weight to the extra-territorial reach of state power in controlling transnational activities. The ‘transnational spatialities of state power’ can work in multiple ways, securing borders against migrants-in-transit through ‘detention, deportation and deterrence’ on the one hand, while binding emigrants to their home countries by granting extra-territorial citizenship rights on the other (Ehrkamp, 2020, p. 1206). Debates on transnationalism have also spawned creative synergy with a range of other emerging concepts. In their introduction to a special issue of Identities, de Jong and Dannecker (2018, p. 494) shift attention from internal navel-gazing to examining the productive rapprochement between transnationalism and like-minded

8  Handbook on transnationalism

concepts such as ‘borders’, ‘translocality’, ‘precarity’, ‘queer’, ‘moralities’, ‘the state’, and ‘brokerage’ to offer to novel frameworks for analysing ‘the complexity and the interconnectedness of social life on a global scale’. Similarly, Tedeschi et al.’s (2020) review of highly cited recent papers suggests that the transnationalism optic has considerable mileage in engaging disparate fields of study including telecommunications, return migration, the body and the law. The focus on the flexibility and diversity of migratory trajectories that is germane to transnationalism research has also provided fertile ground for the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Cresswell 2006; Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006). The insistence on going beyond ‘the nation as container’ while foregrounding the dynamism and unequal power of transnational fields coheres with the new paradigm’s push against a sedentarist bias to reveal the politics of (im)mobility. Lines of continuity can be traced between transnationalism’s emphasis on eschewing methodological nationalism and insisting on migrants’ affinities with multiple territories on the one hand, and the mobilities approach’s focus on understanding migration itself as a socio-political practice that ‘(re)composes societies, including national ones’ (Lin and Gleiss 2018, p. 142) on the other. While migration from a mobilities framework is more multidirectional and diverse than simply transnational, both approaches – the more mature field of transnationalism studies and the newer ‘mobilities turn’ – created space for interrogating the power of discourses, practices and infrastructures that both facilitate as well as hinder, halt and prohibit movement (Blunt 2007; Sheller 2011). As Sheller (2017) argues, through challenging the idea of space as a container for social processes, the new mobilities paradigm grew out of and extended a range of theorisations of space across local, national, transnational and global scales.

SECTION OVERVIEW Part I: Conceptualising Transnationalism In Part I of this handbook, we focus on the conceptualisation of transnationalism, as an observable set of phenomena and as an analytical approach to grappling with social reality. Appropriately, we begin in Chapter 2 with David Featherstone’s account of transnationalism and translocalism before and during nation formation. With a view to the historical emergence of national states, and the countercurrents of working and subaltern social movements, Featherstone demonstrates that much of what is named transnationalism actually operates through situated translocal connections, ‘placed relations through which transborder processes are generated’. The chapter elaborates on these claims through an historical account of national and international workers; movements wherein notions of race, coloniality and imperial connections of extraction, settlement, slavery and indenture took on different contours depending on varying relations to place. Such an account troubles narratives of worker movements emanating outwards from imperial Britain, highlighting in the context of mari-

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  9

time work how ships and dockyards were sites of struggle over coloniality, where through practices such as ‘smuggling anti-colonial literature, which was prohibited by colonial regimes, seafarers shaped internationalist political trajectories which had significant impacts on anti-colonial struggles’. This argument resonates with earlier critiques of methodological nationalism in scholarship on transnationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) but also challenges the persistence of ‘methodological statism’ (Mongia 2019), the view that the control of migration by states is long-standing and non-contentious and that migrant transnationalism responds to these national structures. Featherstone, by contrast, shows how translocal relations can be fundamental to the formation of the nation itself, in this case the anti-colonial struggles that involved migrants ‘both making sense of and challenging exclusionary constructions of Britishness’. In Chapter 3, Biao Xiang takes these questions about the circumstances under which transnationalism emerges and has significance in another direction through the development of a multi-scalar analytical framework. Building on the general consensus around the extent and novelty of transnationalism, Xiang zooms in on the specific conditions under which transnationalism can actually be said to alter or shape social realities. Drawing attention to scale as units of coordination (such as a nation, supply chain, or hometown association) makes it possible to distinguish between transnationalism as social relations and connections writ large and transnational connections that have wider significance because they ‘generate additional capacity for the actors involved’. In thinking through a multi-scalar framework focused on coordination, Xiang proposes that each scale has two dimensions – a scope that might extend from local through to transnational and a type, either taxonomical (defined by bureaucratic hierarchies) or emergent (created by actors from below). Transnational scales are ordinarily emergent but they do intersect in critical ways with taxonomical scales; indeed Featherstone’s account of anti-colonial struggles in disrupting empire and the emergence of nations demonstrates how different scales can be closely intertwined and interdependent. To give shape to this multi-scalar framework, Xiang offers the case of the various relations involved in and emergent from Yiwu, a town in south-east China that has become a significant centre for wholesale commodity sales and trade. What he observes is that there is unevenness in the extent to which transnational connections achieve scalar coordination (notably trade but not religious practice), that scalar coordination can be traced to basic institutions such as family as well as local and national government activities, and that transnational flows are not necessarily against the nation-state; trade can enhance national initiatives while religion can be seen as a counterpoint to the nation. Such an account shifts the emphasis from defining what is or is not transnational to attend to how different connections matter not just as practices but for their longer-term transformative potential. In Chapter 4, Sergei Shubin shifts attention to the relationship between transnationalism and time. While notions of instantaneity and simultaneity (Portes et al. 1999; Glick Schiller et al. 1995) have been a central part of the claims to novelty in accounts of transnationalism, Shubin argues that this emphasis on the present and connectivity belies the complexity of temporal relations involved in cross-border

10  Handbook on transnationalism

movements and lives. Indeed, the claim to connectivity that was at the heart of some early assertions of transnationalism, and especially those that placed significant emphasis on communication technologies, present a problematic ‘flat temporality identified primarily with the domain of action and utility’. In effect, claims of simultaneity across borders imply potential for a complete time-space compression that disregards the disruptive dimensions of migration and transnational life. Shubin develops an alternative account of transnationalism and time that draws on the work of the philosopher Maurice Blanchot to emphasise the ways in which transnational life is: fragmented because of the disruption involved in mobility and connectivity; characterised by liminal or in-between temporalities rather than fully formed senses of time; and asynchronous and anonymous time that emphasises non-coincidence and surprise over predictability and progression of transnational relations. The greater attention to time in this chapter lays important conceptual groundwork that can reveal the labour involved in achieving connectivity, the friction and constraints that people encounter in transnational life and the politics of waiting and forgetting that haunt questions of memory and relationships across borders. Questions of time and transnationalism also bear heavily on matters of life course and the experiences of transnational ageing that are addressed by Vincent Horn in Chapter 5. As Horn notes, much of the early scholarship on transnationalism placed emphasis on the cross-border lives of younger migrants, seeking labouring opportunities, building families and maintaining relationships and communities transnationally. A focus on transnational ageing relates partly to the extension of these transnational experiences across the life course but it also involves later life migrations and the involvement of older people in families that are separated through the migration of children, siblings or other relatives and community members. In this respect, and echoing important arguments about variability in transnationalism made later by Carling (Chapter 7), Horn reminds us that transnational ageing can emerge as both a putatively voluntary phenomenon (to the extent of being a life style choice in some cases) as well as ‘the undesired consequence of spatially ruptured social formations (involuntary)’. Older people living transnational lives have to negotiate a range of legal, cultural and social differences and often do so in the context of differentiated and shifting expectations about life course and intergenerational relations. As Horn reminds us, however, it is critical that scholars do not position older people only as passive actors struggling with such complexity – indeed, ageing parents and grandparents, especially women, have been critical facilitators and enablers of transnational family arrangements. The study of transnational ageing also then engages an important connection between transnationalism and older people’s lives more generally, highlighting the need to question assumptions about sedentarism in later life and recognising how expectations around ageing and family life are subject to change through migration. Affect and emotion have been critical undercurrents in the study of transnationalism but as Raelene Wilding and Loretta Baldassar highlight in Chapter 6 it is only recently that feelings have been addressed more explicitly by researchers. The obscureness of emotions is perhaps surprising given how much important literature

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  11

on families there has been in studies of transnationalism, which clearly imply questions of intimacy across distance, as well as belonging, home and displacement that hinge on how people feel about places they traverse and people they connect with. To draw out what they call ‘an alternative history of transnationalism’, Wilding and Baldassar engage more explicitly with theories of affect and emotion and highlight some of the insights that can emerge through a focus on hope, love and guilt, emotions that have been particularly salient in understanding transnational family life. Their account demonstrates that these emotions play a fundamental role in transnational relationships: guilt in the rupture of transnational family and reworked gender roles but also love and hope tied to feelings of longing that sustain relationships across time and distance. While their discussion is specific to parenting, partnering and aged care, Wilding and Baldassar’s account demonstrates how important it is for researchers to pay explicit attention to emotions and affect, not only as outcomes of transnational life but as forces that motivate and shape the very possibility of moving and living across borders. In the last chapter in Part I, Jørgen Carling (Chapter 7) returns to questions about the extent and durability of transnational ties by focusing on how connections are prevalent in different contexts and their substance in terms of actually facilitating transnational practices. For Carling, it remains important to delimit exactly what is meant by transnationalism in order to address the question how researchers can ‘best understand the ways in which transnationalism varies across space and changes over time’. The argument that Carling develops is distinct from earlier critiques of transnationalism’s limits (cf. Portes et al. 1999 most notably) in that he seeks to shift away from only measuring migrants’ contributions to cross-border relations and practices. He proposes instead the notion of ‘reciprocal agency’ that highlights the importance of transnational connections involving people on both sides of borders, and indeed we might extend to a range of intermediary actors as well (Lindquist 2017). By focusing on remittances, Carling makes a strong analytical case for showing how transnationalism does or does not sustain under particular circumstances – the impact of different kinds of migratory patterns (settlement, temporary or circular), policy settings that shape the possibility for remittances and the continued salience of different kinds of family relationships. Rather than a necessary and stable outcome of migration, or always equal in their substantive impacts, Carling’s account thus highlights the need for more analytical precision and empirical depth in understanding the existence of transnationalism. Part II: Varieties of Transnationalism One of the characteristics of recent scholarship on transnationalism is an increasing diversification of the subjects and spaces involved in cross-border lives, activities and circulations. In Part II we thus turn attention to some of this variety, traversing state practices, homemaking, organisations, activism, families, youth, urbanism, education, popular culture and religion. We begin Part II with Gerasimos Tsourapas’ account of transnational state practices and authoritarian politics. Through his focus

12  Handbook on transnationalism

on ‘transnational authoritarianism’, Tsourapas sets out to rework the territorially bound concept of authoritarianism that is commonly deployed in scholarship within political science and international relations. Instead, he observes a wide range of practices through which authoritarian regimes stretch out across their borders in managing emigration exit, maximising economic benefits and minimising perceived political and security risk, particularly through silencing the voices of citizens abroad. In doing so, the chapter identifies how states’ transnational engagements also involve broader alignments and coordination with non-state and multilateral organisations as well as being facilitated by new technologies for cross-border surveillance. Shifting from this focus on the authoritarian reach of ‘home’ nation-states, in Chapter 9 Paolo Boccagni addresses the social dimensions of home, as a place, set of relationships and infrastructure for migration. As Boccagni observes, the focus on transnationalism has particular significance for notions and experiences of home, disrupting the commonsensical view of home as a singular, relatively fixed place. Transnationalism instead speaks to multiple senses of home and connection, and the circulation of people, objects and feelings across space in the practices of creating and sustaining home. Home also articulates at multiple scales in transnationalism – places for living and family, the home country amongst emigrants and diaspora, and established through transnational householding. This account is particularly insightful for the way in which he accounts for the naming of home, the feeling of being at home, the making of homes and the emplacing of homes, transnationally. Boccagni concludes his account in ways that resonate with the earlier accounts of time (Shubin) and space (Xiang) in relation to homemaking, noting that migrant homemaking involves both transnational undertakings connecting places, while also transtemporal work of recreating past memories and expressions to create meaningful places of attachment. Ludger Pries and Rafael Bohlen address transnational organisations in Chapter 10. In contrast to accounts of transnationalism as sets of practices, identities and cultural affiliations, Pries and Bohlen highlight that organisations ‘are defined by more or less explicit structures and boundaries’ and thus highlight one avenue for researchers to engage in meso-level analysis of transnationalism. Their chapter addresses both profit and non-profit organisations, demonstrating how multinational companies play critical roles in structuring economies, global trade and value chains, and labour markets, while non-profit organisations such as hometown associations can be critical in connecting life worlds across borders, serving as political channels, and facilitating and creating migrant community and senses of belonging. The focus on transnational organisations hence provides an important account of the different kinds of actors involved in linking places, economies and societies as well as creating opportunities for the migration studies dimensions of transnationalism to attend to broader structures and systems involved in constituting and facilitating cross-border activities. Building in part on this focus on organisations as transnational actors, Michele Ford turns attention to the politics of transnational activism in Chapter 11. As Ford demonstrates, transnational activism, underpinned by various networks, movements

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  13

and coalitions, has become a significant feature of cross-border political activity. Certainly, and echoing Featherstone’s opening chapter, Ford reminds us that cross-border activism is not new, but the affordability of travel and the coordinating and communicating potential of the internet have created scope for a much wider range of activist connections and collaborations. The account presented here recognises considerable variability in activism, however, wherein scale of operation and target might range from challenging global trade agreements to single corporations or local government activity, while activist movements also operate within different opportunity structures, not least influenced by access to resources and more or less constraining national and transnational contexts. In other words, while transnational activism obviously occurs across borders it is also often grounded in place and subject to different constraints and opportunities that emerge therein. Research on families and householding practices has been a cornerstone of the study of transnationalism since the 1990s. In Chapter 12, Yeoh, Lam and Huang discuss research in Asia on the formation of transnational families, a seemingly oxymoronic phrase given the common assumption of proximity and situatedness in social science understandings of the family. As they argue in the chapter, the transnational optic has upended these assumptions such that ‘the scalar relationship between “family” and “nation-state” can now be reversed as “nations” can now be folded into the “family”, while “family” can now be stretched across national borders’. As in other chapters in Part II, a key theme in this account of transnational family formation and maintenance is the way in which such relations vary, reflecting the need to maintain some connections over others, because of the impacts of national policy frameworks and their role in shaping migrant lives, and the uneven access that family members have to communication technologies. Yeoh, Lam and Huang also demonstrate that transnational families are sites for considerable contestation and change – in terms of gender identities and relations, the double-edged effects of communication technologies that can sustain intimacy but also generate new forms of surveillance and control, and the way in which remittances support but also bring challenges for migrants subject to expectations and multiple demands. Given the greater viability of maintaining family relationships transnationally today, these insights also bear on the much wider questions of gender roles, familial ties and obligations, intimacy and care and, fundamentally, what constitutes the family. Valentina Mazzucato and Joan van Geel focus on the experiences of young people growing up in transnational social fields in Chapter 13. Migration affects children and young people in different ways, when they are migrants themselves or with their families, as the second generation of migrant parents and for those who stay at home when parents migrate. The authors note that research on young people and migration has unevenly employed the notion of transnationalism. Research on second generation migrants for example tends to remain focused on the lives of young people in the countries their parents moved to rather than addressing their potential onward mobilities. Studies on left-behind children, by contrast, often draw attention to the circulation of care and feelings of children in relation to their migrant parents, situating them within but largely subject to transnational social fields. Drawing on the mobilities

14  Handbook on transnationalism

turn, Mazzucato and van Geel suggest that it is the last group, mobile young people, where there is a need for greater research attention. The focus on young people’s own mobilities highlights them as active agents in shaping transnational social fields and migration trajectories rather than only in terms of parental moves. In Chapter 14, Arnisson Ortega and Evangeline Katigbak explore the urban dimensions of transnationalism, highlighting how various kinds of transnational connections and circulations play a role in transforming urban areas. They draw in particular on Smith’s (2001) notion of ‘transnational urbanism’, a term which brings together questions of globalisation and urban place and in doing so ‘disrupts the treatment of cities as discrete and bounded territories constituted by settlements and neighborhoods and instead offers a dynamic accounting of flows and mobilities that sustain urban life’. They demonstrate the significance of transnational flows to urbanisation through specific focus on the Philippines and three sites that epitomise the significance of transnational relations – gated transnational suburbs, island tourist hubs generated through transnational interracial relationships and transnational mansions. These spaces show how different kinds of transnational connections come together in making urban places – especially diasporic remittances and investment, real estate development focused on these potential investments, and the meaning making tied to constructing housing reminiscent of places of migration. In this respect, Ortega and Katigbak are able to demonstrate how various kinds of transnationalisms, national and local loyalties, familial expectations, and idealised migrant aspirations and emotions about place, come to shape the processes of urbanisation. Johanna Waters and Maggi Leung also consider the multiple forms of connections and mobilities that shape transnationalism through their account of transnational higher education in Chapter 15. In this chapter they bring together both the study of student mobility and a focus on the transnational operation of higher education institutions themselves. While not all literature on international student mobility deploys a transnational framework, Waters and Leung show clearly how international students engage in transnationalism through consumption and identity practices, post-graduation employment and social reproduction, and the significance of transnational networks to student mobilities. Flipping perspectives, Waters and Leung then consider educational institutions that operate across borders. As they note, scholarship on transnational institutions rarely engages with notions of transnationalism but several key features of research highlight important connections: the significance of cross-border commercial arrangements and flows; knowledge production across postcolonial and neocolonial contexts; and the assurance of quality in transnational operations. In concluding, Waters and Leung note that curiously these literatures on transnational higher education have remained relatively separate, suggesting that there is significant potential for new knowledge at the intersection of institutional and student mobility from a transnational perspective. Transnationalism is also embedded in expressions and circulations of popular culture, as Youna Kim discusses in her account of transnational popular culture in Chapter 16. Technological and political economic developments have been particularly significant in the transnationalisation of popular culture. The deregulation of

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  15

industries of media culture since the 1980s alongside the growth in satellite and cable television and subsequently online networks have created the conditions for a wide range of media forms to move almost seamlessly around the globe. Initially conceived by media scholars as indicative of processes of Westernisation, transnational popular culture is now recognised as much more diverse with multiple emergent centres generating media content that is taken up in a range of different geographical contexts and with unique possibilities for culture and identity formation. Not least amongst these is the way in which transnational popular culture facilitates belonging amongst migrants who are now much more easily able to consume, reproduce and even contribute to ‘home’ country popular culture across borders. Kim examines these shifting landscapes of transnational popular culture through a focus on the Korean Wave of popular culture. Since the early 2000s, Korean popular culture has had a significant boom in production and distribution, initially in Asia but subsequently across the globe. Facilitated by marketisation, digital fan cultures and soft power, the Korean Wave demonstrates how contemporary transnational popular culture can lead to growing significance for postcolonial and peripheral cultural forms, creating conditions for new hybridised expressions of self, identity, nation and transnation. Like cultural expressions, religion has a longstanding relationship with migration wherein population movements have for centuries been a process that has underpinned the spread and of religious practices and organisations around the world. Dominic Pasura examines this relationship in Chapter 17, highlighting religion’s role in shaping migration and the lived experiences of migrants alongside the way in which religious traditions and practices are themselves transformed through the effects of movement, displacement and migration. As Pasura notes, much of the already established literature on religion in the social sciences has had an overemphasis on Christianity and in particular Protestantism, wherein narratives of secularisation have dominated accounts in contrast to accounts of otherness and tradition in the ongoingness of religion in other parts of the world. Centring the relationship between migration and religion in exploring religions more broadly in a globalising world, Pasura asks two questions: How are religious beliefs, institutions and practices transported and transplanted across borders? What is the analytical value of a transnational optic in studying religion on the move? His account highlights significant overlaps and intersections between transnational religions such as the Catholic church and diasporic religions expressed and maintained through communities of people dispersed in multiple locales. Pasura also discusses how religions are adapted to place through the lived experiences and practices of migrants, the transnationalism that sustains ongoing connections to religions elsewhere and the specific sites of encounter within which religious practices intersect with what is already in place. As Pasura concludes, taking a transnational optic opens up understandings of religion beyond traditional institutionalised accounts, both in terms of what counts as religious practices and the ways in which they can be transformed through migration and the lives of migrants.

16  Handbook on transnationalism

Part III: Transnational Migrations Part III of the handbook focuses more specifically on conceptualisations of transnational migration across different mobility patterns and migration categories. The chapters in this section attest to the durability of transnationalism as a productive approach in exploring different facets of international migration, from the study of temporary labour migration, to international student migration, marriage migration, return migration and migrant remittances. In Chapter 18, Matt Withers and Nicola Piper’s account of transnationalism and temporary labour migration highlights the need to shift the analytic focus from ‘agentic’ migrant transnationalism to foregrounding the importance of state power and transnational brokerage networks in managing migration, employment and welfare regimes. In particular, they direct attention to temporary labour migration regimes, and argue that the structures and institutions that regulate the legality and temporality of migrant entries have induced a ‘temporality-precarity nexus’. They situate the discussion of temporary migration regimes within the context of prominent guest worker regimes in Asia and the Gulf states as an example of how capital-driven, brokered migration schemes and a resultant commodification of migrant labour as disposable low-cost input often confine temporary migrant workers to risk-laden and vulnerable livelihoods. The optimism of migration-and-development discourses readily co-opted the assumptions of agentic transnationalism, while downplaying the overlapping forms of discrimination and disempowerment that temporary migrant workers face within highly restrictive labour migration regimes predicated on profit-driven recruitment agencies and intermediaries. As non-citizen workers accorded ‘temporary’ status, these migrant workers invariably experience constraints on length of stay and employment mobility, and have diminished access to social protection, family migration and pathways to longer-term residency. As Withers and Piper note, under conditions where ‘settlement is unattainable, family accompaniment impossible, return visits financially impractical … cross-border activities collapse into a “thin” transnationalism chiefly constituted by distance communication and remittances’. In other words, built-in conditions of temporariness and precarity limit migrants’ capacity to engage in the full suite of sustained cross-border practices. Instead, the temporary migrant worker is ironically locked into unending circuits of transnational money, material goods, care and emotion in order to sustain the social reproduction of family life across borders, but denied the liminal freedoms of simultaneous identity that settled migrant communities may leverage, or the flexibility of choice that capital-rich transnational elites enjoy (Yeoh, 2015). Withers and Piper conclude the chapter by proposing that in order to create a ‘thicker’, more liveable, transnationalism for temporary migrant workers, transnational networks of labour activism and cross-institutional alliances need to be strengthened in order to build a dynamic stratum for facilitating ‘transnational labour citizenship’ as an alternative rights-based approach to migration management. Turning attention to internationally mobile students, Gracia Liu-Farrer (Chapter 19) highlights three prominent types of international students that have featured

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  17

in the literature since the late 1980s: globe-trotting university students, early study abroad students, and student-workers. With the expansion and diversification of international education globally, international student mobilities have become a significant transnational force, even as internationally mobile students’ trajectories appear increasingly fluid, sometimes circular, sometimes stepwise, and at other times multinational. Liu-Farrer argues that international education has been adopted by a diverse array of stakeholders – national, regional and local governments, educational institutions, employers, families and individual students – with different motivations, ranging from cultivating regional identity, importing labour, internationalising education systems, producing revenues and financing schools, to accumulating cultural capital and credentials, and fostering personal growth and freedom. In this light, a bi-focal perspective limited to ‘to-and-fro’ movements between source and destination countries is no longer adequate in studying international student mobilities. Instead, applying a ‘thicker’ transnationalism lens (to use Withers and Piper’s language of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ transnationalisms) should train attention on the cross-border ties that individuals, organisations and institutions foster and maintain across an interconnected and competitive transnational field with distinct hierarchies. Importantly, Liu-Farrer draws attention to the significant role of an education-migration industry that produces and perpetuates cross-border student mobility, not only by actively searching for students and facilitating the process of migration, but also by shaping students’ decision-making. The rise of a profit-driven and predatory international education regime introduces additional precarity and uncertainty for international students navigating the education-migration nexus. In Chapter 20, Juan Zhang gives weight to the gendered contours of transnationalism by focusing on the intimate geopolitics and gender dynamics that propel and animate transnational marriage migration in the broader Asian context. Zhang highlights Jongwilaiwan and Thompson’s (2013) notion of the ‘transnational patriarchal bargain’ where citizen husbands ‘parley citizenship rights into patriarchal privileges’ within marriage, while migrant wives renegotiate a ‘moral sense of self’ within their marital families by fashioning themselves as caring wives and dutiful daughters-in-law. At the same time, migrant wives continue to enact transnational identities as filial daughters and generous patrons to their natal families and home communities. Zhang locates transnational patriarchy within a particular transnational disciplinary regime predicated on heteropatriarchal norms and geopolitical inequalities across borders. By regulating the private and intimate domains of transnational migration, such a regime of power produces frictional effects on women’s bodies, not only within home spaces where they are compelled to conform to the cultural scripts of the host society, but also in the public domain in relation to their access to citizenship rights. Underpinned by the uneven terrain of transnational geopolitics, Zhang shows that the ‘cartographies of desire’ (Constable 2005) reflected in transnational marriage migration are hemmed in by ‘friction as interrupted mobilities’, stemming from ‘immigration barriers, divergent cultural norms, body politics and incompatible visions of family life’. In arguing that friction is also associated with transformative

18  Handbook on transnationalism

possibilities, Zhang’s analysis connects transnationalism to the politics of (im)mobility in the reworking of the global intimate and its relationalities. Also situating their analysis at the productive interface between transnationalism approaches and the mobilities paradigm, Anastasia Christou and Brenda S.A. Yeoh interrogate the linkages between return, return migration and transnational mobilities in Chapter 21. They argue that recent scholarship that has drawn from a cross-fertilisation between the two approaches has unsettled ‘the hard dichotomy between migration and return’. The conceptual distinction between ‘migration’ and ‘return migration’ has blurred considerably, as movements become multiple, multidirectional and provisional, while identity takes on complex, simultaneous, ambivalent or elastic qualities. Instead, the term ‘transnational return mobilities’ (adapted from King and Christou’s 2011 ‘return mobilities’) facilitates the stretching of the meaning of a specific migratory move ‘across time, space and generations’, thereby affording a more flexible conceptual terrain while retaining the transnational and homecoming elements. This recoding as transnational return mobilities is helpful in opening up ample room to explore a wide range of related concerns, from the mythologising of return as a cohesive force for diasporic communities, the allure (and illusion) of ancestral tourism and homeland visits, home-host dynamics and ‘reverse transnationalism’, and alienation in the homeland and transnational identity politics, to the gendered and generational dimensions of reintegration into the family and community. In the final chapter of Part III, Anju Paul (Chapter 22) introduces the concept of ‘multinational migrations’ as a way to move beyond the more traditional binational framing of transnationality that tends to limit transnational connections to those between a single origin and single destination. In recognising that migrants often move multiple times across international borders over the course of their migratory lifetimes, ‘multinational migrations’ provides an umbrella term for the proliferation of terms in recent migration scholarship to accommodate migration patterns encompassing multiple moves, such as onward, secondary, stepwise, serial, triangular, twice, step-down and cross-wise. Paul offers different ways of defining multinational migrations, such as foregrounding the directionality of migration sequences (whether migration is upward, downward, lateral, circular or multidirectional) or by focusing on intentionality (whether migration is strategic or organic). She argues that the sheer variety of multinational migrations has resulted in new forms of transnational ties, but this has largely remained an understudied area. In offering a way forward, Paul distinguishes between three types of transnational ties that go beyond the traditional origin-destination pairing: transnational dyads that connect two destination countries; transnational triangles that trace linkages among two destinations and the origin country; and transnational webs featuring ties that connect multiple members of a single family or other tightly-knit social units to three or more countries, even if they have not all lived in all of the countries in the web. She concludes that by giving attention to the ‘mimetic and normative pressures embedded within multinational networks of pre-migrants and existing migrants’, the transnational optic as applied to migration can be rendered ‘truly multinational’.

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  19

Part IV: Transnational Networks and Circulations Part IV of the handbook builds on the discussion in Part III on multiple forms of transnational migrations by engaging more specifically with the various networks and circulations that emerge as a result of transnational migrant activities. In turn, these different facets of transnational networks – remittances, virtual communication, care, businesses and lifestyles – are integral to understanding the complex flows and circuits that undergird and sustain transnational migrations and mobilities. In Chapter 23, Marta Bivand Erdal discusses the flow of remittances, the single transnational practice that has attracted the most scholarly and policy attention. She focuses on the multiple forms of remittances as an integral part of migrant transnationalism, as well as a central tenet of the migration-development nexus. She notes that remittances are often treated as a form of ‘bottom-up’ development finance that surpasses foreign direct investments and development aid in many developing countries. At the same time, remittance behaviour is often far removed from national development strategies, as most migrants regard remittances as private transfers motivated by interpersonal linkages, and embedded in familial networks of obligations, expectations and emotion. In this light, Erdal argues that remittances are always – albeit in differing ways – more than ‘the money migrants send back home’ and instead, they need to be understood as economic exchanges and relationships across borders that are ‘inevitably social by nature’, and which have flow-on effects on the wider community beyond the household. Turning to another arena which has attracted considerable scholarly attention, Jolynna Sinanan and Heather Horst (Chapter 24) discuss communication practices as a key part of transnational networks, highlighting in particular the role that rapidly changing communication technologies play in shaping migrant experiences of family and other social networks. Prior to the ubiquity of digital media, traditional modes of communication such as sending letters and audio cassette recordings did not provide real-time contact or a sense of co-presence. With the spread of smartphones and social media platforms, digital communication has enabled new forms of mediated co-presence where ‘always-on’ awareness of distant others is made possible. While these technologically enabled forms of connectedness have facilitated ‘digital togetherness’ (Marino 2015) and feelings of proximity for family and friends across transnational space, they have also created ‘polymedia environments’ (Madianou and Miller 2013) that require constant management of social relationships in navigating both the online and offline worlds. As Sinanan and Horst write, ‘multiple complexities of ambivalent feelings, shifts in obligation and future orientations that are part of migrant experiences are now widely recognised as being inextricable from digital media practices’. Beyond transnational family and friendship networks, communication technologies are also implicated in transnational social movements and migrants’ political engagement in different ways, from channelling political discussion, emotional expression and media representation, to mobilising collective action across territories.

20  Handbook on transnationalism

Linked to but not synonymous with communication practices, the role of care and how it circulates in sustaining transnational lives takes centre-stage in Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding’s (Chapter 25) contribution. Understanding care as intrinsically relational, involving both caregiver and care recipient and embedded in networks of relationships, the authors highlight the importance of gender, generation, ethnicity and socio-cultural norms in shaping transnational care relationships. The feminisation of international labour markets and the care-chain migration of women as lowly paid global care workers have further entrenched retrogressive gender norms in the transnational context. The under-valorisation of migrant women’s care work is further compounded by diminished rights and recognition under restrictive migration regimes that govern what is often considered low-skilled ‘women’s work’. Baldassar and Wilding introduce the concept of ‘care circulation’ in order to account for the circulation of care across transnational families and global households that must navigate multiple legal, regulatory, policy, social and cultural contexts. The term gives weight to the ‘the reciprocal, multidirectional and asymmetrical exchange of care’ within broader networks (Baldassar and Merla 2014, p. 22) that not only fluctuates over the life course but is also shaped by inequitable processes encountered in crossing institutional regimes. Forwarding the notion of ‘digital kinning’, the authors also challenge the normative understanding of caregiving as synonymous with physical co-presence; instead, they argue that the circulation of care increasingly relies on a polymedia environment that creates both the opportunity and obligation for ongoing communication and support within the transnational family network. A care circulation approach complements and extends the notion of care chains in the global labour market by going beyond a care-deficit/care-surplus analysis; and instead highlighting a broader set of care practices involving a wider network of care actors, including those who move and those who stay behind. In Chapter 26, Jacob Thomas and Min Zhou turn attention to the role of transnational linkages in immigrant businesses within and beyond ethnic enclaves. While traditional scholarship on ethnic entrepreneurship has largely focused on immigrant businesses and self-employment as an adaptive strategy to overcome marketplace disadvantages and blocked mobility associated with minority status in host societies, the adoption of a transnational perspective has invigorated the research in new ways. The conceptual shift from ‘immigrant’ to ‘transnational’ foregrounds how these entrepreneurs develop their businesses by ‘connect[ing] to two or more social environments across national borders [while] actively seek[ing] opportunities in transnational spaces’. By leveraging on bilingual proficiency, cultural knowledge, family ties and co-ethnic networks, transnational entrepreneurs gain access to ‘important resources of social capital that open up additional opportunities for entrepreneurial pursuit unavailable in the host society’. They are also better placed to build their enterprises by bridging ‘structural holes’ and forging connections where there are few existing ties compared to their native counterparts or co-ethnics without such access. Thomas and Zhou also note that counterintuitively, transnational entrepreneurs are ‘more settlers than sojourners in the migrant-receiving country’, as putting down roots contributes to strengthening their economic base in the host society.

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  21

While transnational linkages are variable among ethnic entrepreneurs, the authors argue that where these are strong, cross-border entrepreneurial activity contributes positively to ethnic capital accumulation, diasporic community building and the social mobility of co-ethnic group members. In the final chapter in Part IV of the handbook, Sin Yee Koh (Chapter 27) trains the analytical lens on the transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles of the upper echelons of society. Concerned with the structures of differentiation that separate elites from non-elites, Koh argues that access to transnational resources and opportunities provides one of the key mechanisms through which elites not only enhance their already privileged status, but also transfer and reproduce their elite status across generations. Under the influence of the globalisation thesis that rose to prominence in the late twentieth century, scholarly interest in transnational elites had initially focused on corporate/business elites and globe-trotting expatriates, and more generally, the transnational capitalist class who ‘operate across state borders to further the interests of global capital’ (Sklair 2001, p. 295). The turn of the twenty-first century saw a resurgence of interest in wealthy elites, evocatively referred to as ‘the super-rich’, ‘high net worth individuals’ and ‘the one per cent’. A more recent development since the 2010s has shifted interest to the global middle class, and in particular, their strategic cultural capital accumulation through transnational mobility. Across these different conceptualisations of elite status, Koh signals the importance of exclusive elite spaces in reinforcing the distinctions between elites and non-elites, a process that is exacerbated by the elites’ ability and relative ease in partaking of transnational lifestyles. In particular, she highlights the role of educational and schooling networks, as well as social clubs and gated residential enclaves, in creating shared affiliation and socialised experiences of privilege and entitlement. She also points to the significance of elite clubs at the international level – such as the World Economic Forum and the Group of Thirty (G-30) – in consolidating and extending transnational networked power, as seen in members’ influence on business and political decision-making, oftentimes indirectly and behind closed doors. For Koh, elite transnational networks are not just spun by the seemingly effortless, exceptional personal mobility of the rich and powerful, they also underpin their ability to move their capital transnationally to maximise gains and reduce potential devaluation if their capital were kept immobile. Transnational networks are hence integral to elite lifestyles, while also contributing to the reproduction and legitimation of elite status.

TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE (POST-)PANDEMIC WORLD It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

22  Handbook on transnationalism

This handbook was conceived in a time before COVID-19 entered popular and scholarly vocabulary. It took fragile form and made uneven progress in the throes of the pandemic, reaching completion after many struggles against disruptions, delays, despair and disease on the part of 36 scholars far-flung across the world, in 15 countries and 8 time zones. The pandemic made all of us intensely aware of how inextricably interconnected our fates and fortunes are in these best and worst of times, and as we encounter the immensity of human wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair. The volume is, in the end, a testament to both the friability and enduring strength of transnationalism as a world-spanning idea as well as an everyday human practice. In his recent think piece, Alan Gamlen (2020) suggests that the ‘age of migration’ may now be coming to an end. For some time to come, devastated economies and unprecedented high rates of high unemployment will be less dependent on migrant workers to fill seasonal and skill shortages in the labour force in ‘a reversal of a decades-long trend’ (Gamlen 2020, p. 3). The uncertainties of pandemic resurgence, the tightening grip of economic nationalism, and the rise of a ‘tsunami of hate and xenophobia’ against migrants (in the words of the UN Secretary General, Guterres, 2021) signal a halt to globalisation and mark a reversal of migration trends. As Kysel and Thomas (2020, p. 349) note, state responses to the pandemic have ‘eschewed multilateralism’, ‘ignored well-established human rights obligations’ and are ‘poised to deploy a range of new border management technologies and even more assertively manage migration in the name of “health proofing” borders’. Yet, even prior to the pandemic, scholars of transnationalism and ‘immobility regimes’– as accounted in many chapters in this volume – have observed that ‘not being able to move can be as much a driver of transnational life as mobility itself’ (Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume). As an optic, transnationalism actually highlights the ways in which connectivity and mobility have become deeply embedded dimensions of global society and the relations between places across international borders. In this light, we bring this introductory chapter to a close with three observations. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly not upended transnational migration and mobility for all. As Lin and Yeoh (2021) conclude, ‘the COVID-19 pandemic relies not just on a virus, but also human organization to unleash its virulence’. In many countries, the management and control of national borders are predicated on economistic logics coupled with ‘graduated ideas of (non)citizenship’ that seek to ‘preserv[e] the lucrative flows of kinetic classes as far as possible, while marginalizing cheap migrant workers who later became vectors of disease in their overcrowded dormitories’ (Lin and Yeoh 2021, p. 108). While temporary migrant workers confront increasing risks and restrictions – often in both sending and receiving states, and upon return (Withers and Piper, Chapter 18 in this volume; Christou and Yeoh, Chapter 21 in this volume) – the transnationally mobile ‘super-wealthy’ (Koh, Chapter 27 in this volume) continue to be able to move money offshore, reap enormous profits, live privileged but insulated lifestyles, and constantly change their residency to safer havens to escape contagion (Letzing 2020). Adopting a mobility

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  23

justice approach, Heller (2021) argues that the excessive mobility of the privileged through air travel has been a major factor in spreading the virus, while inequitable access to vaccines and the introduction of COVID-19 vaccine passports are likely to perpetuate global travel inequity (Asi 2021). Second, while the pandemic interrupted all manner of embodied movements and may do so for some time to come, pre-existing transnational ties, networks and circulations anchored by the family, community, institutions and cultural organisations all serve as powerful infrastructures for generating and sustaining mobility and making transnational connections a likely ongoing characteristic of the world. While the pandemic has restricted bodily mobility and forms of travel, there is a concomitant rise in the way families have turned to communication technologies to conduct their working lives and caring online (Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume; Yeoh, Lam and Huang, Chapter 12 in this volume). Beyond the family realm, another important arena where digital infrastructures are playing an amplified role can be seen in the remaking of international higher education (Waters and Leung, Chapter 15 in this volume). Even as the rapid digitalisation of universities around the world in response to the pandemic has the tendency to ‘accelerate their further commercialization and privatization’, Sidhu et al. (2021, p. 314) urge the need to foreground embodied and experiential dimensions of learning and to address broader issues of justice and equity. The role of digital infrastructures and media technologies has thus become critical in governing the way people care, communicate, live, work, study, mobilise and project identity across borders, raising important new issues around ‘digital citizenship’ (Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). Third, despite deepening concerns about the violence and inequality of transnational mobility regimes under pandemic conditions, there have also been calls for reform. The UN Secretary-General’s urgent call to ‘reimagine human mobility for the benefit of all’ is not only in line with the question of rights for all but pragmatically based on the view that in the post-pandemic era that ‘no one is safe unless everyone is safe’ (UN Sustainable Development Group 2020a, p. 3). For example, the pandemic has not just revealed the in-built precarity of the temporary migration regime for transient migrant workers, but laid bare the unsustainability of migrant temporariness and back-and-forth mobility as the underlying principle for sustaining economic growth and labour markets for migrant-receiving nation-states (Yeoh 2020). Also identifying grounds for optimism, scholars of international migration law have argued that civil society and activist movements can offer ‘a potential site for building a politics of interdependence’ which centre ‘a universal baseline of rights for migrants’ as a means to temper an absolutist view of sovereignty (Kysel and Thomas, 2020, pp. 352–3). In a time of prolonged uncertainty, sending and receiving states may be motivated to work together to find new ways to effect ‘transnational labour citizenship’ characterised by the portability of benefits and services and the enforcement of baseline labour rights (Withers and Piper, Chapter 18 in this volume). As we struggle to make sense of the conundrum that ‘the worst of times’ is also ‘the best of times’, the crisis has forced us to confront a choice that cannot be compromised – ‘go back to the world we knew before or deal decisively with those issues

24  Handbook on transnationalism

that make us all unnecessarily vulnerable to this and future crises’ (UN Sustainable Development Group 2020b, p. 22).

NOTES 1. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first occurrence of the term ‘transnational’ to around 1920, when it was used in an economics text to describe Europe after the First World War as characterised by an ‘international or more correctly transnational economy’ (Faist 2010). 2. These figures relate to the number of documents indexed in Scopus that include the word ‘transnational’ in any part of the article. See https://​www​.scopus​.com/​search/​form​.uri​ ?display​=​basic.

REFERENCES Al-Ali, Nadje, Richard Black and Khalid Koser (2001), ‘The limits to “transnationalism”: Bosnian and Eritrean refugees in Europe as emerging transnational communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24 (4), 578–600. Appadurai, Arjun (1991), ‘Global ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology’, in Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology, Santa Fe, NM: New Mexico School of American Research Press, pp. 191–210. Asi, Yara M. (2021), ‘Vaccine passports may be on the way – but are they a reason for hope or a cause for concern?’, The Conversation, 13 March, accessed 21 May 2021 at https://​ theconversation​.com/​vaccine​-passports​-may​-be​-on​-the​-way​-but​-are​-they​-a​-reason​-for​ -hope​-or​-a​-cause​-for​-concern​-156534. Babic, Milan, Javier Garcia-Bernardo and Eelke M. Heemskerk (2020), ‘The rise of transnational state capital: State-led foreign investment in the 21st century’, Review of International Political Economy, RIPE, 27 (3), 433­–75. Baldassar, Loretta and Laura Merla (eds) (2014), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge. Basch, Linda G., Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, Basel: Gordon and Breach Science. Blunt, Alison (2007), ‘Cultural geographies of migration: Mobility, transnationality and diaspora’, Progress in Human Geography, 31 (5), 684–94. Castles, Stephen (2004), ‘The factors that make and unmake migration policies’, The International Migration Review, 38 (3), 852–84. Collins, Francis L. (2009), ‘Transnationalism unbound: Detailing new subjects, registers and spatialities of cross‐border lives’, Geography Compass, 3 (1), 434–58. Collyer, Michael and Russell King (2015), ‘Producing transnational space: International migration and the extra-territorial reach of state power’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (2), 185–204. Constable, Nicole (ed.) (2005), Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cresswell, Tim (2006), On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, New York: Routledge.

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  25

Dahinden, Janine (2017), ‘Transnationalism reloaded: The historical trajectory of a concept’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (9), 1474–85. de Jong, Sara and Petra Dannecker (2018), ‘Connecting and confronting transnationalism: Bridging concepts and moving critique’, Identities, 25 (5), 493­–506. Ehrkamp, Patricia (2020), ‘Geographies of migration III: Transit and transnationalism’, Progress in Human Geography, 44 (6), 1202­­–11. Faist, Thomas (1998), ‘Transnational social spaces out of international migration: Evolution, significance and future prospects’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie/European Journal of Sociology, 39 (2), 213–47. Faist, Thomas (2000), ‘Transnationalization in international migration: Implications for the study of citizenship and culture’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23 (2), 189–222. Faist, Thomas (2010), ‘Towards transnational studies: World theories, transnationalisation and changing institutions’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (10), 1665–87. Gamlen, Alan (2020), ‘Migration and mobility after the 2020 pandemic: The end of an age?’ Geneva: International Organization for Migration (IOM). Giles, Wenona (1997), ‘Re/membering the Portuguese household in Toronto: Culture, contradictions and resistance’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 20 (3), 387–96. Glick Schiller, Nina (2018), ‘Theorising transnational migration in our times: A multiscalar temporal perspective’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8 (4), 201–12. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1992), ‘Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 645 (1), 1–24. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1995), ‘From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration’, Anthropological Quarterly, 68 (1), 48–63. Graubart, Jonathan (2004), ‘“Legalizing” politics, “politicizing” law: Transnational activism and international law’, International Politics, 41 (3), 319–40. Guarnizo, Luis E. and Michael P. Smith (1998), ‘The locations of transnationalism’, in Michael P. Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below, New York: Transaction Publishers, pp. 3–34. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (1992), ‘Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference’, Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 6–23. Guterres, António [@antonioguterres] (2021), #COVID19 does not care who we are, where we live, or what we believe. Yet the pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering. That’s why I’m appealing for an all-out effort to end hate speech globally [Tweet], Twitter, accessed 21 May 2021 at https://​twitter​ .com/​antonioguterres/​status/​1258613180030431233​?ref​_src​=​twsrc​%5Etfw​%7Ctwcamp​ %5Etweetembed​%7Ctwterm​%5​E125861318​0030431233​%7Ctwgr​%5E​%7Ctwcon​%5Es1​ _​&​r ef​_ url​=​h ttps​% 3A​% 2F​% 2Fwww​. un​. org​% 2Fen​% 2Fcoronavirus​% 2Fcovid​- 19​- un​ -counters​-pandemic​-related​-hate​-and​-xenophobia. Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006), ‘Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities and moorings’, Mobilities, 1 (1), 1–22. Hannerz, Ulf (1996), Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, London and New York: Routledge. Heller, Charles (2021), ‘De-confining borders: Towards a politics of freedom of movement in the time of the pandemic’, Mobilities, 16 (1), 113–33. Heyvaert, Veerle (2017), ‘The transnationalization of law: Rethinking law through transnational environmental regulation’, Transnational Environmental Law, 6 (2), 205–36. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette and Ernestine Avila (1997), ‘“I’m here, but I’m there”: The meanings of Latina transnational motherhood’, Gender & Society, 11 (5), 548–71.

26  Handbook on transnationalism

Jongwilaiwan, Rattana and Eric C. Thompson (2013), ‘Thai wives in Singapore and transnational patriarchy’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 20 (3), 363–81. Kaplan, Caren (1996), Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. King, Russell and Anastasia Christou (2011), ‘Of counter-diaspora and reverse transnationalism: Return mobilities to and from the ancestral homeland’, Mobilities, 6 (4), 451–66. Kysel, Ian M. and Chantal Thomas (2020), ‘The contested boundaries of emerging international migration law in the post-pandemic’, AJIL Unbound, 114, 349–53. Letzing, John (2020), ‘The super-wealthy won big as COVID-19 spread – here’s how they can help alleviate the economic peril faced by most’, World Economic Forum, accessed 21 May 2021 at https://​www​.weforum​.org/​agenda/​2020/​10/​the​-rich​-got​-richer​-during​-the​ -pandemic​-and​-that​-s​-a​-daunting​-sign​-for​-our​-recovery/​. Levitt, Peggy (1998), ‘Social remittances: Migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion’, The International Migration Review, 32 (4), 926–48. Levitt, Peggy, Josh DeWind and Steven Vertovec (2003), ‘International perspectives on transnational migration: An introduction’, The International Migration Review, 37 (3), 565–75. Levitt, Peggy and Nina Glick Schiller (2004), ‘Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society’, The International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002–39. Levitt, Peggy and B. Nadya Jaworsky (2007), ‘Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends’, Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 129–56. Lin, Weiqiang and Marielle Stigum Gleiss (2018), ‘Migration and the production of migrant mobilities’, in Gracia Liu-Farrer and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds), Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 141–51. Lin, Weiqiang and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2021), ‘Pathological (im)mobilities: Managing risk in a time of pandemics’, Mobilities, 16 (1), 96–112. Lindquist, Johan (2017), ‘Brokers, channels, infrastructure: Moving migrant labor in the Indonesian-Malaysian oil palm complex’, Mobilities, 12 (2), 213–26. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller (2013), ‘Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16 (2), 169­–87. Mahler, Sarah J. (1999), ‘Engendering transnational migration: A case study of Salvadorans’, The American Behavioral Scientist, 42 (4), 690–719. Marino, Sara (2015), ‘Making space, making place: Digital togetherness and the redefinition of migrant identities online’, Social Media + Society, 1 (2). Mitchell, Katharyne (1997), ‘Transnational discourse: Bringing geography back in’, Antipode, 29 (2), 101–14. Mongia, Radhika (2019), Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State, Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black. Mountz, Alison and Richard A. Wright (1996), ‘Daily life in the transnational migrant community of San Agustín, Oaxaca, and Poughkeepsie, New York’, Diaspora, 5 (3), 403–28. Nowicka, Magdalena (2020), ‘(Dis)connecting migration: Transnationalism and nationalism beyond connectivity’, Comparative Migration Studies, 8 (1), 1–13. Ong, Aihwa and Donald M. Nonini (eds) (1997), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, New York: Routledge. Ougaard, Morten (2018), ‘The transnational state and the infrastructure push’, New Political Economy, 23 (1), 128–44. Portes, Alejandro (2001), ‘Introduction: The debates and significance of immigrant transnationalism’, Global Networks, 1 (3), 181–94. Portes, Alejandro, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt (1999), ‘The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 217–37.

Introduction to Handbook on Transnationalism  27

Pries, Ludger (ed.) (2008), Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-Link of Organisations, London: Routledge. Rouse, Roger (1991), ‘Mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism’, Diaspora, 1 (1), 8–23. Sauvant, Karl P. (ed.) (2008), The Rise of Transnational Corporations from Emerging Markets: Threat or Opportunity?, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Sheller, Mimi (2011), ‘Cosmopolitanism and mobilities’, in Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 349–65. Sheller, Mimi (2017), ‘From spatial turn to mobilities turn’, Current Sociology, 65 (4), 623–39. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry (2006), ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (2), 207–26. Sidhu, Ravinder, Yi’En Cheng, Francis L. Collins, Kong Chong Ho and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2021), ‘International student mobilities in a contagion: (Im)mobilising higher education?’, Geographical Research, 59 (3), 313–23. Sklair, Leslie (2001), The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Michael P. (2001), Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Suzuki, Nobue (2000), ‘Between two shores: Transnational projects and Filipina wives in/ from Japan’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (4), 431–44. Tan, Yan, Xuchun Liu, Andrew Rosser, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Fei Guo (2018), ‘Transnationalism, diaspora, and development: A purposive review of the literature’, Geography Compass, 12 (12). Tedeschi, Miriam, Ekaterina Vorobeva and Jussi S. Jauhiainen (2020), ‘Transnationalism: Current debates and new perspectives’, GeoJournal. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s10708​-020​ -10271​-8. UN Sustainable Development Group (2020a), ‘Policy brief: COVID-19 and people on the move’, accessed 21 May 2021 at https://​unsdg​.un​.org/​resources/​policy​-brief​-covid​-19​-and​ -people​-move. UN Sustainable Development Group (2020b), ‘Shared responsibility, global solidarity: Responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19’, accessed 21 May 2021 at https://​globalcompact​.at/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​11/​SG​-Report​-Socio​-Economic​-Impact​ -of​-Covid19​.pdf. Vertovec, Steven (1999), ‘Conceiving and researching transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 447–62. Waldinger, Roger D. (2015), The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and their Homelands, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Willis, Katie, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and S.M. Abdul Khader Fakhri (2004), ‘Introduction: Transnationalism as a challenge to the nation’, in Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Katie Willis (eds), State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific, London: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4), 301–34. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. (2015), ‘Affective practices in the European city of encounters: Reflections from a distance’, Cities, 19 (3), 545–51. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. (2020), ‘Temporary migration regimes and their sustainability in times of COVID-19’, Geneva: International Organization for Migration (IOM). Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Katie Willis (1999), ‘“Heart” and “wing”, nation and diaspora: Gendered discourses in Singapore’s regionalisation process’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 6 (4), 355–72.

28  Handbook on transnationalism

Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Katie Willis (eds) (2004), State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific, London: Routledge. Yeung, Henry W. (1997), ‘Business networks and transnational corporations: A study of Hong Kong firms in the ASEAN region’, Economic Geography, 73 (1), 1–25.

PART I CONCEPTUALISING TRANSNATIONALISM

2. Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism David Featherstone

INTRODUCTION In his coruscating review of George Rudé’s Protest and Punishment, the socialist historian E.P. Thompson reflects on the fate of trade unionists and rioters in England who were transported to Australia. Central to Thompson’s critique was Rudé’s failure to engage with the ‘tenacious maintenance of familial ties’ by those transported as convicts (Thompson 1994, p. 201). Thompson ends his essay with a story, drawn from M.K. Ashby’s study of Bledington, of an old woman who died near Burford in Oxfordshire in 1896. The woman’s husband and brother had both been transported in 1831, ‘as “Swing” rioters’ to Australia ‘for 14 and 7 years respectively’. ‘After seven years, when neither came back she comforted herself with the thought that “the one must wait for the other”’. ‘Fifty years later they still had not come and she died in her chair looking towards the East – as she thought towards Australia’. ‘What is one to make’, Thompson asks, ‘of that illiterate old lass whose patience was so large, and whose knowledge of geography, was so small?’ (Thompson 1994, p. 201). This chapter takes up the challenge posed by Thompson’s question. It draws attention to the terms on which historical transnational relations and trajectories have been understood and narrated, and explores their significance. In line with recent geographical scholarship, it focuses on ideas of translocalism as a way of developing a direct engagement with the placed relations through which transborder processes are generated. I argue that such approaches are also significant as they lend weight to the recognition that the nation-state form is not trans-historical. The chapter does, however, engage with the dynamics between translocal relations and the emergence of national states, especially in the context of decolonisation. Instead, as with Thompson’s concerns with the struggles of working-class actors, the chapter is primarily focused on the engagements of subaltern and working people in shaping translocal connections and relations. The chapter proceeds as follows. I first consider what is at stake in different ways in understanding the transnational and translocal and some of the different geographical imaginaries associated with these terms. I then explore the importance of past forms of transnational and translocal formations through three different themes: labour organising, the relations between anti-colonialism and maritime labour, and the relations between translocal encounters and resistance to forms of racialising nationalism. 30

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism  31

CONCEPTUALISING PRE-NATIONAL TRANSNATIONALISM AND TRANSLOCALISM In her book Indian Migration and Empire, Radhika Mongia argues that ‘While a transnational approach is useful for understanding certain recent trans(formations), it is not as helpful for historical inquiry since, in its reliance on the “national”, it introduces the problem of presentism in a particularly acute yet unacknowledged fashion. The problem is embedded in the very nomenclature: formulation of the transnational obliges if not shackles us to assumptions of space, state and subjectivity already conceived in national terms’ (Mongia 2019, p. 5, emphasis in original). These critical observations draw attention to some of the tensions involved in using transnational frameworks to engage with the longstanding historical relations between places discussed in E.P. Thompson’s reflections on convict transportation. Mongia’s reflections signal some of the conflicts between ways of thinking about the transnational and the translocal which are explored in this section. They also suggest the importance of understanding the nation and the functions it has acquired in relation to processes such as migration. Thus, as she notes, a consequence of ‘methodological statism’ is the ‘assumption that controlling migration across putative state borders is a long-standing and noncontentious element of state sovereignty’ (Mongia 2019, p. 6). This section first traces a brief genealogy of the challenge to methodological nationalism which has shaped work on transnationalism and the translocal. It then considers some of the different terms through which geographers have made sense of the spatialities of transnationalism and translocalism. A key impetus for the shift to thinking in terms of transnational and translocal histories and geographies has been the focus on oceanic circulations of political ideas and radicalism adopted by scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (Gilroy 1993; Linebaugh and Rediker 1990, 2001). Thus in his influential book Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy moves ‘discussion of black political culture beyond the binary opposition between national and diaspora perspectives’ by locating the black Atlantic world in ‘a webbed network, between the local and the global’. This serves to challenge ‘the coherence of all narrow nationalist perspectives and points to the spurious invocation of ethnic particularity to enforce them and to ensure the tidy flow of cultural output into neat symmetrical units’ (Gilroy 1993, p. 29). Gilroy’s challenge to ‘narrow nationalist perspectives’ was informed by a concern with the ways in which in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century black political activists and intellectuals shaped solidarities and relations which were not narrowly confined within national spaces. As he argues elsewhere, socialism and feminism ‘came into conflict with a merely national focus because they understood political solidarity to require trans-local connections. In order for those movements to move they had to break down the obviousness of the national state as a principle of political culture’ (Gilroy 2004, p. 5, emphasis in original). Such translocal connections were not, Gilroy argues, only articulated through movement beyond the nation, rather the formation of such relations and solidarities could involve challenges to the very idea of the nation-state (though as the next section suggests this was not an

32  Handbook on transnationalism

inevitable product of left social and political movements). In his work, then, the idea of translocal connections begins to do quite different work to some versions of the transnational which straightforwardly imply relations between actors and processes in already constituted national states or the movement of rather singularly conceived ethnic groups. In this respect Gilroy’s work has been a key reference in point in a broader challenge to the ‘methodological nationalism’ of much of the social sciences and geography. Debates over ‘methodological nationalism’ have stressed the significance of different approaches to transnationalism and translocalism and how they relate to pre-national spatial formations. Thus Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller argue that ‘methodological nationalism’ has pervasively structured both broader theoretical framings and empirical practices of research on questions of migration. By methodological nationalism they refer to the ways in which national articulations of communities and social and political relations are treated as trans-historical rather than specific formations (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 304). These conceptual issues are arguably related to a broader tendency to occlude what Sivamohan Valluvan has described as ‘the exclusionary principle that underpins nation formation’ (Valluvan 2019, p. 39). Wimmer and Glick Schiller argue that a further consequence of methodological nationalism is that ‘national discourses, agendas, loyalties and histories’ become taken for granted and treated as given, with the consequence that ‘nationally bounded societies are taken to be the naturally given entities to study’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 304). As Mongia’s account indicates, there are particular problems with reading constructions of the fully-formed nation-state back into the past. Such problems are compounded by pervasive assumptions that past territorial formations were more settled and less defined by circulation and movement (Featherstone 2007). A powerful rejoinder to such assumptions is given by Sunil Amrith in his study of the Bay of Bengal. As Clare Anderson has noted with reference to Amrith’s arguments, ‘migration around the Bay of Bengal by indentured and other workers was so extensive that in the century after 1840 perhaps as many as 28 million Indian and Chinese people migrated to Ceylon, Malaya and Burma’ (Anderson 2016, p. 182). Thus, Amrith argues that in the nineteenth century, the ‘colliding currents of the Bay of Bengal brought people into contact’ creating ‘new societies under the anvil of a new empire’ (Amrith 2013, p. 73). Central to his account are the port cities of the Straits Settlements such as Penang and Singapore which he argues were ‘places of linguistic innovation, as strangers were thrown together and had to learn to speak to one another. The distinction between forced and free migration blurred. Soldiers, slaves, transported convicts, and migrant workers toiled together. Their collective biography is the story of the Bay of Bengal as a human sea – a sea connected by ships and money, but also by ideas, struggles and shared suffering’ (Amrith 2013, p. 74). Amrith here usefully draws attention to the diverse forms of connection that are constituted and routed through particular sites, something which the term translocal has been used to understand and explain. As well as avoiding some of the issues with methodological nationalism through his focus on the diverse circulations around

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism  33

and across the Bay of Bengal, Amrith’s sensitivity to the situated connections and relations which are produced through particular sites and contexts strongly aligns with work on translocalism. By attending to how such situated connections work from a translocal perspective, his work has foregrounded particular relations and dynamics which are at times ignored in more abstract accounts of transnational processes. This also speaks to the importance of scrutinising in depth the work done by different spatial concepts such as the transnational and translocal. The remainder of this section considers recent work on transnational or global histories by geographers which has engaged with a range of spatial imaginaries. Some of the problematics raised by transnational histories of anti-colonialism have, for example, been probed by Andy Davies in his insightful account of the Geographies of Anti-Colonialism. Consequently, he observes that the ‘turn towards networked or other extra-territorial history struggles for a vocabulary at times’. Thus he asks ‘Is it possible to speak of an “international” or “transnational” form of connection between two or more areas which were not strictly “nation-states” and were often made up of multiple “nations”?’ (Davies 2019a, p. 46). This emphasises the need to think about the nation as an ongoing and contested evental space in relation to processes of transnationalism in line with Mongia’s work, rather than assume the nation as a given container upon which transnational relations are forged. Tim Bunnell has also stressed the importance of understanding how changing configurations of nation-states can have significant impacts on mobile actors. His work on Malay seafarers, for example, traces their shifting relations to nation-building, particularly in the period after Malaysian independence in 1957 (Bunnell 2016). This approach highlights the importance of attending to the dynamic and shifting relations of the nation to transnational and translocal flows and how these are negotiated by particular diasporic groups. An engagement with diasporic identities has also been an important theme in recent work by geographers which has probed some of the limits of ways of thinking about translocal spaces. Thus Ishan Ashutosh has recently argued for the importance of thinking about the diverse trajectories forged through diasporic formations. He argues, drawing on Isabel Hofmeyr’s work, that it is useful to challenge constructions of ‘the black Atlantic and Indian Ocean diasporas as dichotomous formations, in which the ocean acted as a rupture for the former and a path of return for the latter’. He contends that doing so can have important effects in terms of challenging the limits of particular national histories. Thus he argues that Hofmeyr’s synthesis of the Indian Ocean and black Atlantic arenas can productively serve ‘to disrupt the national framings of settlement, slavery and indenture that have kept South African and Indian national histories apart’ (Ashutosh 2020, p. 903). For Ashutosh, a focus on the ‘transregions produced by various forms of dispersal and connection’ can ‘revitalize the concept of diaspora by illuminating their overlapping and distinct spatialities.’ Through eschewing ‘fixed conceptions of space, these maritime and territory spanning geographies present space as relational, with boundaries that are both shifting and porous’ (Ashutosh 2020, p. 904). As Anyaa Anim-Addo has argued, such relations were constituted through particular sites such

34  Handbook on transnationalism

as Caribbean port cities which, as she notes, were ‘marked by external and strategic security processes and militarization within imperial regimes’ (Anim-Addo 2018, p. 107). To make sense of the relational spatialities through which past translocal and transnational relations have been forged, geographers have used conceptual frameworks such as networks and assemblage which avoid some of the problems associated with binary spatial framings such as core and periphery or metropole and colony (e.g. Kothari 2012; Legg 2009). Such frameworks have also usefully opened up a focus on the different processes and practices through which translocal relations were produced and negotiated. Relational approaches have also been important in drawing attention to the different emotional geographies through which translocal spaces have been made and re-made. Geraldine Pratt has argued that following such translocal relations can rework ‘static, stable geographies of north/south, west/east, first world/third world, here/there’ (Pratt 2008, p. 757). She draws attention to some of the diverse spatialities through which intimacy can be shaped, arguing that ‘intimacy and emotionality’ are not adequately captured by ethical framings of ‘caring from a distance’ (Pratt 2008, p. 757). In this respect, Pratt’s arguments resonate with historical work which has insisted that a concern with global or world history does not necessarily mean writing histories abstracted from a concern with intimate spaces and relations (Ghosh 2016; see also Wilding and Baldassar, Chapter 6 in this volume). As Laura Tabili’s study of port cities in Britain in the early twentieth century demonstrates, intimate relations can be central to the ways in which translocal relations are shaped and articulated (see Tabili 1994, pp. 135–60). She also demonstrates how forms of intimacy, such as inter-racial relationships could also be bitterly contested, something which is developed in more depth below. Foregrounding articulations of translocal politics and forms of attachment and intimacy, as done obliquely in the story told by E.P. Thompson at the start of this chapter, matters. This is particularly important given that the translocal and transnational are still routinely counterposed to local attachments which tend to be unquestionably positioned as more authentic and lived (see Tomaney 2013; see Massey 1995 for a contrary position). In the subsequent sections, I engage with some of the different ways in which past forms of translocal politics and social relations have been understood and signal their importance for broader debates in transnationalism.

TRANSLOCAL SPACES OF LABOUR ORGANISING In his classic paper, ‘The imperial working class makes itself “white”’, Jonathan Hyslop discusses the way that ideas of ‘white labourism’ forged articulations of whiteness and class across different imperial contexts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Hyslop 1999). He describes the ways in which such ‘white labourism’ became articulated through the activities of trade unions, as well as political campaigns and elections. He notes that because of the close links of the ‘mining areas of Cornwall’ to South Africa, white labourism became articulated

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism  35

as ‘the dominant electoral issue’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Hyslop 1999, p. 413). Thus the mining division of Cornwall was won in the 1900 election by the Radical Liberal W.S. Caine ‘on the basis of a campaign against the still hypothetical possibility of the importation of Chinese labour to the Transvaal’ (Hyslop 1999, p. 413). Hyslop’s account of the importance of white labourism to Cornish elections in the early 1900s emphasises that spatially stretched and contested forms of political practice can structure and be negotiated through seemingly ‘territorial’ democratic practices. Further, his account emphasises some of the different and contested ways in which labour has been represented and articulated through democratic politics (see also Kirk 2003, pp. 17–58). This speaks to a broader sense in which struggles for political reform have been articulated and envisioned through translocal and transnational forms of politics. Writing about the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, which were the product of movements for democratisation in Britain, Catherine Hall showed that the terms on which claims to democratic representation were envisioned, were shaped through the dynamic imaginative geographies of race, class and gender marked by imperial relations (Hall 2000). Hall argued, for example, that ‘Jamaica provided one site for an experiment over the relation between “race” and forms of political representation which framed the debates of 1866–7’ after the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865 (Hall 2000, p. 204). Struggles for political reform in Britain were shaped by translocal political imaginaries and trajectories as is demonstrated by the biography of one of the first Labour MPs in Britain, Alexander Wilkie, who was elected MP for Dundee in 1906. Born in Leven in Fife, Wilkie had been a ship’s carpenter by trade, voyaging to the Caribbean and South America before becoming employed as a shipwright first in Greenock and then Glasgow where he was swiftly elected secretary of the shipwrights’ society in 1872 (Bellamy and Saville 1976, p. 208). The shipwrights were part of a culture of reform and labour organising which drew ‘political boundaries against the poor and the “rough” working class’ and ‘no longer took property in labour as the simple basis of a masculine political identity’ (McLelland 2000, p. 101). The organising cultures of Glasgow’s shipwrights, who worked on the yards on the River Clyde – a significant hub of ship-building – were forged through different translocal dynamics. Their notions of skill and pride were in part informed by geographical particularity. A ‘Memorandum to Employers by Clyde Ironworkers’ of 23 July 1878, for example, observed that ‘What would be accepted as efficient workmanship in the yards in the East of England would be rejected and condemned on the Clyde’.1 The Glasgow Shipwrights’ Society also produced translocal links which enabled the construction of solidarities between shipwrights in different ports across Britain. Thus on 2 September 1878, in a context of threatened strikes and lockouts on the Clyde, Wilkie appealed to shipwrights’ delegates across Britain for support.2 The responses and solidarities shaped in response to Wilkie’s appeal were enabled by the regular meetings and democratic branch cultures of shipwrights’ organising. Thomas Torey, the secretary of North Shields shipwrights in the north-east of England, responded to Wilkie that ‘A discussion ensued in reference to the matter when it

36  Handbook on transnationalism

was resolved that should the Glasgow Shipwrights eventually receive notice of an extension of the hours of labour they will be quite justified in resisting the same.’ The ‘craft unionism’ of workers such as the shipwrights with its emphasis on skill, masculinity and respectability, strongly informed trade unionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Kirk 2003). The rise of syndicalist unions in the early twentieth century, which sought to organise all workers rather than those in select trades, however, was a direct challenge to some of the limits of such organising cultures. Some syndicalist unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) also shaped multi-ethnic organising cultures and challenged the racism of mainstream US labour organisations such as the American Federation of Labor. Peter Cole’s work on Local 8 of the IWW on the Philadelphia docks demonstrated how the Local fought segregated work gangs, had strong black leadership in the form of Ben Fletcher, and was part of broader circuits of transnational solidarity and syndicalist political cultures (Cole 2007a). Thus James Larkin, the influential Irish syndicalist who led the Dublin lockout in 1913, spoke to the Local during its dispute with the Charles M. Taylor Company in February 1915. Pledging the ‘support of the Irish Transport Workers if necessary’ Larkin promised ‘to present the situation in this port of dockers across the sea with a request that they hold themselves in readiness and refuse to discharge any grain or cargo from ships loaded by scab labour’ (Cole 2007b, pp. 66–7). In this context, Larkin’s transnational solidarities can be read as shaping articulations of multi-ethnic solidarities in line with IWW principles. However, this was not necessarily a consistent thread through his political engagement, as an account of Larkin’s involvement in racist organising practices during the 1906 election in Liverpool makes clear. The Liverpool stonemason Fred Bower, a friend of Larkin, recalled in his memoir that Larkin led a procession to protest against the pro-Chinese labour sentiment of Robert Houston, a ‘millionaire ship owner’ and Conservative MP for Liverpool West Toxteth. Bower notes, without adverse comment, that ‘Some fifty members of the Dockers’ Union, who were unemployed were garbed a la Chinese. Headed by a brass band playing the Dead March in Saul, the pseudo Chinamen trailed with their shouldered implements, behind the hearse, in which a coffin-shaped box, draped with the Union Jack, reposed’ (Bower [1936] 2015, pp. 112–13). Only a few pages later in his memoir in a discussion of an organisation in Liverpool of ‘the most advanced Socialists knowns as the International Club’, Bower notes that ‘One of our members, Lee Foo, was a pleasant-faced Chinaman, who acted as an interpreter at the local police courts, when any of his countryman were in the hands of the police’ (Bower [1936] 2015, p. 124; see also Belchem 2014, p. 32). The disjuncture between Bower’s account of the march of the Docker’s Union and the internationalist and multi-ethnic culture of the International Club signals some of the fraught and racialised politics of syndicalism. It also speaks to some of the contested relations between unions and the multi-ethnic dynamics of maritime labour which are discussed in the next section.

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism  37

MARITIME LABOUR, ANTI-COLONIALISM AND TRANSLOCAL CONNECTIONS While syndicalist unions like the IWW were a powerful force in shaping transnational organising networks in the early twentieth century, their organisations had uneven trajectories. In the United States, the IWW was subject to swingeing repression through the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920 which led to the mass imprisonment of the organisation’s leadership, including Ben Fletcher from Local 8 (Cole 2007a). There were also at times bitter struggles between syndicalists and Communists as the global reverberations of the Russian Revolution in 1917 intensified the influence and appeal of Communist politics. This led to the establishment of Communist Parties and organisations in different parts of the world and the formation of strong international networks through the Communist International (Comintern). There was also significant traffic between these forms of organising (Griffin 2018), as some key syndicalists such as George Hardy, a key figure in the IWW from East Yorkshire in England who was imprisoned in the US, shifted their allegiance to Communism in the late 1910s and early 1920s (Hardy 1956). These movements raised key challenges to the outlook of white-dominated left movements, and had an important impact on the translocal and transnational imaginaries of the global left. As Jeremy Krikler has noted, ‘socialism would only be definitively separated from racism through the actions of the international communist movement’ arguing that ‘this is one of the enduring (but largely unnoted) contributions of communism to socialism more generally’ (Krikler 2005, p. 110). A key organisation in this respect was the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) established in Hamburg in the late 1920s to coordinate Comintern anti-imperial work. The ITUCNW shaped important intersections between translocal networks and internationalist organising, with its location on the docks providing useful access to visiting seafarers from West Africa (Weiss 2013). Linked to the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers (ISH), a Communist controlled union confederation, the ITUCNW produced a paper The Negro Worker that had a transnational distribution which included West Africa and the Caribbean. In the early 1930s the editor of The Negro Worker was the Trindidadian George Padmore who used the paper to position black Communist organising in opposition to movements such as Garveyism, the militant form of black nationalism associated with Marcus Garvey. Padmore also collaborated with militants such as Tiemeko Garan Kouyaté from what was then the French Sudan (present-day Mali) in shaping a transnational network of anti-imperial activists in diverse parts of Africa, the Caribbean and metropolitan cities such as London, Hamburg and Paris (Weiss 2013). Black maritime workers were central to the production of this radical translocal anti-colonial network as can be demonstrated by a report of the seizure of ‘seditious literature’ on the William Wilberforce which arrived in Freetown from Hamburg on 2 June 1931. The literature, which was in the possession of Charlie Solomon whom colonial officials described as a ‘native seaman’, included 150 Negro Workers and 100 copies of The Proceedings of the First International and parcels of

38  Handbook on transnationalism

papers addressed to ITUCNW contacts in Free Town, Bathurst, Gambia and Accra (Commissioner of Police 1931). Through activities such as smuggling anti-colonial literature, which was prohibited by colonial regimes, seafarers shaped internationalist political trajectories which had significant impacts on anti-colonial struggles. Such transnational anti-colonial networks, however, were founded on contested terms. Padmore’s break with the Comintern after the Communist turn to the Popular Front led to injunctions to be less hostile to imperial powers such as Britain (see James 2015). ‘The Antwerp group’, a group of German seafarers based in Antwerp which broke away from the ISH due to political differences, were active in significant anti-fascist organising on German merchant vessels. By the outbreak of the Second World War, they had men on 322 ships (Hyslop 2019, p. 508). As well as organising opposition to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and forging solidarities during the Spanish Civil War, seafarers from the group contested the role of Nazi-supporting officers on board particular ships through acts such as defacing swastikas. Hyslop’s account of the Antwerp group suggested the importance of the ship as a site of contestation and struggle (Hasty and Peters 2015). Andy Davies’s recent work on the Royal Indian Naval (RIN) Mutiny of 1946 showed how the grievances of the mutineers combined a focus on the racist conduct of officers, racialised divisions of labour and the tensioned negotiation of caste differences with broader anti-colonial imaginaries (Davies 2013, 2019b). By foregrounding the maritime context of these events, Davies drew attention to the ways that the mutineers’ geography of democracy was shaped by international imaginaries and connections while tracing the circulation of grievances and radical ideas, both between different ships and different maritime spaces such as signalling stations in Bombay (Davies 2019b). The reverberations of such events through transnational maritime networks meant that antagonisms relating to anti-colonial struggles and imperial reactions to them were articulated in different places. Nawab Ali, who was from Sylhet in present-day Bangladesh and had been a merchant seafarer in the 1930s, recalled ‘Royal Navy men’ who ‘had been in Bombay when the Navy was fighting with the Indian freedom fighters’ coming and trying to ‘break up’ a restaurant he ran in Plymouth in 1948 (Ali 1987, p. 87). Such events stressed the ways in which ships and the dockside areas of port cities acted as sites of struggle over the coloniality of labour (Featherstone 2019; Khalili 2020; Werner 2016). Hakeem Ibikunle Tijani’s account of a major strike led by the Nigerian Seamen’s Union in 1959 on the eve of the Nigerian independence in 1960 emphasised that the racism endemic to colonial labour geographies which shaped transnational maritime networks became increasingly contested through processes of decolonisation. The context for the strike was a deterioration in ‘the state of industrial relations in the shipping industry’ between March 1958 and June 1959 which led to significant tensions ‘between the Nigerian Seamen’s Union and the corporate foreign shipping lines’ (Tijani 2012, p. 86). In this context, a strike began ‘on board the M.V. Apapa vessel on its northbound voyage from Lagos to Liverpool (June 2nd–June 15th, 1959)’ (Tijani 2012, p. 86).

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism  39

As in the case of the RIN mutiny, the racist conduct of white European offices was central to the dispute which swiftly spread to other vessels and to port workers in Lagos. Tijani’s account of the strike emphasised both its transnational impact and the relations between such translocal organising and political events in Nigeria itself. Thus he notes that ‘From Liverpool to London and from Lagos to the Colonial Office, stakeholders, including nonshipping corporations were surprised at the success of the seamen’s walkout and its effects on the political atmosphere in Nigeria. The new Ministry of Labour and the shipping lines took the strike, and the fact that workers in Lagos ports and other labor unions soon joined in it, quite seriously’ (Tijani 2012, p. 86). This account of the strikes emphasises some of the dynamic spatialities that are shaped between forms of translocal connections and the emergence of particular national form, in this case independent Nigeria. It also demonstrates the extent to which such translocal relations were moulded by encounters underpinned by colonial dynamics, which, as the next section discusses, were strongly contested.

SPACES OF ENCOUNTER AND TRANSLOCAL RESISTANCE Reflecting on the encounters staged by Caribbean migrants in the UK in the period after the Second World War, Stuart Hall makes the following observation. He contends that ‘What’s so striking is the confidence with which, in the decolonising moment, these “children of empire” confronted and engaged “the mother country” on the home territory of the colonizers themselves. They came not to beg, or to be grateful or to be informed, but to look it in the face and if, possible, to overcome it!’ (Hall with Schwarz 2017, p. 137; see also La Rose 2019). Hall’s analysis highlights the importance of the dynamic trajectories and uneven relations of power which shaped these encounters. It also signals some of the relations between forms of transnational and translocal flows and the articulations of racialising nationalism which intensified in Britain in the post-war period. In this regard, Hall’s account asserts the agency of those migrants in both making sense of and challenging exclusionary constructions of Britishness. This is built on longstanding opposition to different expressions of structural racism that had been developed in relation to racialised minorities in port cities in Britain (Jenkinson 2008). Writing of the response to state-sanctioned racialised moral panics about sexual relations between white women and black troops during the Second World War, Hazel Carby contested official depictions which positioned this as an ‘external “problem” imported into Britain with the arrival of the bodies of black GI’s or personnel from the Caribbean’. Rather, she characterised such narratives as a ‘“home-grown” composite racialized consciousness’ which drew ‘upon past official responses to the existence of black communities in Britain and upon the racialization of bodies in colonial territories’ (Carby 2019, pp. 72–3; see also Hirsch 2018, p. 112). This ‘racialized consciousness’ had particular spatialities, and, as Carby notes, ‘had been nurtured, given form and realized in the policing and disciplining of

40  Handbook on transnationalism

colonial subjects and the black residents of Bristol, Cardiff, London and Liverpool’ before the Second World War (Carby 2019, pp. 72–3). As the previous section indicated, the opposition to such racist imaginaries and practices was shaped by transnational flows and connections. One of the major figures involved in challenging such racialised forms of the nation in the early post-war period was the Trinidadian Communist Claudia Jones. Jones was one of a number of black women involved in the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) who through ‘activism, journalism and overseas travel practiced a radical internationalist, feminist politics within the US and global Communist Left’. As Erik McDuffie argued, her organising ‘was committed to building transnational political alliances with women of color and politically progressive white women from around the world’ (McDuffie 2011, pp. 17–18). Jones’s own trajectories were decisively shaped by the McCarthyite repression of the US Left in the 1950s. In 1955, she was arrested under the Smith Acts, held in Alderson Prison and eventually deported to Britain where she did significant work with London’s African-Caribbean community which involved editing the West Indian Gazette (Boyce Davies 2008; Lynn 2020). While part of the CPUSA, Jones developed pioneering analyses of the relation between class, race and gender in essays such as ‘An end to the neglect of the problems of Negro women’ (Jones 2011). Despite being largely cold shouldered by leading British Communists, her leadership was acknowledged by black party members such as Trevor Carter who argued that Claudia Jones’s ‘attitude and analysis of racism was something new to us’ (Carter 1986, p. 68). Thus Carter noted how Jones encouraged him and other activists to analyse the Commonwealth Immigration Act ‘in terms of structural racism within society at large: institutional racism as we later came to call it’. As Satnam Virdee showed, the Act’s purpose was articulated by the then prime minister Harold Macmillan in explicitly racialised terms, ‘claiming there was a need to halt black immigration’ (Virdee 2014, p. 109). Carter noted that when the Act became law in February 1962, ‘it did not occur to her [Jones] to accept defeat: she was one of the leaders responsible for organizing a mass demonstration with a strong West Indian presence including many black nurses in uniform’ (Carter 1986, p. 68). In this regard, her most significant legacy is organising what would become the Notting Hill Carnival. As Carole Boyce Davies has noted, Jones was involved in establishing a Caribbean carnival in London in 1959. The first of six indoor carnivals which would later evolve into the Notting Hill Carnival, this event was part of the popular response to ‘racially motivated riots and attempts at intimidating Caribbean people in Notting Hill and Nottingham’ and in particular the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane (Boyce Davies 2008, p. 178). Boyce Davies argues that the ‘initial aggression might then be likened to the initial impetus for African-based carnivals in the Caribbean, the cannes brulees and the emancipation origins of carnival, as distinct from the European pre-Lenten festivals’ (Boyce Davies 2008, p. 178, emphasis in original). The genesis of the Carnival again reflects strong relations between translocal flows of resistance and cultural forms and opposition to violent, racialising nationalisms. Thus while the first

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism  41

carnival held in 1959 was held at St Pancras Town Hall it was directly configured in opposition to the racist violence in Notting Hill. In this respect, Shirin Hirsch has drawn attention to the ways translocal connections and solidarities were significant in contesting Enoch Powell’s ‘River of Blood’ speech on 20 April 1968, arguably the most influential articulation of racism in post-war Britain. Her recent book situates the speech in Wolverhampton, Powell’s parliamentary constituency, where he delivered the speech to the local and national press at a carefully choreographed event. She argues that for Powell, ‘returning to the local allowed for a new way in which a racialized nation could be imagined, through the imagined voices of “ordinary” white constituents’ (Hirsch 2018, p. 113). She also drew attention to some of the placed dynamics of the resistance to the speech and the intense fear it caused among communities of colour in the town. Thus organisations like the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) were involved in organising ‘defence groups to protect Indian migrants from racist violence’. She quoted Avtar Jouhl of the Birmingham IWA who recalled that ‘the committees were immediately set up to organise this protection; “we will not sit back, we will hit back”, the organization announced’ (Hirsch 2018, p. 60).

CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to introduce some key ways of thinking about past articulations of translocalism and transnationalism. I have done so by remaining alive to the translocal connections shaped by subaltern groups and working-class movements in line with E.P. Thompson’s insistence on paying attention to some of the ‘tenacious’ forms of organising and opposition they have shaped. Drawing attention to such connections can help reshape dominant understandings of the cartographies of politics and social relations and contribute in significant ways to research on transnationalism both in the past and in the present. In particular, I have emphasised how engaging with such connections can productively unsettle nation-centred histories and geographies and foreground forms of agency and solidarity that have stretched beyond the nation in significant ways (see also Ford, Chapter 11 in this volume). I have also sought to keep the nation in view here, rather than wishing it away. In particular, I have argued that transnational flows and connections have been important in shaping opposition to the exclusionary practises of racialising nationalism. In a context of the global resurgence of racialised forms of right-wing nationalism, such histories offer important resources for making sense of the contemporary era.

NOTES 1. 2.

Glasgow City Archives, TD 389/31. Glasgow City Archives, TD389/30–49.

42  Handbook on transnationalism

REFERENCES Ali, Nawab (1987), ‘Lifehistory’, in Caroline Adams (ed.), Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylheti Settlers in Britain, London: Thap Books, pp. 67–94. Amrith, Sunil S. (2013), Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Anderson, Clare (2016), ‘Global mobilities’, in Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne (eds), World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 169–96. Anim-Addo, Anyaa (2018), ‘Reading postemancipation in/security: Negotiations of everyday freedom’, Small Axe, 22 (3 (57)), 105–14. Ashutosh, Ishan (2020), ‘The spaces of diaspora’s revitalization: Transregions, infrastructure and urbanism’, Progress in Human Geography, 44 (5), 898–918. Belchem, John (2014), Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th-Century Liverpool, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bellamy, Joyce M. and John Saville (1976), ‘Alexander Wilkie (1850–1928)’, in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. 3, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 207–8. Bower, Fred [1936] (2015), Rolling Stonemason: An Autobiography, edited by Ron Noon with Sam Davies, London: Merlin Press. Boyce Davies, Carole (2008), Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bunnell, Tim (2016), From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool Through Malay Lives, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Carby, Hazel (2019), Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, London: Verso. Carter, Trevor (1986), West Indians in British Politics, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Cole, Peter (2007a), Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Cole, Peter (2007b), Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, Chicago, IL: Charles Kerr. Commissioner of Police (1931), ‘Report on the seizure of seditious literature on the William Wilberforce’, CO 323/1164/14. Davies, Andrew D. (2013), ‘Identity and the assemblages of protest: The spatial politics of the Royal Indian Naval Mutiny, 1946’, Geoforum, 48, 24–32. Davies, Andrew D. (2019a), Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks Across and Beyond South Asia c.1900–1930, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Davies, Andrew D. (2019b), ‘Transnational connections and anticolonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Naval Mutiny of 1946’, Global Networks, 19 (4), 521–38. Featherstone, David J. (2007), ‘The spatial politics of the past unbound: Transnational networks and the making of political identities’, Global Networks, 7 (4), 430–452. Featherstone, David J. (2019), ‘Maritime labour, transnational political trajectories and decolonization from below: The opposition to the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act’, Global Networks, 19 (4), 539–62. Ghosh, Durba (2016), ‘Body politics, sexualities and the “modern family” in global history’, in Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne (eds), World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 107–36. Gilroy, Paul (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul (2004), After Empire, London: Routledge. Griffin, Paul (2018), ‘Diverse political identities within a working class presence: Revisiting Red Clydeside’, Political Geography, 65, 123–33.

Pre-national transnationalism and translocalism  43

Hall, Catherine (2000), ‘The nation within and without’, in Catherine Hall, Keith McLelland and Jane Rendall (eds), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–233. Hall, Stuart with Bill Schwarz (2017), Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, London: Penguin. Hardy, George (1956), Those Stormy Years: Memories of the Fight for Freedom on Five Continents, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hasty, William and Kimberley Peters (2015), ‘The ship in geography and the geographies of ships’, Geography Compass, 6 (11), 660–676. Hirsch, Shirin (2018), In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hyslop, Jonathan (1999), ‘The imperial working class makes itself “white”: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa before the First World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 12 (4), 398–421. Hyslop, Jonathan (2019), ‘German seafarers, anti-fascism and the anti-Stalinist left: The “Antwerp Group” and Edo Fimmen’s International Transport Workers’ Federation, 1933–40’, Global Networks, 19 (4), 499–520. James, Leslie (2015), George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and the End of Empire, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkinson, Jacqueline (2008), Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Jones, Claudia (2011), ‘An end to the neglect of the problems of Negro women’, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.), Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment, Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, pp. 74–86. Khalili, Laleh (2020), Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, London: Verso. Kirk, Neville (2003), Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914, London: Merlin Press. Kothari, Uma (2012), ‘Contesting colonial rule: Politics of exile in the Indian Ocean’, Geoforum, 43 (4), 697–706. Krikler, Jeremy (2005), White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa, Manchester: Manchester University Press. La Rose, John (2019), ‘We did not come alive in Britain’, in Paul Field, Robin Bunce, Leila A. Hassan and Margaret Peacock (eds), Here to Stay, Here to Fight: A ‘Race Today’ Anthology, London: Pluto Press, pp. 12–17. Legg, Stephen (2009), ‘Of scales, networks and assemblages: The League of Nations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34 (2), 234–53. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker (1990), ‘The many headed hydra: Sailors, slaves and the Atlantic working class’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (3), 225–252. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker (2001), The Many-Headed Hydra, London: Verso. Lynn, Denise (2020), ‘Deporting black radicalism: Claudia Jones’ deportation and policing blackness in the Cold War’, Twentieth Century Communism, 18 (18), 39–63. Massey, Doreen (1995), ‘Places and their pasts’, History Workshop Journal, 39, 182–92. McDuffie, Erik S. (2011), Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Communism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McLelland, Keith (2000), ‘England’s greatness the working man’, in Catherine Hall, Keith McLelland and Jane Rendall (eds), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 71–118. Mongia, Radhika (2019), Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State, Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black.

44  Handbook on transnationalism

Pratt, Geraldine with the Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights (2008), ‘International accompaniment and witnessing state violence in the Philippines’, Antipode, 40 (5), 759–71. Tabili, Laura (1994), ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Thompson, Edward P. (1994), ‘Sold like a sheep for £1’, in Edward P. Thompson (ed.), Persons and Polemics: Historical Essays, London: Merlin Press, pp. 193–200. Tijani, Hakeem I. (2012), Union Education in Nigeria: Labor, Empire, and Decolonization since 1945, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tomaney, John (2013), ‘Parochialism – a defence’, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (5), 658–72. Valluvan, Sivamohan (2019), The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Virdee, Satnam (2014), Racism, Class and the Racialised Outsider, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weiss, Holger (2013), Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, Amsterdam: Brill. Werner, Marion (2016), Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4), 301–34.

3. What, when and how transnationalism matters: a multi-scalar framework Biao Xiang

Transnational connections have become ubiquitous in the twenty-first century. The main questions that concerned scholars 20 years ago, namely is transnationalism new (e.g. Cohen 1997; Foner 1997; Glick Schiller 1999), and is it a stable, lasting phenomenon or is it ephemeral and transitional (e.g. Alba and Nee 2003; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2000; Levitt and Waters 2002; Portes et al. 1999), have yielded more or less consensual answers. Over the decades since, scholars have accumulated ‘a rich descriptive literature on transnational families, hometown associations, transnational politics and long-distance nationalism, status, multiple types of organizations, gender, remittance economies, religions, social security and diasporic identities’ (Glick Schiller 2018, p. 201). Building on this rich scholarship, this chapter moves on to ask what transnational connections matter and how: In what conditions may transnationalism ‘alter fundamentally some key societal structures’ that can be designated ‘as forms of significant transformation’ (Vertovec 2009, p. 24)? Under what conditions is transnationalism no more than existing social relations writ large? Do family members left behind by international migrants deserve more policy attention than those left behind by internal migrants? In what ways do remittances from overseas impact the local society more than household savings in general? This chapter proposes a multi-scalar framework as a way to assess what, when and how transnational relations may have lasting impacts on social changes. A multi-scalar framework first examines whether the transnational connections in question form a ‘scale’, namely a unit of coordination that generates additional capacity for the actors involved. The transnational relations that form a scale are normally more impactful on the larger society than otherwise. Second, the multi-scalar framework disentangles how the transnational scale interacts with established institutions, particularly those nested within a nation-state, such as local governments and ministerial regulations. This framework emphasises that established institutions also act as scales in the sense that they coordinate among governmental agencies at the same level and mobilise resources within a jurisdiction in order to achieve policy goals. The scales enacted by established institutions are defined by bureaucratic hierarchy and are therefore ‘taxonomical’, in contrast to ‘emergent’ scales that are created by actors from below (e.g. migrant networks or social movements) that defy formal hierarchies. The interactions between scales across levels (the local, the national and the transnational) as well as between types (‘taxonomical’ and ‘emergent’) to a great extent determine how consequential transnational connections can be. 45

46  Handbook on transnationalism

This chapter proceeds in two parts. The first part defines the multi-scalar framework, and distinguishes it from other transnational approaches by highlighting its affinity to perspectives from the Global South. The second part illustrates how the framework can be operationalised in a case study on the relation between transnational trade and Islamic revival in south China.

WHAT IS A SCALE AND WHAT IS MULTI-SCALAR TRANSNATIONALISM? A scale is the spatial reach created by actors within which they coordinate with others and mobilise resources for particular causes (Xiang 2013). A household is a scale, so is a nation-state. Scale results from actions, either top-down (by activities of the state or corporations) or bottom-up (by ordinary people). As Nancy Munn (1983, p. 280) pointed out, people’s socio-cultural practices ‘do not simply go on in or through time and space, but [they also] … constitute (create) the space … in which they “go on”’ (cited in Munn 1986, p. 11). Such constituted space – a scale – provides a basis for initiating new actions. The ‘multitude’, which Negri and Hardt (2004) envision as the counterforce of empire, can be more accurately understood as a scale than a group. The power of the multitude lies in its capability of constant coordination across diverse groups. Poliscars in New York City represent an example of scale as capacity. Poliscars are vehicles converted from supermarket carts with which homeless people can move around, sleep in, and communicate with other users. A Poliscar ‘dramatically expands the scale of everyday life for its users, renders new places accessible, provides communication links with people citywide, and expands the information field’ (Smith 1996, pp. 65–6). If connections do not generate additional capacity for actions, they fall short in making a scale. A vibrant neighbourhood is vibrant often because it turns itself into a scale of coordinated actions; a declining neighbourhood is likely to be losing its scalar capacity. The international community of scientists form a scale, but global refugees do not. Refugees, despite their shared experiences, have not created a scope of coordination of their own. The scope of coordination has its geographical limit at a particular moment of time. The local, the national and the global articulate with each other, but do not collapse into one. Migrants’ transnational networks, for instance, are sustained by dense relations on the familial scale (e.g. which finance the journeys), shaped by policies of the national scale (e.g. regulations over emigration procedure, immigration, and the labour market), and facilitated by connections within a locality (e.g. local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the destination that provide language learning). Although the familial and the local in this case appear to have become transnational since they are linked to migrants overseas, we must pay full attention to histories, cultures, internal structures and dynamics of the family and local NGOs. It is the family and community relations that produce and sustain transnational connections, not that transnational connections constitute them. If we collapse everything into transnationalism simply because there is this or that transnational connection,

What, when and how transnationalism matters  47

we may confuse primary institutions with secondary phenomena. Consequently, we would fail to understand what exactly transnational connections mean for people, and how they may or may not change people’s life significantly. Nicola Yeates’ critique of the earlier literature on transnational care illustrates the shortcoming of analytically isolating transnational processes from other scales. By fixating on migrant care givers, the literature unintendedly contributes to ‘fetishizing of migrant care workers as the prototypical embodiment of care transnationalization’ (Yeates 2012, p. 148), and obscures more fundamental aspects of care transnationalisation. A multi-scalar framework positions transnational processes as constellations of actions at the local, national and global scales, each of which has its own structure and dynamics. Furthermore, the framework of multi-scalar transnationalism foregrounds the intersections between scales in assessing the impacts of transnational processes. The Arab Spring for instance was powerful because it gained transnational scalar capacity which made national militaries reluctant to intervene. However, the Arab Spring has not induced sustained socio-political changes in the region because the transnational scale did not articulate closely with the national and local scales. The Arab Spring was primarily led by urban middle classes; the rural populations were not sufficiently included to create a national scale for sustained democratisation (King and Maghraoui 2019). Tunisia succeeded because the majority formed a more united national scale. Thus, transnationalism as a multi-scalar constellation is very different from the imaginaries of ‘transnational community’ (Vertovec 1999) and particularly ‘transnational social space’, which, according to Faist (1998, p. 5), are ‘characterized by self-feeding processes or the dynamics of cumulative causation’ (see also Faist 2000). Instead, the multi-scalar framework aims to specify the multi-scalar-conjunctural approach proposed by Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018; Glick Schiller 2018). The multi-scalar-conjunctural approach emphasises that transnationalism must be understood historically (transnationalism is more visible and consequential at some historical junctures than at others) and structurally (transnational connections are tied to power relations in politics, economy, military and media). Following Çağlar and Glick Schiller’s proposal, the multi-scalar framework aims to offer a simple roadmap to organise the infinite number of actors in play into a clear pattern but without losing sight of actual complexities, therefore providing a basis for further analysis. Central to the multi-scalar framework is the interplay between scales of different scopes (local, regional, national …) and of two types, the taxonomical and the emergent. The ideal-type taxonomical scales are those in which a smaller scale nests inside a larger one, and the larger encompass the subordinate scales exhaustively. Taxonomical scales include the scales of individual, neighbourhood, city, region, and the nation, with the individual being encompassed by the community, community covered by the city, and so on. This image of a rigid hierarchy of scales has been widely criticised. For instance, human geographers have made the powerful case that scales are mutually constituted and constantly transmuting (e.g. Brenner 1999; Swyngedouw 1997), and they ‘overlap and bleed into one another’ (Mountz and Hyndman 2006, p. 450). Some scholars argue that scale is too elastic to be an ana-

48  Handbook on transnationalism

lytical tool (e.g. Kelly 1999; Marston 2000). But it is undeniable that modern social life has to a great extent been shaped into taxonomical scales by state bureaucracy. Modern states exercise power through taxonomical scales. The president of a nation is at a higher position than a mayor not because she is more virtuous or closer to the divine, as a monarch would claim, but because the president coordinates a larger scale of the society and represents more people. ‘Height’ in a hierarchy is determined by ‘width’ of the scope of influence. What appear to be levels are really differentiated scales in practice. The second type of scale, the emergent, means the scopes of mobilisation and coordination that emerge from people’s actions, as opposed to being defined by established systems. Examples of emergent scales include the Poliscar in New York and the envisioned multitude cited above. Paul Adams (1996) demonstrates how subordinated groups challenged social hierarchies in particular territorial contexts by reaching beyond the spatial boundaries through media. For instance, TV broadcasting turned the 1989 Tiananmen movement in Beijing into a national and global event. One of most powerful arguments for the transformative impacts of emergent scales was Rosa Luxemburg’s (1976) articulation that workers must form class-based alliance across national borders in order to topple nation-bound reactionaries. The difference between the emergent and the taxonomical is clear. Taxonomical scales are by definition hierarchical. Actors on taxonomical scales dream of moving up to a higher level in order to have wider influence. The emergent is fundamentally horizontal. Not only is there no differentiation between the high and the low, actors do not necessarily want to enlarge their scales. People may choose to shrink (downscale) their connections because, as we will see below, dense relations on smaller scopes sometimes generate more capacity. Taxonomical scales have clear boundaries. Units of the same taxonomical scale are also exclusively demarcated from each other. For instance, provinces in a nation are unambiguously divided, and provincial governors carefully avoid stepping in others’ territories. Without such divides across taxonomical scales as well as between units of the same scale, the president would not have the taxonomical authority over all the provinces. A larger taxonomical scale is meant to cover all units of the lower scale exhaustively. As the anthropologist Dumont ([1966] 1972) pointed out, taxonomical scales constitute a whole. Comprehensiveness – exhaustive coverage without exception – is indeed a central goal of modern bureaucracy (Scott 1998). In contrast, emergent scales have no fixed boundaries or stable shapes. Although they appear to be antithetical to each other as ideal-type concepts, the taxonomical and the emergent are always intertwined in practice. For instance, if a mayor fails to create a local scale of action of her own by working with other strategic actors – in other words an emergent scale – she will not be able to implement tasks from the higher level, nor can she hold real authority over the subordinates. In many cases, the taxonomical and the emergent scales appear identical in their spatial reach. An NGO fighting a local development project may create a scope of mobilisation that is the same, in terms of geographical coverage, as the government’s or

What, when and how transnationalism matters  49

corporations’ scope for project implementation. But the dynamics of how the scales work are very different. Thus, every scale has two dimensions: scope (local, regional, transnational) and type (taxonomical or emergent). Transnational connections, when they form a scale, are emergent in most cases. But there are taxonomical transnational scales too. Examples include the European Union (EU), United Nations (UN) operations, supply chains organised by global corporations, labour deployment arranged by inter-state agreements, and military operations by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States. US imperialism provides an illuminating example of taxonomical transnational scale in action. As Chalmers Johnson (2007) and others have pointed out, unlike European colonialism, US imperialism recognises other states’ sovereignty. By tracing its origin to the Japanese imperialist ‘Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’ and Manchukuo project, Duara (2003, Chapters 1 and 7) calls it ‘imperialism of nation-states’. Imperialism of nation-states is predicated on economic, political and cultural dominance, rather than territorial occupation. Military might is a critical condition that sustains such dominance. But key to the military might is its power of projection over long distance, in other words its capacity of mobilising resources and taking actions across large space if needed, rather than its power to kill. Imperialism of nation-states in general, and US imperialism in particular, is thus a scalar project. The imperialist operations are governed by taxonomical scales because they follow strict chains of command, shaped by the US state, and are deeply intertwined with the state power of US allies. The taxonomical scalar structure was even more evident in the Japanese case (Duara 2003). But US imperialism is also closely tied to emergent scales. Internationalised elite education, global finance, and entertainment culture, all operating on emergent scales, are instrumental for American dominance. Equally important for US imperialism is the containment of the emergent scales of anti-war, anti-military base, and anti-capitalism movements across the world. In sum, a multi-scalar framework can contribute to unpacking global power relations.

A GLOBAL SOUTH PERSPECTIVE What distinguishes the multi-scalar framework proposed here from other similar approaches (e.g. Glick Schiller 2018) is my emphasis on taxonomical scale. This emphasis may look odd because the transnationalism paradigm aims precisely to undermine the perception that social life is organized along taxonomical scales and avoid ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) – the approach that takes the nation-state as given and as natural container of social relations. In order to explain why it is necessary to bring back the taxonomical, we need to understand the specific historical context in which the transnationalism paradigm has gained popularity and how this may have affected research priorities. With the end of the Cold War, Marxist analysis of global capitalism (Lenin [1916] 1963), Dependency Theory (Rodney 1972) and World System Theory (Wallerstein

50  Handbook on transnationalism

1974) – which are all by definition transnational analyses – appeared too heavy and deterministic. The Gulf war, the Rwanda genocide, the Balkans breakup, at the same time the expansion of the global commodity market and rapid developments in communication and transport (see Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume), have created a strong sense that the world is splintered yet connected, defying coherent meta-narratives. Many researchers have thus welcomed Geertz’s recommendation that ‘[I]n a splintered world, we must address the splinters’ (2000, p. 221). The transnationalism paradigm, being open-ended, more actor-centred, with a vision that ordinary people like migrants may create new ways of organising public life, appealed to many. Marxist sociologists Manuel Castells turned to the ‘network society’ (2000) and Robin Cohen to ‘global diaspora’ (1997). The desire to move beyond nation-states as the main unit of analysis may explain two shared features in the English literature on transnational migration. First, the literature pays great attention to migrants’ experiences. This is clearly an important correction to over-formalised theories such as the push-pull model (Lee 1966) and Dependency Theory, but this move also renders the research descriptive in the sense that it is centrally concerned with the experiences of transnational mobility themselves rather than what the experiences reflect, or how the experiences are institutionally shaped (Glick Schiller 2018, p. 204). Second, normative critiques of border control became a common motivation for studying transnational mobility. This concern is in turn based on universalistic ethics of equality, accessibility and diversity (for a critical analysis on how academic research on the so-called ‘refugee/ migration crisis’ in Europe became part of the humanitarian industry, see Cabot 2019). What has received less attention is the middle space between individual experiences and normative critiques. For instance, questions of how mobility is organised logistically have received little attention till recently. The processes of how transnational mobilities are sustained are often defined by taxonomical scales (see Xiang 2013). Insufficient attention to taxonomical scales may also explain why the transnationalism literature has gained less traction in the Global South than in the North. Most published research on transnational migration is carried out by scholars in migrant receiving countries in the Global North, with Africa–Europe migration and Mexico– US border crossing being paradigmatic models. For researchers and particularly the public in China and India, the two countries that I am most familiar with, migrants’ transnational experiences may appear novel but are not self-evidently significant. It is unclear how transnational mobility can drive substantial social change on the ground. As for normative critiques of immigration control, few in the Global South dream that their lives would become better if all national borders were removed. People are acutely aware that borders are too important for the Global North for the latter to remove them, yet they are only part of a much wider range of instruments of injustice. When North–South inequality is so entrenched in agricultural subsidies, intellectual property regimes, climate change mitigation, let alone global finance and military deployment, how would a relaxation in border policing help? People in the Global South demand research that, in Paulo Freire’s words (1970, p. 126), entices

What, when and how transnationalism matters  51

‘reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed’. Analyses that miss out taxonomical scales appear too aloof. Taxonomical scales deserve more attention because nation building remains a critical project in the Global South. Nationalism is one of very few weapons available to resist global hegemony and to explore ways of organising social life that are suitable for people themselves. If one has witnessed how a society has been punished for making its own choice about basic economic and social policies time and time again (just think of the series of coups in Latin America and the ongoing crisis in Venezuela), it is fairly logical to conclude that national sovereignty is a precondition for meaningful development and that we should aim to organise analysis along national lines. Conversely, getting away from nationalism may not be as difficult as it is made to appear. Imperialists freed themselves from nationalism for a long time: ‘Other nations have nationalism; the English, it has been conventional to say, have patriotism, royalism, jingoism, imperialism – but they do not know nationalism’ (Kumar 2003, p. 18). Imperialists speak of universalistic ideologies, with civilisational mission being the primary one, to justify occupation, dominance and inequality. Nationalism is a way to debunk that. Khagram and Levitt (2008, p. 5) are certainly right in suggesting that the world should be conceived of as ‘consisting of multiple sets of dynamic overlapping and intersecting transnational social fields that create and shape seemingly bordered and bounded structures, actors, and processes’, but the opposite is also true: the bordered and bounded create transnational fields. Foregrounding taxonomical scales is not returning to methodological nationalism. Nation building in the Global South involves transnational processes. The nation-building project was a global response to global colonialism and a result of global dialogue and learning (Anderson 1991, p. 4; Chatterjee 1986). As Duara (2009, p. 6) puts it, ‘nations are constructed in a global space premised upon institutional and discursive circulations’. The non-aligned movement, socialist internationalism, Third Worldism, tricontinental movement, let alone Pan-Africanism, were inseparable from national independence. Although initiated by states, these movements include strong elements of people-to-people interactions, or what we may call ‘transnationalism from below’. Indeed, as Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) made clear, methodological nationalism partly stems from an ignorance of the history of nation building, the neglect of which contributes to the naturalisation of the nation. They caution against methodological ‘fluidism’ that fails to recognise the continuing salience of nation-states and takes the transnational life of migrants constantly on the move as the prototype of the human condition (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 326). As such, methodological nationalism seems to be the other side of reified ‘methodological transnationalism’, namely the presupposition that transnationalism is self-evidently important and should be taken as the starting and ending points. It is because ‘we have come to take for granted a world divided into discrete and autonomous nation-states that we see nation-state building and global interconnections as contradictory’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 301). We must overcome methodological nationalism and

52  Handbook on transnationalism

methodological transnationalism at the same time. A focus on the interplay between taxonomical scales and emergent scales may provide a tool to do so.

APPLYING THE MULTI-SCALAR FRAMEWORK: TRADE, ISLAM AND BUREAUCRACY IN SOUTH CHINA The remainder of this chapter demonstrates how the multi-scalar transnationalism framework can be operationalised. The specific question concerns the relation between transnational trade and transnational Islam in Yiwu, a town in south-east China that has become the world’s largest wholesale centre for light commodities of an extraordinarily wide range (including housewares, toys, electricals, tools, garments) (Belguidoum and Pliez 2016). Yiwu represents a typical patten of transnational urbanism in the Global South (Ortega and Katigbak, Chapter 14 in this volume). Its rapid urbanisation is deeply embedded in transnational processes, but the city does not possess hegemonic power in economy, politics or culture as normal ‘global cities’ do. My field research between 2008 and 2019 suggests that (1) trade grew rapidly because of the development of an emergent transnational scale among numerous small traders; (2) transnational trade was conditioned by the local government through its coordination along taxonomical scales. This prevented transnational trade from bringing about transnational religious activities; but (3) Islamic religious activities nevertheless flourished among Chinese Muslim translator-brokers. These activities formed an emergent local scale. They fell outside the government’s taxonomical scale and were therefore more difficult to control than transnational trade. While my research finds no direct relation between the growth of trade and the development of Islam, the multi-scalar framework identifies the most important pathways of how the two interacted, as mediated by foreign traders, Chinese Muslim intermediaries, local suppliers, and the government. My finding resonates with the critical analysis about ethnic entrepreneurship by Thomas and Zhou (Chapter 26 in this volume). The fact that a high proportion of Muslims, both Chinese and those from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, participate in transnational trade has less to do with their religious-ethnic characteristics than with their positioning in multiple-scalar transnational connections. The Market: An Emergent Transnational Scale Accommodated into the Taxonomical A city of 0.76 million permanent residents (2015), Yiwu exported USD 38.3 billion worth of goods in 2018. The main players are a large number of small traders instead of a small number of large corporations. Nearly 500,000 foreign merchants visited Yiwu each year in the late 2010s, and more than 13,000 traders from over 100 countries and regions reside there on a regular basis. The traders make small and frequent deals, and constantly seek new partners, resembling the typical bazaar economy (Geertz 1978). Trade is facilitated by sophisticated networks of intermediation,

What, when and how transnationalism matters  53

including over 2,500 logistics companies (in 2013, Lu et al. 2014, p. 16), and 2,000 Arabic-Chinese translator-brokers in the early 2010s (Ma Ping 2012, p. 217). The intensive networks of interaction and intermediation, as the chief of Yiwu Bureau of Commerce put it, enabled ‘Chinese peasants who know nothing about the international market to engage international business; and enable foreign merchants who know nothing about China to buy goods from China’. These interactions created additional capacity for those involved to carry out transnational trade which would have been impossible for most of them, thus an emergent transnational scale. This scale would not have expanded had the government not intervened. Of particular importance is the officially termed ‘marketplace procurement model’ that the Yiwu government encouraged. In this model traders carry out international trade in the same way as daily shopping. The seller and the buyer exchange goods for cash in person; they do not need special licences for international trade, or foreign currency accounts (because the deal can be settled in RMB), or value-added tax (VAT) invoices. In 2018, this model accounted for nearly 81 per cent of all exports from Yiwu (Yiwu government 2019). Behind this seemingly ‘primitive’ form of trade are highly complex arrangements. Firstly, this model requires significant adjustments in the regulations in taxation, customs, licensing, health and safety inspection, quality control and currencies, which in turn necessitates close coordination across governmental departments. Secondly, marketplace procurement trade obviously needs a marketplace. The Yiwu Marketplace, known as China’s Light Community City, it covers more ​​ than 550 million square metres, housing 75,000 shops that sold more than 1.8 million types of products in 2018. Concentration of such a scale is necessary because this enables traders to find what they want, no matter how specific the requirements are, on a single visit. Building a marketplace of this scale necessitates total mobilisation of resources and coordination across sectors. Farmland has been procured, peasants relocated, traffic rechannelled, and even an entire railway track was moved to make space for the marketplace. Different bureaus, districts, townships and villages under Yiwu’s jurisdiction are mobilised to serve the master plan. Thirdly, marketplace procurement trade requires specially close connection between trade and manufacturing. This is because buyers commonly purchase ready-made goods, order varying amounts of goods at short notice, and request to adjust the design of goods constantly, because of the change of seasons or fashion, even though the amount is small. Information must be fed back to the manufacturing operations quickly. The Yiwu government has implemented a strategy that aims to ‘promote manufacturing through trade, integrate trade and manufacturing’ since the 1990s, and facilitated the growth of local manufacturing surrounding trade. The specific measures include reforming regulations of different departments and establishing industrial parks (China Enterprises News 2018). In sum, transnational trade as an emergent scale is to a great extent reliant on actions of the Yiwu government. Yiwu government’s interventions – coordinating across government sectors, creating new industrial parks, and mobilising resources over the entire jurisdiction through the hierarchical relation between the city and the

54  Handbook on transnationalism

subjugated units (particularly districts and township) – are an exercise of capacities of taxonomical scales. The question then is, given that countries with large Muslim populations in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia at one point accounted for nearly 80 per cent of Yiwu’s exports, has transnational trade in turn induced transnational Islam? I shall address this question in the following section. The Mosques: An Emergent Local Scale Challenging the Taxonomical A city that had no Muslim population before the late 1990s now has a mosque of 2,500 square metres in the city centre (Zou 2015, p. 33). Nearly 20 informal mosques spread across the city until the government cracked down on them in 2016. Further, tension between migrant Muslims and the local government has escalated. In 2011 the Yiwu government decided to move the mosque to a suburb. Migrant Chinese Muslims threatened to hold a sit-in in front of the city government building. In the end, not only did the mosque remain where it is, the community raised more than 20 million RMB to rebuild it into a state-of-the-art landmark of the Arabic style in 2013. Immediately after the major renovation was completed in January 2013, the government asked the mosque committee to take down the sign ‘Great Mosque’ because, as a county-level city, Yiwu is not entitled to approve permanent religious institutions as the formal name Mosque indicated. The mosque had to be officially named a ‘site for religious activities’, an administrative category designated by the central government. The mosque committee refused. The government sent in a team in the night and replaced the sign. The new sign was removed by agitated masses the next morning. The mosque has been left without a sign since. The 2013 incident attracted wide attention from Muslims across China and beyond. Foreign traders played a minimum role in the development of Islam in Yiwu, let alone in the contestations with the government. The marketplace procurement model is such that traders, both from overseas and from China, are transient migrants. The majority of foreign traders visited China once or twice a year and delegated the daily business to their Chinese translator-brokers. The translator-brokers changed jobs frequently and rarely worked for the same client for longer than two years. Chinese Muslims also tended to exclude foreigners in religious activities because foreigners’ presence would attract additional government scrutiny. Transnational friendship and even marriages (Ma Yan 2012) did exist, but they did not form a transnational scale of religious activities. A number of foreign traders, particularly from Pakistan and North Africa, were actively involved in the 2013 contestation. But they were quickly silenced. The government talked to each of them, and threatened to shorten their visas and investigate their business (Huang Jingxuan 2013; interviews1). As their livelihoods almost entirely relied on the Yiwu Marketplace, which is in turn fully owned and managed by the government, they had to take warnings from the local government very seriously.

What, when and how transnationalism matters  55

Central to the development of Islam in Yiwu were Chinese Muslims (the ‘Hui’) who worked as Arabic-Chinese translators and business brokers between foreign traders and local suppliers. Mostly men aged between 25 and 40, they had migrated from the countryside or small cities in north-west China, with an education level of junior high school or below. The translators played a leading role in organising the informal mosques. The informal mosques, typically converted from a two- or three-bedroom apartment, were places where they prayed and socialised every day. Different informal mosques were closely related: people visited each other frequently and information transmitted instantly. Chinese Muslims in Yiwu regarded these informal mosques as true mosques, and call the officially endorsed ‘site for religious activities’ a ‘guest mosque’, which serves guests – the foreign traders who pass through. The translator-brokers organise many activities, ranging from religious festivals and sports events, to match making clubs, study groups (English language class or translators, Arabic for newly converted Muslims particularly spouses, and Quran leaning for everyone), barbeque picnics, and tours to nearby cities. During my visits they had raised funds to support girls’ education, Muslim care homes in the north-east, college students in financial hardship across China, Palestinian refugees in Jordon, and Rohingyas in Malaysia. It is more accurate to conceive of the translator-brokers as forming a scale rather than being a group. The population was unstable because of the constant migration; their relationship with the local society was weak and fluid too. Within the group there was no leader or clear structure. Some informal mosques did not have imams, which is highly unusual, and the translators took turns to lead prayers (which made the mosques more lively than those in their homeplace). A further manifestation of the scale quality of the population was the silent crowds that quickly formed in an emergency. In two cases, when government officers asked informal mosques to close down, Muslims from different parts of the city rushed to the mosques in no time. No leaders, no slogans, no demands, the silent masses prevented immediate shutdown of the mosques on both occasions. This local scale should be traced back to nationwide networks fostered through Arabic Language Schools (ALSs). The vast majority of the translators graduated from ALSs. ALSs are small private colleges set up by Muslim charities to teach Islam through modern Arabic, modelled after vocational colleges. While faith-based education is strictly controlled in China, ALSs as employment-oriented vocational colleges were approved and even encouraged by local governments as they brought back to schools the Muslim students who dropped out from government schools. Started in the north-west at the end of the 1970s, ALSs were set up across China by the 1990s. ALS students constantly moved from one school to another, following the Islamic tradition that religious students travelled from one madrassa to another. Based on this network, an ALS alumnus could come to Yiwu to work as a translator easily. Some translators moved every few years between Yiwu, Guangzhou (a major city close to Hong Kong), Shishi (a medium-sized city in Fujian province that is a national trading centre of children’s clothes), and their homeplace in the north-west.

56  Handbook on transnationalism

The ALS networks were even more instrumental for the charity causes far beyond Yiwu. The local emergent scale by the Chinese Muslims was more independent than transnational trade from the government. This explains its resilience, and even audacity, in religious activities. This, however, did not spare the population from the nationwide crackdown on religious activities in mid-2016. All the informal mosques in Yiwu were shut down by late 2016. Compounded by the decline in business, many of my informants left Yiwu after 2016. Some of them returned home in the north-west, others went to other places in China like Yunnan and Hainan with large concentrations of Muslim populations as well as viable economic opportunities, yet others migrated overseas, with Malaysia being a popular destination. The translators’ mobilisational and coordinating capacity within Yiwu declined, but their nationwide ALS networks kept going strong, as evidenced by the traffic on their WeChat accounts. Will these connections expand into a transnational scale of religious association? How will such emergent scale interact with the Chinese state? These questions warrant close observation.

CONCLUSION Nearly three decades after the transnationalism paradigm became well established in migration studies in English, this chapter proposes a multi-scalar framework to examine what transnational processes matter, why and how. I define scale as a spatial form of capacity. A transnational scale means the capacity of mobilising resources and coordinating across international borders among a particular group of people. In addition to scope, I also analytically divide scales into two types: the emergent and the taxonomical. An emergent scale is created by people without institutional power. People gain additional capacity by connecting and coordinating with each other. In comparison, a taxonomical scale indicates the mobilisational and coordinating capacity of an institution, particularly government. The institution acquires capacity by being part of a well-structured hierarchy. The hierarchy is rigid, but the taxonomical scales can be highly dynamic. Spatially bound taxonomical scales can cultivate emergent transnational scales, as we have witnessed in transnational trade in Yiwu. This chapter has also demonstrated that the multi-scalar framework can be applied in three steps. First, we may distinguish transnational connections that constitute a scale from those that do not. In the case of Yiwu, transnational trade constituted a scale, but social and religious connections across borders fell short of forming one. Second, we may investigate how the transnational scale emerges by tracing it to basic institutions such as family, local government and national policies. Third, we examine how transnational processes affect the social life around us which is primarily local and national. Transnational processes are not necessarily at odds with the nation-state, nor do they have a built-in tendency to become self-perpetuating (forming a ‘transnational social field’). In the Yiwu case, transnational trade reinforced government power because the former was subjugated to government

What, when and how transnationalism matters  57

taxonomical scales, while local religious activities posed more challenges to the government because they fell outside of the taxonomical. The multi-scalar framework helps to capture empirical complexities, and will also train our eyes for the relations between the conditions here and now and the dynamics afar, and between powerful institutions and potential changes.

NOTE 1. Interviews with three Chinese Muslims who were directly involved in the incident, 3–6 May 2018, Yiwu.

REFERENCES Adams, Paul (1996), ‘Protest and the scale politics of telecommunications’, Political Geography, 15 (5), 419–41. Alba, Richard and Victor Nee (2003), Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Belguidoum, Saïd and Olivier Pliez (2016), ‘Yiwu: The creation of a global market town in China’, Journal of Urban Research [online], 12, https://​journals​.openedition​.org/​articulo/​ 2863. Brenner, Neil (1999), ‘Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality and geographical scale in globalization studies’, Theory and Society, 28 (1), 39–78. Cabot, Heath (2019), ‘The business of anthropology and the European refugee regime’, American Ethnologist, 46 (3), 261–75. Çağlar, Ayşe and Nina Glick Schiller (2018),  Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Castells, Manuel (2000), The Rise of the Network Society: Economy, Society and Culture, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Chatterjee, Partha (1986), Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books for the United Nations University. China Enterprises News (2018), ‘Yiwu’s strategy of attracting investment: “Promoting cooperation with industry, trade and industry”’, accessed 1 January 2020 at http://​www​.zqcn​ .com​.cn/​hongguan/​201812/​26/​c510522​.html. Cohen, Robin (1997), Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Duara, Prasenjit (2003), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Duara, Prasenjit (2009), The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation, Abingdon: Routledge. Dumont, Louis ([1966] 1972), Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Faist, Thomas (1998), International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Bremen: University of Bremen Institute for Intercultural Studies. Faist, Thomas (2000), The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

58  Handbook on transnationalism

Foner, Nancy (1997), ‘What’s new about transnationalism? New York’s immigrants today and at the turn of the century’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 6 (3), 355–75. Freire, Paolo (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Bloomsbury. Geertz, Clifford (1978), ‘The bazaar economy: Information and search in peasant marketing’, American Economic Review, 68 (2), 28–32. Geertz, Clifford (2000), ‘The world in pieces: Culture and politics at the end of the century’, in Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 218–63. Glick Schiller, Nina (1999), ‘Transmigrants and nation-states: Something old and something new in the US immigrant experience’, in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh Dewind (eds), Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 94–119. Glick Schiller, Nina (2018), ‘Theorising transnational migration in our times: A multiscalar temporal perspective’, Nordic Journal of Migration Studies, 8 (4), 201–12. Glick Schiller, Nina and Georges E. Fouron (2000), Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Huang Jingxuan (2013), ‘Shichang yu qingzhensi de jiaohui: lun Yiwu Yisilan Xianxiang’ [The intersections between the market and the mosque: On the Islam phenomenon in Yiwu]. MA thesis, Taiwan National Tsinghua University, Institute for Anthropology. Johnson, Chalmers (2007), The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York: Henry Holt and Company. Kelly, Philip (1999), ‘The geographies and politics of globalization’, Progress in Human Geography, 23 (3), 379–400. Khagram, Sanjeev and Peggy Levitt (2008), ‘Constructing transnational studies’, in Peggy Levitt and Sanjeev Khagram (eds), The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–22. King, Stephen and Abdeslam Maghraoui (eds) (2019), The Lure of Authoritarianism: The Maghreb after the Arab Spring, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kumar, Krishan (2003), The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Everett S. (1966), ‘A theory of migration’, Demography, 3 (1): 47–57. Lenin, Vladimir ([1916] 1963), ‘Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism’, in Lenin’s Selected Work, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 667–766. Levitt, Peggy and Mary Waters (eds) (2002), The Changing Face of Home: Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lu Lijun, Yang Zhiwen and Zheng Xiaobi (2014), Yiwu Shidian [Yiwu Experiment], Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe [People’s Publishing House]. Luxemburg, Rosa (1976), The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, edited with an introduction by Horace B. Davis, New York: Monthly Review Press. Ma Ping (2012), ‘Musilin “dongjian” yu yanhai diqu chengshi de fenbu geju bianhua’ [The eastward spread of Muslims and the changes in its distribution pattern among coastal cities], in Ma Qiang and Ma Fude (eds), Zaoyu yu tiaoshi: Xiandaihua beijingxia de chengshi musilin xueshu yantao hui wenji [Encounter and Adaptation: Proceedings of the Symposium on Urban Muslims in the Context of Modernization], Lanzhou: Gansu Nationalities Publishing House, pp. 214–24. Ma Yan (2012), Yige xinyang qunti de yimin shijian: Yiwu musilin shehui shenghuo de minzuzhi [The Migration Practice of a Faith Group: An Ethnography of the Social Life of Muslims in Yiwu], Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue chubanshe [Central University for Nationalities Press]. Marston, Sallie (2000), ‘The social construction of scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (2), 219–42.

What, when and how transnationalism matters  59

Mountz, Alison and Jennifer Hyndman (2006), ‘Feminist approaches to the global intimate’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34 (1/2), 446–63. Munn, Nancy (1983), ‘Gawan kula: Spatiotemporal control and the symbolism of influence’, in Jerry W. Leach and Edmund Leach (eds), The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277–308. Munn, Nancy (1986), The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin Books. Portes, Alejandro, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt (1999), ‘The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 217–37. Rodney, Walter (1972), How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications. Scott, James (1998), Seeing Like a State, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, Neil (1996), ‘Spaces of vulnerability: The space of flows and the politics of scale’, Critique of Anthropology, 16 (1), 63–77. Swyngedouw, Erik (1997), ‘Neither global nor local: “Globalisation” and the politics of scale’, in Kevin Cox (ed.), Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, New York: Guilford Press, pp. 137–66. Vertovec, Steven (1999), ‘Conceiving and researching transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 447–62. Vertovec, Steven (2009), Transnationalism (Key Ideas), New York: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974), The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4), 301–34. Xiang Biao (2013), ‘Multi-scalar ethnography: An approach for critical engagement with migration and social change’, Ethnography, 14 (3), 282–99. Yeates, Nicola (2012), ‘Global care chains: A state-of-the-art review and future directions in care transnationalization research’, Global Networks, 12 (2), 135–54. Yiwu government (2019), Waimao Shuju [Statistics on International Trade], accessed 21 December 2019 at http://​www​.ywtrade​.gov​.cn/​wmsj/​. Zhu Min (2016), ‘The history, characteristics and lessons of Yiwu specialized market’, accessed 11 September 2020 at http://​www​.sic​.gov​.cn/​News/​455/​6999​.htm. Zou Lei (2015), ‘Xin sichouzhilu shang zongjiao yu maoyi de hudong: Yi Yiwu, Ningxia weilei’ [The religion-trade interactions on the new silk road: Taking Yiwu and Ningxia as examples]. Shijie Zongjiao Wenhua [World Religious Cultures], 3, 32–7.

4. Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation Sergei Shubin

Time seems to play a rather curious role in the key arguments developed in transnationalism scholarship. An early contribution by Kroeber (1952, p. 404) considered time as ‘processes of flow’ connecting cultures and people across different locations. Hägerstrand (1970) used biographical perspectives to frame time as a resource and a context for ‘life paths’ of individuals involved in what we would now term transnational lives. Drawing on Hägerstrand’s work, further studies focused on ‘temporal habits’, routines and rhythms framing chronological interpretations of time in cross-border movements (Elder 1994). These earlier discussions provided important framing in the analysis of transnational networks (Faist 1998) and transnationality’s multiple ‘spatiotemporal (dis)orders’ (Sassen 2000, p. 221). Many of these studies drew on the concepts of life-cycle, longue durée, cross- and inter-generational time frames to develop more fluid and ‘stretched’ notions of time that reflect complex linkages between people, places and organisations across nation-states (Khagram and Levitt 2008). Engagements with life-course theory, particularly in research exploring transnational migration, considered the social progress of displaced people over time, and the temporalities of life transitions and mechanisms of time management used to maintain transnational links (for an overview, see Shubin 2015). These approaches focused on the ordering of time (Jasso 2004), networked and interconnected temporalities, and temporal directionality and sequences in framing transnational living, while often assuming homogeneity of time and paying limited attention to its very movement (Collins and Shubin 2015). The deepening interest in time in transnational research reflected a later shift to studying it as ‘multiple and heterogeneous’ (May and Thrift 2001, p. 5) and ‘heteronomous’ (Cwerner 2001, p. 21) thus questioning temporal linearity and the ability of individuals to control time. Many transnationalism studies helpfully used relational arguments to challenge essentialist and fixed approaches to place, identity and position (see Carling, Chapter 7 in this volume). Such approaches build on ‘relational dialectics’ (Harvey 1996, p. 7) and fluid, juxtaposed and porous views of space and time. In particular, time has been seen as a medium relating existing transnational identities to longer-term histories of colonialism, highlighting temporally uneven connections and their openness to the future (Radcliffe 2017). The dominance of the present in constructing temporal awareness has also been questioned, with more attention paid to the role of internationalisation of memory (i.e. spread of particular forms of nostalgia) and future-oriented visions (i.e. utopic dreams and desires) in connecting contemporary transnational meanings and cultures (Gutman et al. 2010). 60

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  61

Furthermore, feminist scholars used transnational perspectives to stress transmission of experiences and the creation of stretched-out belonging at the interconnections of different temporal ‘roots’ and across generations (Kaplan 1987; Spivak 1992). Despite the importance of these developments, the theoretical grounds for deploying such temporal figures and justifications for using them in transnational studies have often been left unexplained. In many cases ‘time was not theorized’, and instead expressed as a flat temporality identified primarily with the domain of action and utility (Glick Schiller 2018, p. 204). The persistent focus on ‘the time of linearity, simplicity, unity, totality, and determination’ (De Sousa Santos 2016, p. 13) evident in transnational research fails to account for the unpredictable movement of time and complex intertemporal relations. While developing a temporal vocabulary and descriptive framework to express transnational conditions, the majority of these literatures do not offer consistent theoretical analysis of transnational time. The majority of transnational scholarship also fails to consider the models of teleology and forces creating contradictory, asynchronous, paradoxical times accompanying the movements across cultural and gender boundaries (Braidotti 2011). As a result, in transnational studies ‘time is still largely understood as a taken-for-granted backdrop to, rather than a constituent of, globalization processes and human experiences’ (Zhou 2015, p. 164). This chapter addresses the call from Featherstone et al. (2007, p. 389) to ‘problematize the temporality of transnational networks’ by rethinking the very term ‘trans-national’ in relation to time. It explores the changing meaning of ‘trans-(national)’ time that is not predicated on a coherent subject managing its unfolding and is not rooted to stable topological positions or continued relations. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English (2010), the prefix ‘trans-’ can be interpreted in two different ways: first, to express the sense of movement across, through, and beyond place, person, thing, or state, and second, to designate composition or compound. Consequently, the term ‘trans-national’ is described as an extension and movement beyond limits (of a person, place, region, condition) and national boundaries, where such a crossing puts into question the composition of multidimensional worlds and production of connectivities. My intention in this chapter is to reconsider the meaning of ‘trans-’ as a movement beyond the limits of possibility, identity and recognition associated with the ‘national’, treating it in less certain terms and introducing a pause, a hiatus in the analysis of the crossing between these limits. First, I engage with the idea of ‘trans-’ as a movement ‘beyond’ self and identity and consider the temporal nature of such a passage to examine the possibility of a relation with difference beyond limits and national frontiers. Second, I examine the meaning of ‘trans-’ as a ‘composition’ and explore the temporality of re-composition of the elements related across space, bringing into question the subject(s) emerging during the crossing and limits of power in managing such a relationship. I start by exploring specific understanding of relationality framed around connectivities that my twofold ‘movement beyond’ attempts to unsettle.

62  Handbook on transnationalism

QUESTIONING RELATIONAL TEMPORALITY A key element in the conception of transnationalism is the relation. Transnationalism emphasises the interconnected character of spaces and times. Many existing definitions of transnationalism consider the processes that create and sustain crossings and continuous exchanges between people and organisations across borders, and the limits of consciousness and identifications (Vertovec 2009). However, these dominant visions perceive spatial and temporal relations as pre-conditioned by the logic of unity, extension and recognition while lacking the developed account of boundedness, recurrence and difference. On the one hand, in exploring the spaces and times of crossings, many transnationalism studies prioritise connectivity between people and places without paying due attention to the boundedness necessary for such relations to develop. In transnationalism scholarship, boundaries as dividing lines or temporal disjunctions are often treated with suspicion as vestiges of dichotomies that can undermine pluralised visions of space and time (Hannerz 2002; Levitt 2004). As a result, there is a danger in presenting time as homogeneous and isotropic, extending in the unlimited field. In this case, temporal boundaries are mainly used to demarcate particular domains in time: the ones that are over (past) or yet to come (future). Drawing on Harvey’s (1989) earlier work, time in transnationalism research is often described as a part of the process of ‘time-space compression’, segmented into measurable and orderable presences such as the periods of integration or durations of belonging to host communities (Boccagni 2012). As I have discussed elsewhere (Shubin 2015; Collins and Shubin 2017), thinking of temporality in terms of objective and orderable moments points towards the concept of time as a closed and complete structure, timelessness available to all and belonging to none. Such a closed chronological model of time, as Barnett (2005) stresses, does not allow opportunities to express the relations of surprise, patience, anticipation or hope across distance. Furthermore, conceptualisations of time as a succession of units overlooks the interrelatedness of temporal modes so that ‘time becomes another mode of extension’ and the movement of time is lost (Malpas 2012, p. 234). To recover the dynamism of time in transnationalism, there is a need to account for boundaries not only as functions of relational openness but as a part of the very character of relations extending beyond and across bounds. In contradistinction, many existing approaches to transnationalism focus on the ways of relating, which are based on the intentional construction of meaning and knowledge. In the analysis of transnational time, the focus on the agency (who remembers and forgets, and how) justifies the creation of a ‘“logical developmental narrative” of time’ while masking the disturbing temporal disconnections and silences (Agathangelou and Killian, 2016, p. 30). ‘Temporally decentred’ transnational actors are often expected to hold together different times (time zones) in an attempt to create a coherent sense of the self and ‘being present’ in different places (Solomon, 2014, p. 675). In this context, transnational ‘identity itself constitutes a timing project’, where the actor attempts to reconcile destabilising influences of time and manage disruptions to familiar temporal structures (Hom 2018, p. 76). Such

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  63

use of time for identity construction supports what Barnett (2005, p. 7) calls ‘generic theories of cultural othering’. Attempts to create intelligible temporal whole draw on the spatial figures of here and there, presence and absence to explore relations of identity and difference across the frontiers. In line with the standard relational theory of identity, the ‘transnational’ person or group depends on self-identification or a set of categories and meanings ‘transnational’ persons identify with, and recognition of others. According to this view, the identity of the subject such as a transnational actor is created by putting certain elements seen as different at a distance. This distance is framed ‘in fundamentally spatialized ways’, while limited attention is paid to the temporal aspects of the relation (Barnett 2005, p. 7). Spatially, this relational understanding of identity translates into the differentiation of persons on the basis of their mobility, gender, ethnicity within shifting networks of practices and moral codes, thus creating ‘transnational subjects, technologies and ethical practices’ (Grewal 2005, p. 3). The exploration of such separation and potential ways of bridging spatial distance has been a popular theme in transnationalism research, which attempted to extend recognition to distant others, particularly through practices of transnational care (Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume). While temporality is also considered in this process of identity formation, it mainly relies on the spatial figures of ‘placement’ in life-course stages and ‘location’ within the social networks of ‘linked’ lives (Collins and Shubin 2015). Temporally, mainstream identity politics in transnational studies relies on the separation of potentially knowable but yet unknown objects. Temporality is taken as internal and subjective, where unknown, future-oriented objects or practices such as sensory experiences can become part of the here and now, present ‘knowledge and practices … waiting to be transformed in order to be trans-nationalized’ (Pordié 2013, p. 12). It is based on an earlier Kantian view of time as an entity that needs to be ‘synthesised’ or ‘unified’ within the mind of an individual and where temporary experiences are charted as mind-dependent things (Hoy 2009, p. 3). This approach assumes a view of time as progressive, which implies an individual ability to manage different events into a unified narrative and to stand outside of history to justify such progression. It valorises forward-looking visions and creates stereotypes of ‘self-naturalising temporality that places some as progressing forward and others as stuck in the past’ (Muñoz 2009, p. 8). Furthermore, this view of temporality entrenches dualistic divisions between predictable and unforeseen, positive or negative temporality. In transnational studies, temporal distance to others is described through the concept of ‘post-migrant’ that seeks to describe hybridisation of societies, but depends on specific futural trajectory and retroactively constructed narrative (Foroutan 2019). ‘Post-migrants’ are expected to achieve a state of full integration into a ‘host’ society, so they are considered both in relation to ‘the grid of an inscribed past’ and to the normative future (Çağlar 2018, p.  27). Relation to such transnational ‘others’ is defined in terms of ‘not yet or no longer comprehension’ with the anticipation of time when their activities and sociabilities become known and shared by the ‘host country’ subjects (Libertson 1982, p. 2). In this case, relation is predicated on negotiating the

64  Handbook on transnationalism

delay in incorporating currently unknown elements (things, technologies, emotions) into mechanisms of comprehension under the authority of the knowing subject. As a result, Glick Schiller (2018) criticises existing transnational frameworks for expecting migrants to eventually settle and build transnational connections, thus suggesting the inevitability and temporal suspension of relationality. Similarly, Barnett (2005) warns that this approach to temporality offers limited understanding of relations beyond (trans-) oneself and across boundaries. On the one hand, it ties transnational connections to the relations of equivalence or comparable durations and endpoints such as ‘temporal limits’ to migrant integration or persistence of transnational family practices (Waters 2011, p. 1120). On the other hand, it assumes contingent disruption of relations into new forms of identification linked, for example, to the temporalities of ‘home’ and ‘not-home’, which obscure the complex construction of liminal times of suspension, temporariness and drifting in transnational lives (Kilkey et al. 2014). Overall, in the process of negotiation of distance, the relation to difference is limited to the mechanisms of recognition or misrecognition, which privilege exclusion of the other in the formation of a ‘transnational’ subject. This approach to relationality assumes temporal coincidence, certainty and the sharing of ‘common ground’ in the form of ‘globalised language and practice’ between the transnational actor and the others (Pordié 2013, p. 15), but leaves unexplained less defensive, more creative modes of individual responses to difference (McNay 2000). To address these concerns and challenge the logic of unity, extension and recognition, the rest of the chapter offers an alternative account of temporal movement across (trans-) to the other and how this movement can produce a particular relation. The discussion draws on poststructuralist thinking about time and, in particular, the ideas of Maurice Blanchot (1982, 1992, 1995, 1997, 2003) to challenge logic of identity and recognition in transnational research. Blanchot’s highly influential writings have pushed philosophy and literature to their limits and raised radical ethical and ontological questions relevant to the key challenges faced by the social sciences today. In particular, his work on the unhinging of space and time, the instability of difference and alterity, and the duplicity of writing and representation offers alternative approaches to the challenging questions of time, alterity and neutrality, which continue to trouble scholars of transnationalism. Blanchot’s commitment to bear witness to extremity and go beyond (trans-) the stable points to limits of the self, language, knowledge and reason are particularly well suited for the analysis presented in the rest of the chapter.

PASSAGE BEYOND THE SELF In order to progress the first part of my argument about alternative temporalities of trans-national relating, I start by exploring the movement beyond the self and its effects on relations beyond different limits. This section moves beyond the idea of managed, known and rational time when expressing relations across limits and boundaries. Transnationalism studies often see the subject (migrant) as an entity

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  65

transformed through relations with culturally, socially and politically different others by means of accommodating some differences and excluding others. However, Blanchot’s (1992) ideas help to challenge the very identity of transnational subjects and their ability to create space for the other through knowledge or perception. Blanchot calls into question the ‘I’ and the very possibility of its relation with the unknown and the foreign. He speaks about the ‘morcellated self, injured intimately’, which is exposed and ruptured in an encounter with alterity (Blanchot 1992, p. 6). This can be illustrated with reference to dying; when the self is confronted with a radical difference and this exposure to the unthinkable death moves the self ‘beyond’ its limit. In a transnational context, Sarat (2013) describes near-death experiences of Mexican migrants to the United States as the passing of the infinite moment of dying, which migrants cannot express in temporal terms. In such situations, the migrant (the self) cannot own, master death or bring it into knowledge as it is beyond human comprehension. Such encounters with death open up the time of radical dispossession or ‘exilic’ temporality (Fynsk 2013), where the subject cannot manage time or represent it. In a broader sense, the movement beyond the self unsettles the agency of the transnational actor and their ability to temporalise. The process of exposure to difference, to the infinite that comes from another human being, brings the subject (the ‘I’) into question. Blanchot (1992) introduces a strange, fractured subject that, rather than trying to control its boundaries by including and differentiating itself from selected others, gives itself to the other. In temporal terms, this signals the shift away from considering time as objective and orderable, so it can no longer be seen as a mind-dependent feature of transnational lives. The self opens into a relationship with the infinite that is at once creative and destructive, as it relates and fragments at the same time. This movement opens into the otherness with the self, ‘making of me this foreigner, this unknown from whom I am separated by an infinite distance’ (Blanchot 2003, p. 133). When the ‘I’ of the international actor can no longer master time and open the other within itself, solely individual experience can no longer be present or located, and time is thrown out of joint. As an example, temporalities of countercultural (New Age, Techno) transnational actors with ‘displaced minds’ (D’Andrea 2004, p. 241) escape known temporal frameworks as these nomads go through a mixture of self-transforming stages of stillness and chaotic meditation. Similarly, the exilic temporalities of transnational religion (Shubin 2011, 2012) and ecstatic experiences of diasporic longings (Csordas 2009) unsettle familiar temporal registers. In this regard, Derrida (1995, p. 65) speaks about ‘atemporal temporality’, something that cannot be stabilised or established through reason and therefore is a sign of madness. In transnationalism research, Búriková and Miller (2010) speak about such a situation as ‘drifting’ and being ‘out of time’, while Ellis (2017) considers a ‘vicious circle’ of young women from Turkey ‘drowning’ in maddening, impossible temporal arrangements in the United States. Trans-boundary movement, when the subject engages with difference in unfamiliar contexts and struggles to develop the impossible relation with the foreign within itself, dispossesses the migrant of its

66  Handbook on transnationalism

temporal limits. This approach challenges the view of ‘balanced time’ used by transnational subjects to establish binary divisions between inside and outside (of family, work, region), which can be reconciled by return ‘home’, reshaping of commitments and transformed self (Wilding and Baldassar 2009, p. 185). Exposure to the foreign disrupts the spatiotemporal order and presents a turning, ‘the streaming flow of the timeless outside’ (Blanchot 1982, p. 83). Ghostly revenant (timeless) interventions often disturb transnational lives, bringing gradual erosion of identity and a sense of rootlessness. In the Singaporean poems by Edwin Thumboo about exile and diaspora, the murmur of British colonialism (unspeakable and referred to only as the ‘they’) is neither present nor absent, and unsettles the temporalities of transnational lives of Indian migrants and contributes to trauma and their loss of self (Valles 2013). Similarly, in Fanon’s descriptions of lives of what we could now call ‘transnational migrants’, the force of ‘violence from time immemorial’ recurrently interrupts the existence of Algerians abroad and creates ‘crude, empty, fragile’ selves (Fanon 2004, p. 3). These events signal an-archic temporality, beyond the order of the discourse and the agency of the self. The possible and impossible experience, when the transnational actor opens to the silent strangeness within and yet withdraws any sense of agency and maintains separation with the other, points towards ‘diachronic, differential temporality’ (Barnett 2005, p. 10). As Blanchot (2003, p. 44) states, in this situation ‘we are delivered over to another time – to time as other, as absence and neutrality; precisely to a time that can no longer redeem us … A time without event, without project, without possibility, an unstable perpetuity’. This approach suspends the temporal relation of meaning across national boundaries, which transnational migrants are often expected to make. Such relations are based on the temporal figures of imagination, anticipation of movement, and reflection on the passage, which reduce time to the succession of moments managed and known by transnational actors. Agathangelou and Killian (2016) refer to such approach as a ‘reduction’ of transnational time, when the sense of the self is distorted by selective outstanding moments yet kept protected by the fictions of a ‘logical’ and connected temporal narrative. An alternative, differential temporality challenges expectations about agentic actors ‘re-framing’ the time of their life under the uncertain limitations of societal structures in ‘home’ and ‘destination’ countries (Wingens et al. 2011). Withdrawal of the self in its impossible relation with alterity ushers in the time of exile, when traditional approaches assuming ‘temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments’ are abandoned (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, p. 963). Different transnational writings illustrate this point. Finkin (2012, p. 99) speaks about the ‘exilic temporality’ of the Roman-era poet Ovid, who is forced to leave Rome for Tomis in present-day Romania, loses his ability to discern between ‘shifting series of “nows”’, and feels arrested in the present as an agglutinated ‘now’, without time for dwelling and very little perception of progression. Similarly, Edwards (2000, p. 47) refers to the suspended logic of reason in ‘unfinished migrations’ across Africa, while I earlier discussed temporal associations between temporal suspense, insanity and mobility in transnational contexts (Shubin 2016). Time here does not belong to the narrative and the order of things, which

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  67

assumes dialectical opposition between being and non-being, mastery and submission, reason and madness. Such a strange relation without common terms or even ‘non-relation’ (Ricoeur 1992, p. 338), belongs to a different, a-logical temporality which requires a relinquishment of identity and deprival of subjectivity.

‘TRANS-’ AS A MOVEMENT OF TEMPORAL RE-COMPOSITION Second, movement beyond (trans-) the boundaries of identity, place or region calls into question temporal composition of relations and elements emerging in this movement. Earlier discussion in this chapter stressed the inability to overcome strangeness between different beings and a temporal relationship which is ‘non-unifying, is no longer content with being a passage or a bridge’ and unsettles unity and cohesiveness of temporality (Blanchot 2003, p. 109). This focus on fragmentation and disruption echoes the efforts of transnational scholars to attend to the ‘unthought’, ‘the non-existent, the interruptions within experiences of continuity, and neocolonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial events’ (Agathangelou and Killian 2016, p. 38). Earlier attempts to reduce time to world-historical narratives and identifiable temporal patterns reproduce temporal frameworks which support colonial discourses and exclusion of the other to the ‘feeling of nonexistence’ (Fanon 1952, p. 139). An alternative approach is required to oppose the Kantian view of time as a continuous totality in which events can be mapped and attend to time’s disruptions and fragmentations. Borrowing Blanchot’s (1995, p. xi) terms, we can introduce the disastrous time or time of the disaster, which does not simply express the disconnections, ruptures or breaks between different elements (imagined, symbolic) of transnational movement. Disastrous time does not describe the temporal relation of discontinuity where the unity is implied or achievable. Instead, it is a time created by the disaster of moving beyond the self, destroying language and refusing the possibility of naming. An encounter with the unknown during a transnational journey is by its very nature indeterminable, unsettling every temporal position and possibility of temporal delimitation. Chivoiu (2018) illustrates such interrupted times with references to families displaced between Romania and Italy. She attempts to bear witness to the disastrous time of suffering of ‘left-behind-children’, who end up committing suicide as they struggle to maintain continuities and make sense of prolonged absences and temporary reappearances of their parents. Similarly, Clayton (2019) expresses times of migrant lives fractured by transnational journeys, who are unable to bring together (re-compose) the seemingly timeless utopia of life before exile, confusions of stops and starts of the journey and precarious times of waiting after their physical arrival. Furthermore, Robertson (2015) speaks about ‘staggered’ times in Asian migration to Australia, when mobility processes go off track, stop and restart at different intervals and create a host of unidentifiable temporalities of the ‘failed’, the ‘almost’ and ‘always already’ migrants. The infinite, disruptive temporalities of transnational lives resist translation into coherent narratives, fail to produce temporal unity of the

68  Handbook on transnationalism

past, present and future, resist the thematisation of time before/after the move, and provide an opening for expressing time as fragmented and dispersed. Furthermore, rethinking the composition of transnational worlds beyond unified historical accounts draws attention to liminal, in-between temporalities irreducible to the totality of dialectical thought. In Blanchot’s (2003) terms, passage beyond the self in a transnational context invokes double movement, which can neither be accomplished in the present nor can present itself; it is neither event nor absence of event. Echoing Bataille’s (1988) temporal ‘limit-experience’, Blanchot (2003, p. 44) speaks about time not accessible to the individual because it transgresses the limits of subjectivity and cannot be exhausted or used in activity. It is not the time of something that can be located and managed, but a neutral time of interruption, separation and exile that the ‘I’ of transnational subjects can never reach. It is the time ‘of interruption in which the present ceases to pass, a between-time (entre-temps)’ (Bruns 1997, p. 126). This view of interrupted time runs parallel to the understanding of time offered by postcolonial theorists, who challenge transnational temporal boundaries (Northern/ Southern, global/local), temporal hierarchies and totalising periodisation of time. For example, Chakrabarty (2004, p. 426) draws attention to the times between historical variations and modes that are necessarily ‘so plural as not to be exhausted by any single definition’. By allowing ‘the time of slavery’ to speak, Hartman (1997, p. 759) challenges the temporal continuities that consign slavery to the past and categorise difference between the Western subject and the oppressed others in order to contain it. Similarly, Schwarcz (1998) offers testimony to the ‘broken time’ of trauma of exiled Chinese intellectuals after the Cultural Revolution, which unsettles dominant transnational temporal narratives. Such in-between time bears witness to rupture and allows intermittence, nothingness itself to speak through some broken temporal content. Blanchot (1982, p. 29) argues: ‘The time of the absence of time is not dialectical. In that time, what appears is the fact that nothing appears … what is new renews nothing; what is present is no longer of the moment; what is present presents nothing’. In these terms, such nothingness or the neuter, is the response to the nameless and infinite alterity, it is neither present nor absent, ne uter (not either), neither nor the other. This approach unhinges the dialectic of time, which in some transnational accounts is described in negative/positive or permanent/temporary terms. In studies of immigration detention (Turnbull 2015) and the politics of waiting in transnational ‘limbo’ (Castañeda 2012), time is often seen as a negative issue to overcome in order to achieve totality by means of integration. Similarly, time tends to be described in positive terms as a resource to be used such as a part of cultural capital (Kelly and Lusis 2006) or an element of ‘resource mobilisation’ strategy in return migration (Cassarino 2004). Instead, a Blanchot-inspired approach highlights the in-between (entre-temps) time of the presence of the unknown, dependent on maintaining the separations rather than synchronising familiar and unfamiliar sequences, durations and rhythms across borders (Blanchot 1982, p.33). Irreducible to the time of comprehension, it is a time of hiatus and silence ‘structurally unknowable’ as it involves exposure to otherness (Shubin and Sowgat 2019). Contrary to the ‘transtemporal’ view of transnational

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  69

lives prioritising connectivity and comparison (Coe 2014, p. 15), this alternative conceptualisation opens up the asynchronous and anonymous time of non-coincidence and surprise. A distinctive sense of temporality offered by Blanchot presents an opportunity to attend to hiatus and ambiguity in the busy world of transnational relations. This sense of time suspends the present, prioritises waiting and forgetting, rather than memory and productive action often emphasised in transnational research. The passage (trans-) to an impossible relationship with the other relinquishes one’s mastery and requires radical passivity, ‘the most passive passivity, the step/not beyond the temporality of time’ (Blanchot 1992, p. 15). For transnational migrants, experiences of shame, loss and trauma disrupt their sense of temporal control, produce an ‘altered sense of time speeding up or slowing down’ (Pedersen 2015, p. 13) and create a time of undecidability, when nothing is suffered, nothing comes to pass. This nothing, silence signals not an empty time, but time of (trans-) re-composition and dispersion. With self-withdrawal, the relation to one’s present is eliminated and the temporal horizon is interrupted, inscribed and effaced at the same time, oscillating between waiting and forgetting. In Blanchot’s (1997, p. 32) terms, forgetting and waiting come together: ‘Forgetting, waiting. The waiting that assembles, disperses; the forgetting that disperses, assembles’. Blanchot plays on the plural meaning of the word attendre to convey the double movement of interruption marked and re-marked with neutrality (Hill 2012). He introduces undecidability in expressing both to wait (expectation, just waiting) and to await (anticipation, waiting for something), which unsettles directional and teleological predispositions framing transnational time. Distinction between anticipation and expectation is both sustained and effaced, ‘waiting does not know and leaves aside what it is waiting for’ (Blanchot 1997, p. 25). This redoubling points towards the reversibility of time, so that waiting for the future is always haunted by the repetitive suspense without temporal progression. In Osondu’s (2010) story ‘Waiting’, depicting suspended lives in an African refugee camp, children continue to dream and wait for the future that may never come true, facing constant readjustment of temporal outcomes (adoption by a family in London, Paris, Rome, maybe America). In the seemingly timeless space of the camp, children’s expected future cannot be reliably inferred from the present as it is ‘crippled and deformed by their dreams’ (Osondu 2010, p. 81). In Blanchot’s terms (1997, p. 24) in such situations ‘waiting is always a waiting for waiting, withdrawing the beginning, suspending the ending and, within this interval, opening the interval of another waiting’. This account of waiting presents the future that is always interrupted and effaced rather than ‘planful’ (Clausen 1993). For migrant children in Osondu’s story, the past is as distant and irretrievable as a curse since it cannot foreground the existing present during the process of ‘chronic waiting’ (Jeffrey 2008, p. 955). In resonance with recent debates in transnationalism research (Carling and Collins 2018; Shubin 2020), an alternative approach to waiting shifts from the dominant thinking about the future as a possible yet deferred present evaluated in terms of investment and return, to the impossible, unspeakable future ‘without any meaning in the present’ (Blanchot 1995, p. 2).

70  Handbook on transnationalism

In transnational studies, this approach can help to better understand the an-archic temporality of ‘waiting children’ who in the process of expecting adoption abroad are presented, screened (for possible diseases) and visualised (in the form of pictures circulated within adoption networks), yet also dispersed (effaced) again when the adoption is not complete (Cartwright 2003). During children’s exposure to the unknown and indeterminable in the form of the gaze of adoption institutions, waiting mediates fragmented temporality of indecision, deferral and return. Similarly, forgetting marks the process of self-effacement (no one is able to forget), the end of productive ability to remember the past (forgetting is a lapse of memory) and re-composition of the ‘I’ in the future through different possibilities. Blanchot (1995, p. 3) speaks about passive ‘forgetfulness without memory’ that remains ahistorical by losing the individual’s ability to spatialise and mask it. Forgetting is not a negation of memory, but an opening of a neutral space of indecision in between presence and absence (Bruns 1997). It recovers difference by attending to indeterminacy, surprise and creativity and makes it impossible for a future to be a self-identical repetition of the past. During this exposure to the plural movement of waiting and forgetting, transnational lives bear witness to ‘permanent temporariness’ (Bailey et al. 2002), boredom and ‘lostness’ (Collins and Shubin 2015) as well as a feeling of being ‘trapped’ in time (Conlon 2011). Lee and Yeoh (2004) stress that forgetting in transnational contexts is manipulated by dominant power structures, so there is a need for alternative ways of engaging with ‘absent’ others. A Blanchot-inspired approach offers such an alternative as it speaks to the distorted, parallel temporal movement (trans-) of gathering and dispersion beyond consciousness and mastery, forgetting and waiting for the undecidable future and inaccessible past.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter explored existing orderings of time, concepts and vocabularies and unsettled the underlying temporal modes presupposed by the relational conceptions that are dominant in transnational scholarship. It questioned the very possibility of a relation across (trans-) various types of borders, which often assumes unity, thematisation and intentional construction of meaning on the part of transnational actors to the exclusion of different ‘absent’ others. In a twofold movement beyond (trans-) the boundaries of subjectivity, place, condition and re-composition of temporal elements, the discussion offered alternative accounts of time. Firstly, the chapter explored what might be termed exilic, an-archic and a-logical temporality in transnational contexts. It argued against the teleological historicised narrative of transnational lives that attempted to resolve past temporal dissonances and remove the uncertainty of future displacements. Relation to the unknown in transnational lives is not given and encounters with alterity (such as death) push a subject beyond their limit, where they become fractured, effaced and released from the structure of discourse. Exilic time of self-withdrawal disrupts socio-spatial order and escapes representations in the form of life-course or migrant/non-migrant

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  71

times. Exilic time renders inoperative the temporal structures of ‘expected durations’, permanence thresholds and accepted rhythms, which assume individual ability to temporalise and order transnational lives. Unlike earlier ‘time-distancing discourse’ of colonial approaches, exilic time does not frame inequality in time to support the exclusion of inferior, ‘lagging behind’ others (Fabian 1983, p. 5). Instead, the concept of exilic time speaks to the unbridgeable temporal distance with the other that cannot be subsumed by the transnational actor. In the passage beyond the self, other times such as the times of ancient, immemorial violence are uncontainable within a common measure and haunt transnational subjects. In the words of Blanchot (2003, p. 207), such an an-archic, a-logical, mad temporality, where time does not belong to the transnational actor, is ‘another time … something that escapes all employ and all end, and more, as that which escapes our very capacity to undergo it’. The movement beyond the boundaries of identity and reason opens a time of interrogation of migration and transnational living. Following Blanchot (1992, p. 55), we can consider this temporality of the infinitive ‘to migrate’ or ‘to write: work of the absence of work, production which produces nothing’. Time of transnational living exceeds the expectations of productive action, escapes the division between past, present or future and cannot be limited to the conditions or the end states of migration. A Blanchot-inspired approach can help to attend to the temporalities of countercultural (New Age, Techno) nomads with ‘displaced minds’ (D’Andrea 2004, p. 241) going through a mixture of self-transforming stages of stillness and chaotic meditation, which escape meaningful and known temporal frameworks. Similarly, we can proceed with opening up the exilic temporalities of mystical and immaterial worlds of transnational religion (Shubin 2011, 2012) and ecstatic experiences of diasporic longings (Csordas 2009) that are not given, cannot be known and escape familiar temporal registers. By engaging with the more-than-human ‘translocal’ materialities and affects of diasporic lives (Xiang, Chapter 3 in this volume), this approach puts into question the discontinuous time beyond oneself, and attends to the temporalities of the unexperienceable, irreducible to perception and bereft of measure. Secondly, the chapter considered disastrous, neutral and fragmented time beyond identifiable temporal patterns and coherent historical accounts of transnational lives. It spoke against the drive for synchronisation and connectivity between temporal elements and across borders in transnational research. By focusing on the in-between temporalities, the chapter challenged the dualisms of permanent/temporary, positive/ negative times and unhinged the dialectic attempting to reconcile these temporal binaries. In resonance with earlier attempts to allow ‘undocumented spatiality’ of migrants (Sigvardsdotter 2013, p. 524) to be expressed beyond the dialectics of presence or absence, this discussion attempted to differently engage with what can be called ‘undocumented temporality’ in transnational research. The time of trauma and suffering in transnational lives cannot be smoothed into a coherent and transparent temporal framework. Such neutral time of affliction bears witness to silences and interruptions and affirms the break with the unknown in transnational lives without a relation of unity of temporal signs, frequencies, routines and ‘assimilation of what is foreign into what is familiar’ (Butler 2012, p. 12).

72  Handbook on transnationalism

Uncovering the asynchronous time of powerlessness and vulnerability, fatigue and doubt so common in transnational lives can help us to engage with what Philo (2017, p. 20) terms the ‘wounded geographies’ of the present that do not correspond to the moments of presence or absence. Instead of attempting to resolve the uncertainties and dissonances of histories and representations of transnational movements, this approach gives expression to the time of the disaster, or the neutral time of destruction or description. Borrowing from the broader research on testimonies of trauma (Carter-White 2009), we can use this Blanchot-inspired approach to re-articulate the dissonance, contradictory temporal sequences emerging in dismemberment and re-composition of transnational movements not as empty time, but as disconcerting, fragmentary, always troubling time of inscription and effacement. As temporal re-imaginings of slavery and forced migration demonstrate (Hartman 1997), attending to time that cannot be neatly presented provides opportunities to open up the taken for granted aspects of the politics of time in transnationalism research. We can re-orient our imaginations to the dissymmetry of time’s flow between past and future, beyond measurement, synchronicity and reciprocity. In so doing, we can uncover the politics of waiting and forgetting without memory that does not condemn specific (other) temporal events to oblivion, but unsettles dominant approaches framing and narrating time solely in terms of enchanted interconnections, chronological progress and improvement.

REFERENCES Agathangelou, Anna and Kyle Killian (eds) (2016), Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations, London: Routledge. Bailey, Adrian, Richard Wright, Alison Mountz and Ines Miyares (2002), ‘(Re)producing Salvadoran transnational geographies’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92 (1), 125–44. Barnett, Clive (2005), ‘Ways of relating: Hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness’, Progress in Human Geography, 29 (1), 5–21. Bataille, Georges (1988), Inner Experience, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1982), The Space of Literature, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1992), The Step/Not Beyond, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1995), The Writing of the Disaster, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1997), Awaiting Oblivion, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, Maurice (2003), The Infinite Conversation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boccagni, Paolo (2012), ‘Rethinking transnational studies: Transnational ties and the transnationalism of everyday life’, European Journal of Social Theory, 15 (1) 117–32. Braidotti, Rosi (2011), Nomadic Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Bruns, Gerald (1997), Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Búriková, Zuzana and Daniel Miller (2010), Au Pair, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  73

Butler, Judith (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Çağlar, Ayse (2018), ‘Chronotopes of migration scholarship: Challenges of contemporaneity and historical conjuncture’, in Pauline Barber and Winnie Lem (eds), Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21–42. Carling, Jørgen and Francis L. Collins (2018), ‘Aspiration, desire and drivers of migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (6), 909–26. Carter-White, Richard (2009), ‘Auschwitz, ethics and testimony: Exposure to the disaster’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27 (4), 682–99. Cartwright, Lisa (2003), ‘Photographs of “waiting children”: The transnational adoption market’, Social Text, 21 (1), 83–109. Cassarino, Jean-Pierre (2004), ‘Theorising return migration: The conceptual approach to return migrants revisited’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 6 (2), 253–79. Castañeda, Ernesto (2012), ‘Living in limbo: Transnational households, remittances and development’, International Migration, 51, 13–35. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2004), ‘Where is the now?’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 458–62. Chivoiu, Oana (2018), ‘Mothers without frontiers and their affective maps in The Flower Bridge by Thomas Ciulei and Code Unknown by Michael Haneke’, in Catalina Florescu and Sheng-mei Ma (eds), Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 23–40. Clausen, John (1993), American Lives: Looking Back at the Children of the Great Depression, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clayton, Sue (2019), ‘Narrating the young migrant journey’, in Sue Clayton, Anna Gupta and Katie Willis (eds), Unaccompanied Young Migrants: Identity, Care and Justice, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 115–34. Coe, Cati (2014), The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Francis L. and Sergei Shubin (2015), ‘Migrant times beyond the life course: The temporalities of foreign English teachers in South Korea’, Geoforum, 62, 96–104. Collins, Francis L. and Sergei Shubin (2017), ‘The temporal complexity of international student mobilities’, in Elizabeth Mavroudi, Anastasia Christou and Ben Page (eds), Timespace and International Migration, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 17–32. Conlon, Deirdre (2011), ‘Waiting: Feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility’, Gender, Place and Culture, 18 (3), 353–60. Csordas, Thomas (2009), ‘Introduction: Modalities of transnational transcendence’, in Thomas Csordas (ed.), Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 1–30. Cwerner, Saulo B. (2001), ‘The times of migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27 (1), 7–36. D’Andrea, Anthony (2004), ‘Global nomads: Techno and New Age as transnational countercultures in Ibiza and Goa’, in Graham St. John (ed.), Rave Culture and Religion, London: Routledge, pp. 236–55. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2016), Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1995), The Gift of Death, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, Brent H. (2000), ‘Unfinished migrations’, African Studies Review, 43 (1), 47–68. Elder, Glen (1994), ‘Time, human agency, and social change: Perspectives on the life-course’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 57, 4–15. Ellis, Burcu A. (2017), ‘Stuck in a vicious cycle? Career aspirations and entrapment among Turkish au pairs in the United States’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 18, 847–62.

74  Handbook on transnationalism

Emirbayer, Mustafa and Ann Mische (1998), ‘What is agency?’, American Journal of Sociology, 103 (4), 962–1023. Fabian, Johannes (1983), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Faist, Thomas (1998), ‘Transnational social spaces out of international migration: Evolution, significance, and future prospects’, Archives of European Sociology, 39 (2), 213–47. Fanon, Frantz (1952), Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz (2004), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. Featherstone, David, Richard Phillips and Johanna Waters (2007), ‘Introduction: Spatialities of transnational networks’, Global Networks, 7 (4), 383–91. Finkin, Jordan (2012), ‘The consolation of sadness’, in Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka and Simon Neuberg (eds), Yiddish Studies Today, Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, pp. 91–108. Foroutan, Naika (2019), ‘The post-migrant paradigm’, in Jan-Johanthan Bock and Sharon Macdonald (eds), Refugees Welcome? Difference and Diversity in a Changing Germany, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 142–70. Fynsk, Chris (2013), Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing, New York: Fordham University Press. Glick Schiller, Nina (2018), ‘Theorising transnational migration in our times: A multiscalar temporal perspective’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8 (4), 201–12. Grewal, Inderpal (2005), Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gutman, Yifat, Amy Sodary and Adam Brown (2010), ‘Memory and the future: Why a change of focus is necessary’, in Yifat Gutman, Adam Brown and Amy Sodary (eds) Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–14. Hägerstrand, Torsten (1970), ‘What about people in regional science?’, Papers of the Regional Science Association, 24, 7–21. Hannerz, Ulf (2002), ‘Flows, boundaries and hybrids: Keywords in transnational anthropology’. Working paper WPTC-2K-02. University of Oxford. Transnational Communities Programme. Hartman, Saidiya (1997), Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David (1989), The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, David (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell. Hill, Leslie (2012), Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, London: Continuum. Hom, Andrew (2018), ‘Timing is everything: Toward a better understanding of time and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 62, 69–79. Hoy, David (2009), The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jasso, Guillermina (2004), ‘Migration, human development and life course’, in Jaylan Mortimer and Michael Shanahan (eds), Handbook of the Life Course, New York: Springer, pp. 331–64. Jeffrey, Craig (2008), ‘Waiting’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26, 954–8. Kaplan, Karen (1987), ‘Deterritorialization: The rewriting of home and exile in western feminist discourse’, Cultural Critique, 6, 187–98. Kelly, Philip and Tom Lusis (2006), ‘Migration and the transnational habitus: Evidence from Canada and the Philippines’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (5), 831–47. Khagram, Sanjeev and Peggy Levitt (2008), ‘Constructing transnational studies’, in Ludger Pries (ed.), Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-Link of Organisations, London: Routledge, pp. 21–39.

Transnationalism and time: beyond the self, unity and relation  75

Kilkey, Majella, Ania Plomien and Diane Perrons (2014), ‘Migrant men’s fathering narratives, practices and projects in national and transnational spaces: Recent Polish male migrants to London’, International Migration, 52 (1), 178–91. Kroeber, Alfred (1952), The Nature of Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lee, Yong-Sook and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2004), ‘Introduction: Globalisation and the politics of forgetting’, Urban Studies, 41 (12), 2295–301. Levitt, Peggy (2004), ‘Redefining the boundaries of belonging: The institutional character of transnational religious life’, Sociology of Religion, 65 (1), 1–18. Libertson, Joseph (1982), Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Malpas, Jeff (2012), ‘Putting space in place: Philosophical topography and relational geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30 (2), 226–42. May, Jon and Nigel Thrift (eds) (2001), TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, London: Routledge. McNay, Lois (2000), Gender and Agency, Cambridge: Polity Press. Muñoz, José (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press. Osondu, Epaphras (2010), Voice of America, London: Granta. Oxford Dictionary of English (2010), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pedersen, Duncan (2015), ‘Rethinking trauma as a global challenge’, in Meryam Schouler-Ocak (ed.), Trauma and Migration, Berlin: Springer, pp. 9–32. Philo, Chris (2017), ‘Squeezing, bleaching, and the victims’ fate: Wounds, geography, poetry, micrology’, GeoHumanities, 3 (1), 20–40. Pordié, Laurent (2013), ‘Spaces of Connectivity, Shifting Temporality: Enquiries in Transnational Health’, European Journal of Transnational Studies, 5 (1), 6–26. Radcliffe, Sarah A. (2017), ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42, 329–33. Ricoeur, Paul (1992), Oneself as Another, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, Shanthi (2015), ‘The temporalities of international migration: Implications for ethnographic research’, in Stephen Castles, Derya Ozkul and Magdalena Cubas (eds), Social Transformation and Migration, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 45–60. Sarat, Leah (2013), Fire in the Canyon: Religion, Migration, and the Mexican Dream, New York: New York University Press. Sassen, Saskia (2000), ‘Spatialities and temporalities of the global: Elements for a theorization’, Public Culture, 12 (1), 215–32. Schwarcz, Vera (1998), Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shubin, Sergei (2011), ‘Living on the move: Mobility, religion and exclusion of Eastern European migrants in rural Scotland’, Population, Space and Place, 18 (5), 615–27. Shubin, Sergei (2012), ‘The church and mobility: Dealing with the exclusion of Eastern European migrants in rural Scotland’, Rural Theology, 10 (1), 9–26. Shubin, Sergei (2015), ‘Migration timespaces: A Heideggerian approach to understanding the mobile being of Eastern Europeans in Scotland’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40, 350–361. Shubin, Sergei (2016), ‘Critical perspectives on histories of “madness” and migration’, in Marjory Harper (ed.), The Past and Present of Migration and Mental Health, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37–58. Shubin, Sergei (2020), ‘Evaluating the process of cross‐European migration: Beyond cultural capital’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (4), 802–16. Shubin, Sergei and Tanjil Sowgat (2019), ‘Contested experiences and potential justice at the limit of the law for poor urban children in Bangladesh’, Children’s Geographies, 13, 1–13.

76  Handbook on transnationalism

Sigvardsdotter, Erika (2013), ‘Presenting absent bodies: Undocumented persons coping and resisting in Sweden’, Cultural Geographies, 20 (4), 523–39. Solomon, Ty (2014), ‘Time and subjectivity in world politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 58 (4), 671–81. Spivak, Gayatri (1992), ‘Teaching for the times’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 25, 3–22. Turnbull, Sarah (2015), ‘“Stuck in the middle”: Waiting and uncertainty in immigration detention’, Time and Society, 25 (1), 61–79. Valles, Eric T. (2013), ‘Speaking migrant tongues in Edwin Thumboo’s poetry’, Asiatic, 7 (2), 230–244. Vertovec, Steven (2009), Transnationalism: Key Ideas, New York: Routledge. Waters, Johanna (2011), ‘Time and transnationalism: A longitudinal study of immigration, endurance and settlement in Canada’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (7), 1119–35. Wilding, Raelene and Loretta Baldassar (2009), ‘Transnational family–work balance: Experiences of Australian migrants caring for ageing parents and young children across distance and borders’, Journal of Family Studies, 15, 177–87. Wingens, Matthias, Michael Windzio, Helga de Valk and Can Aybek (eds) (2011), A Life-Course Perspective on Migration and Integration, Dordrecht: Springer. Zhou, Yanqiu R. (2015), ‘Time, space and care: Rethinking transnational care from a temporal perspective’, Time and Society, 24 (2), 163–82.

5. Transnational ageing and the later life course Vincent Horn

When transnationalism emerged in the 1990s as an alternative approach to the study of contemporary migration (Glick Schiller et al. 1992), its relationship to ageing and the later life course was not of particular scholarly concern. With a few exceptions (Da 2003; Lamb 2002; Treas 2008), most research focused on relatively young labour migrants and/or their children in the country of origin. Nearly three decades later, we find a rapidly growing literature focusing on older people within diverse transnational contexts and configurations. In the last few years, several monographs (e.g. Hunter 2018; Yarris 2017), edited books (e.g. Dossa and Coe 2017; Horn and Schweppe 2016; Karl and Torres 2016; Walsh and Näre 2016), special issues (e.g. Horn and Schweppe 2017; Näre et al. 2017; Nedelcu and Wyss 2019) and journal articles in the intersecting fields of ageing, transnational family and migration studies have been published. Altogether, this literature indicates that transnational ageing and the later life course are linked in many ways. The literature on transnational ageing reveals how transnational involvement shapes older people’s everyday routines and practices, life experiences, identity formation, individual and family histories and relationships (Burholt 2004; Gustafson 2008; Zontini 2015). It shows how migration, labour market and welfare regimes influence older people’s behaviours, decision-making and transnational family arrangements (Ariza 2014; Lunt 2009; Montes de Oca et al. 2013). Moreover, it explores how global politics, welfare state development and ideologies of ageing relate to older people’s life (Braedley et al. 2021; McDaniel and Um 2016). Against this backdrop, transnational ageing has emerged as the conceptual and methodological framework for research on the intertwining of transnational processes and older people’s lives (Horn and Schweppe 2016). Transnational ageing not only asks whether older people are involved in transnational processes, it also explores the relevance of these processes for individual ageing experiences, the transformation of relationships, identity formation, self-conceptualisations, health etc. As with earlier stages in the life course, transnational involvement in old age can have multiple types and intensities. It comprises tangible cross-border activities such as travels, the sending of gifts and monetary transfers as well as abstract types of border crossing such as nostalgia, longing for distant kin and places or imagined co-presence (Baldassar 2008; Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume; Zontini 2015). In addition, transnational involvement in old age can be a prolongation of transnational ties and practices in younger years or a purely new experience at an advanced age. It can be more or less sporadic or routinised, durable or intense 77

78  Handbook on transnationalism

across the life cycle. In other words, rather than a constant mode of being, transnational ageing can become relevant during some phases of the life course while being less relevant during others (Kobayashi and Preston 2007). Similarly, the modes of older people’s transnational interaction can vary over time and/or in accordance with their personal and transnational families’ needs and capacities. Finally, differentiation should be made between transnational ageing as a lifestyle option (voluntary) and transnational ageing as the undesired consequence of spatially ruptured social formations (involuntary) (Horn 2021). This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section introduces transnational ageing as a field of research and provides an overview of concepts, types and central findings on older people’s transnational involvement. The second section focuses on potential implications of transnational involvement on older people’s health and well-being. The third section looks at the invisibility and lack of acknowledgement of older people’s role and function within transnational contexts. Avenues for new research are mentioned in view of recent developments such as deportation and forced migration processes. Methodologically, the chapter is based on the review and analysis of literature on transnational ageing phenomena. In a first step, studies have been broadly clustered in different strands of research. In a second step, the central themes and findings have been identified and analysed across the strands of research previously classified.

TRANSNATIONAL AGEING Transnational ageing as a field of research has evolved in different, partly overlapping areas of study more or less simultaneously (Horn and Schweppe 2016). A first strand of literature that can be identified emerged in research on transnational ties and practices of ageing migrants in industrialised countries. Whilst most of this research is on migrants who have spent a substantial part of their lives abroad, another research strand has emerged in which more attention is given to those who migrated or became mobile at an advanced age (Escrivá and Skinner 2006; King and Lulle 2017). These older people move abroad for family and/or economic reasons while keeping in contact with family and friends in their earlier communities (Lamb 2002; Treas and Mazumdar 2004). However, older people do not necessarily have to be mobile in order to be involved in or affected by transnational processes. A third strand of research thus emerged on older people experiencing the emigration of close kin (Gedvilaitė-Kordušienė 2019; Timmerman et al. 2018; Zimmer et al. 2014). Research in this strand tends to differentiate between those ‘left behind’ and those cared by and caring for local and transnational family members (Díaz-Gorfinkiel and Escrivá 2012; King and Vullnetari 2006; Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). Finally, a fourth research strand emerged in the field of international retirement migration, also referred to as lifestyle migration (Benson and O’Reilly 2009). Studies in this field show how older people develop transnational lifestyles, characterised by periodic changes of residence, participation in transnational socio-cultural and

Transnational ageing and the later life course  79

political activities and the development of transnational identities (Böcker and Balkir 2016; Gustafson 2008). Within the different research strands of transnational ageing research, older people have been conceptualised in numerous ways. This holds especially true for adult migrants’ parents in the country of origin. On the one hand, they have been called ‘flying grandmothers’ (Goulbourne and Chamberlain 2001), ‘zero generation’ (Nedelcu 2009), ‘transnational travellers’ (Deneva 2012), ‘transnational older adults’ (Treas 2008) or ‘late-in-life family joiners’ (Horn 2019). On the other hand, they have been called ‘orphan pensioners’ (King and Vullnetari 2006) or ‘elderly parents left behind’ (Antman 2010). The first set of conceptualisations refers to older people’s role as transnational parents and grandparents who contribute to the functioning and well-being of their families. They are often mobile and incorporate new information and communication technologies (ICTs) into their everyday lives in order to stay in contact with emigrated kin (Baldassar et al. 2016; Baldassar and Wilding 2020; Nedelcu 2017). In contrast, the second set of conceptualisations refers to the negative consequences of children’s emigration on the well-being of older people, such as feelings of loss and loneliness or economic dependencies (Sun 2017; Vullnetari and King 2008). These older people tend to stay put in the adult migrants’ country of origin and are likely to be disappointed with the quantity and quality of support (e.g. economic, emotional) received from their children. Scholars revealed that different types exist among older people of the same population. In their study on older Mexican people, Montes de Oca et al. (2009) differentiate between those who never migrate, those who move back-and-forth between Mexico and the United States and those who age in the United States. Similarly, Horn and Schweppe (2016) differentiate between those staying behind, those travelling back-and-forth and those joining their emigrated children abroad. However, rather than staying within fixed categories, older people may take on different roles and positions within transnational families across the later life course. These changes are revealed by King et al. (2014), who identify a three-stage process of older people within Albanian transnational families. In a first stage, older people are left behind by adult migrant children, suffer from loss but may receive remittances, which help to improve their material well-being. In a second stage, older people reunite with their children and grandchildren abroad, enjoy proximity while at the same time losing independence and their familiar social environment. In a third stage, older people either have returned or spend substantial parts of the year in Albania, balancing their desires to spend time with their grandchildren and to maintain social contacts in their earlier communities. In view of this, it is important to understand ageing in transnational contexts as a process during which older people can be involved in different family constellations and interactions and be subject to different jurisdictions and social security systems. Ley and Kobayashi (2005) have shown how throughout their life course older people strategically switch between different countries in order to take advantage of the benefits of each location. However, older people’s scope of action is significantly structured by their personal and families’ resources (e.g. financial means, housing,

80  Handbook on transnationalism

nationality) and their positions vis-à-vis national migration, labour market and welfare state regimes (Baldassar and Merla 2014; Horn 2019). Thus, whether or not older people become mobile depends on global and regional mobility regimes (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013) which usually favour the mobility of people from countries in the Global North whilst restricting the mobility of people from countries in the Global South. Similarly, whether older migrants return to their country of origin, follow their children overseas or stay is influenced by the portability of pensions and access to health care in the new destination (Lunt 2009). The transnational involvement of older people is diverse and often linked to specific events in their life course or family life cycle. Several studies show how the birth of grandchildren abroad triggers the cross-border mobility of older people staying behind in the adult migrants’ country of origin (Lie 2010; Ramos and Martins 2019). Whilst some travel back-and-forth, others permanently join their emigrated children abroad. Treas and Mazumdar (2004) described the principal reasons for older family members joining their children in the United States as follows: ‘Children encourage ageing parents to come here to help out with their children, to share the benefits of life in the US, or to be nearby so that they can receive care’ (Treas and Mazumdar 2004, p. 244). Although pulled to another country, these older people maintain multiple ties with their country of origin while simultaneously transferring their cultural and social capital (e.g. language, traditions, and cuisine) to their grandchildren in their new country of residence, hence becoming ‘truly transnational’ (Treas 2008, p. 472). By its very nature, transnational travelling implies absence and presence at the same time. Consequently, it temporarily uproots older persons from local interaction and therefore from fulfilling family duties and commitments in the country of origin (Baldassar and Merla 2014). Through their absence, older people may challenge cultural norms of intergenerational reciprocity, for example, when women in their 50s and 60s are expected to dedicate themselves to the care of their husbands’ frail and elderly parents while at the same time feeling the desire or obligation to provide care to their grandchildren abroad. In these situations, older people have to negotiate and carefully balance local and transnational family relationships and responsibilities. ‘Often, these people are trying to juggle their obligations toward parents and grandchildren at once. These ageing people are the epitome of transnational living, sometimes moving up to five times per year, spending every two months in a different location, in their attempts to fulfil various care obligations’ (Deneva 2012, p. 106). Another type of childcare arrangement (not exclusively) in transnational families involving older people in the adult migrants’ country of origin is foster care. In these arrangements, older people slip into the role of mother and/or father surrogates to fill the gap left by the emigrated parent(s) (Levitt 2001; Romero 1997). In her study on Honduran transnational families, Schmalzbauer (2004) revealed that grandmothers in particular could help children to cope and develop positive feelings towards their physically absent parents. Nevertheless, studies examining the role of grandparents as care providers in transnational families find that children in the care of grandparents fare worse than those being cared for by at least one parent (Jia and Tian 2010).

Transnational ageing and the later life course  81

Indeed, foster care arrangements entail potential for tensions between the various actors involved (children, grandparents, parents abroad), including differences about education styles, food preferences, intergenerational relationships etc. (Bernhard et al. 2006; Pribilsky 2016; Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). Similarly, research on ageing migrants shows how older people’s lives are linked with the lives of others across their life course. Literature in this field points to a variety of transnational ties and practices of ageing migrants, including the sending of remittances or frequent visits to their earlier communities (Burholt 2004; Fokkema et al. 2016; Hunter 2018). It shows that the children’s place(s) of residence has a particular bearing on the development of transnational mobility patterns in old age (Baykara-Krumme 2013; Bolzman et al. 2016). Even when no longer able to travel, ageing migrants still long for past places and transnational social ties (Mellingen Bjerke 2017). Drawing on Levitt and Glick Schiller’s (2004) differentiation between the concepts of ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’, Zontini (2015) found that although transnational practices (‘ways of being’) may vanish at a higher age (e.g., because of physical impairments), the same does not apply to identities and sense of self (‘ways of belonging’). Still, transnational ties and practices should not be seen as a general pattern among ageing migrants, as shown by the few quantitative studies in this field (Horn 2019; Schunck 2011). As with the case of older people staying behind in the adult migrants’ country of origin, cross-border mobility of ageing migrants tends to be closely linked to moral economies about life-long obligations towards families and communities. Thus, although seemingly combining the ‘best of two worlds’, not all ageing migrants ‘have a relaxed time during their stays in the home country’ (Fokkema et al. 2016, p. 150). In particular, migrant women’s visits to the country of origin often seem to be motivated by family and community commitments such as childcare, household chores or the attendance of meaningful events like weddings or funerals. Felt obligations and unmet expectations on the part of the ageing migrants and their significant others in the country of origin are core ingredients of experiencing what researchers have referred to as an ambivalent return (Pustułka and Ślusarczyk 2016). Anticipation can turn into disappointment when alienation characterises everyday social interaction after longer periods of spatial separation. At the same time, geographic distance from grandchildren and the (everyday) demands of care obligations may ‘serve to enhance relationships and increase the grandparents’ ability to provide other forms of help. In other words, it may give them a better sense of control over the intensity and forms of grandparental support’ (Repetti and Calasanti 2019, p. 321). Hence, older people in transnational family contexts may experience enhanced independence and a higher quality in relationships due to a more facultative way of grandparental support. Transnational interactions mediated by ICTs play an important role in this. Scholars have emphasised that ICTs should not be seen as an (inadequate) substitute of physical co-presence but as a different way of maintaining and creating social relationships (Baldassar 2016; Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). A sense of togetherness can be created through ‘ordinary co-presence’ (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016), a term used to describe

82  Handbook on transnationalism

the ritualised everyday use of ICTs in transnational families. Madianou and Miller (2012) coined the concept of polymedia environments to refer to the omnipresence of ICTs and the various modalities of staying in virtual contact available. Nevertheless, there are several limits to ICT-based communication, such as the inability to intervene quickly in risk situations or the lack of access to a proper Internet connection (Brandhorst 2017; Marchetti-Mercer 2017). In addition, ICT-based communication entails a heightened risk of conflicts and misunderstandings. While facilitating a space for intergenerational cohesion, ICTs ‘can also exacerbate the emotional distance between generational groups as well as generational distance’ (Tarrant 2015, p. 295). Older persons who are not as familiar with the use of ICTs may feel excluded or dependent on the younger family members’ willingness to help them participate, and in so doing creating new dependencies. ICT-based communication can also be the source of new expectations of virtual connectedness and intergenerational solidarity, generating constraints and frictions as well as the necessity to justify unavailability (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016). Finally, physical and cognitive impairments due to old age can hamper older persons’ capacity to participate and may ultimately lead to their (involuntary) withdrawal from virtual communication (Heikkinen and Lumme-Sandt 2013). Still, research about the implications of ICT-based and other types of transnational interactions on older people’s well-being are still scarce and the findings of the few existing studies equivocal.

IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTH AND WELL-BEING Thus far, empirical evidence from quantitative studies on the implications of the adult children’s emigration on older persons’ well-being is mixed. Analysing data from two Mexican surveys, Antman (2010) and Yahirun and Arenas (2018) found that older persons with adult children who migrated to the United States reported poorer psychological well-being compared to their counterparts with all children living in Mexico. However, while these authors found significant results for loneliness and sadness, they did not find any for overall depressive syndrome, wishes to die, or anxiety. Yahirun and Arenas (2018, p. 986) therefore conclude that the emigration of children ‘triggers very specific emotions’ for older people staying behind. Negative outcomes of adult children’s emigration were also found by Evandrou et al. (2017) who found a higher risk of chronic illnesses among older Chinese with at least one adult migrant son or daughter. By contrast, Kuhn et al. (2011) found a positive effect of children’s migration on the health of older Indonesians, measured by activities of daily living, self-reported health and mortality. Finally, exploring data from a sample of 550 older persons in China, Guo et al. (2018) did not find a significant statistical relationship between family type (e.g. non-migrant, transnational) and older people’s well-being measured in terms of depression and life satisfaction. Related to this is the question of how older people cope with the sudden and prolonged absence of close family members. Horn (2019) revealed how older Peruvians engaged in religious practices and cross-border mobility to cope with loss and derive

Transnational ageing and the later life course  83

satisfaction from their ability to comply (at least temporarily) with their culturally ascribed role as present mothers and grandmothers. However, the transnational family does not always offer a context to cope with the disruption of close family ties. Children, for example, may not be able or willing to stay in contact, transnational interactions may be insufficient to overcome grief, or emotional bonds can fade over time. Conkova et al. (2018) show how older people in these situations develop a set of coping mechanisms, including strengthening ties with neighbours and lowering their expectations about the relationship with their children abroad. Similarly, Marchetti-Mercer (2012) showed that South African older people found it helpful to establish relationships with other people to fill the gap left by the emigration of close family members. In particular, contact with people in a similar situation helped to create a ‘sense of universality’ and mutual support (Marchetti-Mercer 2012, p. 384), which was perceived as comforting. How older people in migrant sending countries experience ageing within transnational families is influenced by their perception of being cared for by emigrated kin. There is ample empirical evidence that intergenerational solidarity and obligations, rather than being dissolved, undergo transformation processes in transnational contexts (Baldassar et al. 2007; Baldock 2000). Studies in this field show how adult migrant children provide and/or organise different forms of care for ageing parents across national borders and large geographic distances. Partly driven by the guilt of having left their parents behind, adult migrant children engage in expensive travels (Baldassar 2015) and provide financial, practical and emotional support (Krzyzowski and Mucha 2014). In her ethnographic study of older Indians in transnational families, Ahlin (2018) found that emotional support through ICTs helped to buffer feelings of loss and improve intergenerational dynamics and relationships. Another important factor is the involvement of local family members in the provision of care (Díaz Gorfinkiel and Escrivá 2012; Kaiser-Grolimund 2018). Besides transnational social ties and practices, the consumption of health care across borders is closely related to the well-being of older people within transnational contexts. Older Chinese migrants in New Zealand, for instance, have been shown to travel to China for health checks, dental services, and cancer treatments or to consume traditional Chinese medicine (Li and Chong 2012). Similarly, Sun (2014) reveals how older Taiwanese migrants try to maintain their health and well‐being by accessing the benefits of public health care available in their country of origin rather than in the USA. However, transnational health care strategies can be a risk, for example, if medications and treatments in different countries are not coordinated. Other studies show that older migrants opt against definite return in order to maintain access to health care services in the country of residence due to their high quality (De Coulon and Wolff 2010; Hunter 2018). According to survey data on Southern European older migrants in Switzerland, the quality of health services is the second most important reason not to return after retirement (the first is living close to children and grandchildren) (Bolzman et al. 2016). Recently, the relationship between transnational ties and practices and the mental well-being of older migrants has come into focus. Klok et al. (2017) measured the

84  Handbook on transnationalism

association between loneliness and transnational belonging among older migrants in the Netherlands, finding that a sense of transnational belonging is associated with more loneliness. Similarly, Park et al. (2019) studied loneliness and social isolation among older Asian migrants in New Zealand. In their qualitative study, they conclude that social isolation and loneliness in this group are closely related to their transnational family context: ‘it is fair to conclude that ageing in a foreign land involves a range of challenges, among which are social isolation and loneliness mainly caused by the lack of family contact or support in a transnational family setting’ (Park et al. 2019, p. 746). In a phenomenological study on older lifestyle migrants in East Asia, Stones and colleagues (2019, p. 51) found that transnational involvements functioned as a protection mechanism ‘against isolation and anomie’ and that it was often women who ‘did the lion’s share of the work of actively sustaining connections between the two worlds’. This echoes findings from research on age, gender and social networks according to which older women tend to have larger networks and higher levels of communication compared to their male counterparts (Fischer and Beresford 2014; McDonald and Mair 2010). However, there is still very little knowledge about the role of different types and intensities of transnational ties and practices in the well-being of older people within transnational families. Different operationalisations of well-being make it difficult to compare findings and draw general conclusions about the bearing transnational ties and practices have on older people’s quality of life (Horn 2021). Cross-sectional data also do not allow identifying cause–effect relationships. Differently put, although the relationship between two or more variables is statistically significant, the direction of the relationship remains unclear. Thus, we know that more intense transnational ties are positively associated with poorer well-being, but we do not know if this is because people with poorer well-being are more likely to engage in transnational ties more intensely or vice versa. In addition, the focus on specific populations (e.g. older Chinese) at specific points in time do not allow extrapolations to older people within transnational contexts in general.

INVISIBILITIES AND INQUIRIES Although transnational processes are both shaped by and affect older people’s lives, older people’s contribution to the functioning of transnational families and economic growth have not been considered at the political level. Instead, older people from countries in the Global South are primarily seen as a burden and not as a resource to the welfare state. In a recent article, Braedley et al. (2021) analysed how Canada’s migration regime affects the possibilities of migrants reuniting temporarily or permanently with their parents. They show that while relatively open to young and qualified labour migrants, the Canadian migration regime has various mechanisms to impede older people from entering the country. Drawing on the concept of bordering, the authors single out several practices used to keep the scope of parent and grandparent migration low. Among these are annual targets, sponsorship requirements or lengthy

Transnational ageing and the later life course  85

processing times. Similar practices have been found by Escrivá (2014) with regard to family reunification procedures and outcomes in Spain. According to her study, reunification of Peruvian and Moroccan migrants with older relatives has often been denied ‘by law or by discretional procedure in applications resolution’ (Escrivá 2014, p. 163). While younger and qualified migrants are supposed to stabilise the welfare systems of ageing societies, older people are seen as threat to this policy goal due to presumed needs for health care and public support. The fact that older people often play an important role for the labour market participation and reproduction of their adult migrant children remains largely invisible. However, migration regimes are not static but rather continuously contested (e.g. by migrant practices) and re-negotiated in discursive arenas at the local as well as national and supranational levels. Only a few years ago, Spain was the principal advocate of allowing Peruvian and Colombian citizens to enter the Schengen zone for 90 days without having to apply for a visa (Horn 2019). Although the background of this initiative and its success was primarily economic, namely the 2012 Free Trade Agreement between the European Union and Peru and Colombia, it also facilitated transnational family life, enabling migrants and their family members to share periods of physical co-presence. At the same time, previously rather ‘porous borders’ (Lim 2017) such as between Mexico and the United States have increasingly been tightened and legal pathways for the deportation of undocumented migrants have been shortened (Prieto 2018). Similarly, in various European countries, nationalist right wing parties that seek to push anti-immigration policies have risen in popularity during the last decade. Older people and their transnational families are affected by these developments in manifold ways. Those residing in the United States may experience the deportation of younger family members (Capiello and Núñez 2018). In these situations, they not only have to cope with the emotional and psychological consequences of the sudden absence of a close relative, they also often lose a vital source of support while simultaneously becoming responsible for grandchildren ‘left behind’. Finally, they may get deported themselves. In either case, deportation leads to the involuntary (re-)transnationalisation of previously proximate family relationships with all its implications for everyday life (Berger Cardoso et al. 2018). In addition, older people in the country of origin are affected by these processes. After years of spatial separation, they may experience the forced return of family members to their households (Montes de Oca 2008). Thus far, scholars have paid attention primarily to the impact of migration status, detention and deportation on parents and their minor children (Dreby 2015; Menjívar and Abrego 2012). By contrast, the implications of these cross-border processes on older people’s lives in both deporting and receiving countries have not yet been fully explored. Similarly, the study of older people’s transnational ties and practices within the context of forced displacement is still a lacuna in the multifaceted landscape of transnational ageing research. Refugee studies oftentimes focus on younger people as they represent the majority of people leaving their countries because of armed conflicts, natural disasters etc. However, most of the younger people have older parents and

86  Handbook on transnationalism

grandparents in their country of origin or in camps in neighbouring countries. Older people also may seek protection in other countries and face the challenge of rebuilding their lives in a new social environment. For example, more than 200,000 or 13 per cent of the people seeking protection in Germany by the end of 2017 had already reached the age of 50 (Statistisches Bundesamt 2019, own calculations). In South America, the United Nations report that increasingly, older people are among the Venezuelans fleeing the humanitarian and political crisis in their country (UNHCR 2018). The study of transnational dimensions and their relevance to the lives of older people under the difficult conditions of forced displacement is therefore another field of inquiry in transnational ageing research.

CONCLUSION Transnational ageing has been proposed as a lens to study older people’s lives in contexts no longer limited to a single national territory (Horn et al. 2013). Transnational ageing does not simply mean a geographic expansion of one’s life in old age. It means to live more or less simultaneously in two (or more) overlapping worlds with their own legislations, cultural values, social practices and systems of intergenerational reciprocity (Lamb 2002). Older people within transnational contexts have to bridge and negotiate these different and often incongruent legal, cultural and social frames of reference. Both bridging and negotiating can place high demands for adaption and coping on older people who have to ‘reconnect what seemingly falls apart’ (Horn and Schweppe 2016, p. 5). However, older people are not just passive actors who struggle to cope with ruptures caused by spatial separation from relatives and friends. They actively engage in transnational family ties and practices and develop transnational lifestyles and/or identities. Older women in particular play a vital role as providers of care and support within transnational families. In fact, the gendered division of labour appears to remain largely intact with women shouldering the bulk of care and kin work in transnational family arrangements. From a life course perspective, transnational ageing can be understood as a process that links and affects the lives of older people and their significant others across time (Treas 2008). It draws our attention to how older people’s actions, choices and social relationships are influenced by life course events and stages in the transnational family life cycle (Baldassar and Merla 2014). In addition, a life course perspective points to the relevance of historical time and circumstances for the analysis of older people’s experiences and trajectories. In this regard, migration and mobility regimes as changing structures of opportunity have been shown to impact transnational family configurations and the role and status of older people within them. However, transnational involvement in old age has many facets and implications. It can be a blessing as well as a burden, a coping strategy as well as an integral part of a later life project to optimise resources in different national contexts. Regardless of its forms, motivations and outcomes, transnational ageing challenges notions of life in old age as an increasingly sedentary stage marked by local

Transnational ageing and the later life course  87

social relationships. In so doing, it questions assumptions about ageing in place and social networks in old age as well as about older people’s capacities to adapt and cope with changes in their social and cultural environments. Finally, it puts into question assumptions about proximity as indispensable for meaningful social relationships and distance as hampering the development and perpetuation of close and intimate ties, for example, between grandparents and their grandchildren born abroad (Nedelcu and Wyss 2019). Therefore, transnational ageing can add a layer of analysis to research on old age and critically revise established concepts in the interdisciplinary fields of ageing and family studies.

REFERENCES Ahlin, Tanja (2018), ‘Frequent callers: “Good care” with ICTs in Indian transnational families’, Medical Anthropology – Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 39 (1), 69–82. Antman, Francisca M. (2010), ‘Adult child migration and the health of elderly parents left behind in Mexico’, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 100, 205–8. Ariza, Marina (2014), ‘Care circulation, absence and affect in transnational families’, in Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla (eds), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge, pp. 94–114. Baldassar, Loretta (2008), ‘Missing kin and longing to be together: Emotions and the construction of co-presence in transnational relationships’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29 (3), 247–66. Baldassar, Loretta (2015), ‘Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in migration and transnational caregiving’, Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 81–9. Baldassar, Loretta (2016), ‘De-demonizing distance in mobile family lives: Co-presence, care circulation and polymedia as vibrant matter’, Global Networks, 16 (2), 145–63. Baldassar, Loretta, Cora Baldock and Raelene Wilding (2007), Families Caring Across Borders: Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldassar, Loretta and Laura Merla (eds) (2014), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge. Baldassar, Loretta, Mihaela Nedelcu, Laura Merla and Raelene Wilding (2016), ‘ICT-based co-presence in transnational families and communities: Challenging the premise of face-to-face proximity in sustaining relationships’, Global Networks, 16 (2), 133–44. Baldassar, Loretta and Raelene Wilding (2020), ‘Migration, aging, and digital kinning: The role of distant care support networks in experiences of aging well’, The Gerontologist, 60 (2), 313–21. Baldock, Cora Vellekoop (2000), ‘Migrants and their parents: Caregiving from a distance’, Journal of Family Issues, 21 (2), 205–24. Baykara-Krumme, Helen (2013), ‘Returning, staying, or both? Mobility patterns among elderly Turkish migrants after retirement’, Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal, 3 (1), 11–29. Benson, Michaela and Karen O’Reilly (2009), ‘Migration and the search for a better way of life: A critical exploration of lifestyle migration’, Sociological Review, 57 (4), 608–25. Berger Cardoso, Jodi, Erin R. Hamilton, Nestor Rodriguez, Karl Eschbach and Jacqueline Hagan (2018), ‘Deporting fathers: Involuntary transnational families and intent to remigrate among Salvadoran deportees’, International Migration Review, 50 (1), 197–230.

88  Handbook on transnationalism

Bernhard, Judith K., Patricia Landolt and Luin Goldring (2006), Transnational, Multi-local Motherhood: Experiences of Separation and Reunification among Latin American Families in Canada, CERIS Working Paper No. 40. Böcker, Anita and Canan Balkir (2016), ‘Maintaining dual residences to manage risks in later life: A comparison of two groups of older migrants’, in Vincent Horn and Cornelia Schweppe (eds), Transnational Aging: Current Insights and Future Challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 125–40. Bolzman, Claudio, Laure Kaeser and Etienne Christe (2016), ‘Transnational mobilities as a way of life among older migrants from Southern Europe’, Population, Space and Place, 23 (5), 1–13. Braedley, Susan, Karine Côté-Boucher and Anna Przednowek (2021), ‘Old and dangerous: Bordering older migrants’ mobilities, rejuvenating the post-welfare state’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 28 (1), 24–46. Brandhorst, Rosa M. (2017), ‘“A lo lejos”: Aging in place and transnational care in the case of transnational migration between Cuba and Germany’, Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal, 7 (1), 56–72. Burholt, Vanessa (2004), ‘Transnationalism, economic transfers and families’ ties: Inter-continental contacts of older Gujaratis, Punjabis and Sylhetis in Birmingham with families abroad’, Ethnic & Racial Studies, 27 (5), 800–829. Capiello, María I. and Eulimar Núñez (2018), ‘The invisible victims of deportation: Older adults who stay behind’, accessed 24 October 2019 at https://​www​.asageing​.org/​blog/​ invisible​-victims​-deportation​-older​-adults​-who​-stay​-behind. Conkova, Nina, Julie Vullnetari, Russell King and Tineke Fokkema (2018), ‘“Left like stones in the middle of the road”: Narratives of ageing alone and coping strategies in rural Albania and Bulgaria’, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 74 (8), 1492–500. Da, Wei Wei (2003), ‘Transnational grandparenting: Child care arrangements among migrants from the People’s Republic of China to Australia’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 4 (1), 79–103. De Coulon, Augustin and François-Charles Wolff (2010), ‘Location intentions of immigrants at retirement: Stay/return or go “back and forth”?’, Applied Economics, 42 (26), 3319–33. Deneva, Neda (2012), ‘Transnational aging carers: On transformation of kinship and citizenship in the context of migration among Bulgarian Muslims in Spain’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 19 (1), 105–28. Díaz Gorfinkiel, Magdalena and Ángeles Escrivá (2012), ‘Care of older people in migration contexts: Local and transnational arrangements between Peru and Spain’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 19 (1), 129–41. Dossa, Parin and Cati Coe (eds) (2017), Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dreby, Joanna (2015), ‘U.S. immigration policy and family separation: The consequences for children’s well-being’, Social Science & Medicine, 132, 245–51. Escrivá, Ángeles (2014), ‘Migrants coping with legality: The views and experiences of older Peruvians and Moroccans’, Journal of Spatial and Organizational Dynamics, 2 (2), 161–75. Escrivá, Ángeles and Emmeline Skinner (2006), ‘Moving to Spain at an advanced age’, Generation Review, 16 (2), 8–15. Evandrou, Maria, Jane Falkingham, Min Qin and Athina Vlachantoni (2017), ‘Children’s migration and chronic illness among older parents “left behind” in China’, SSM – Population Health, 3, 803–7. Fischer, Claude S. and Lauren Beresford (2014), ‘Changes in support networks in late middle age: The extension of gender and educational differences’, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 70, 123–31. Fokkema, Tineke, Eralba Cela and Yvonne Witter (2016), ‘Pendular migration of the older first generations in Europe: Misconceptions and nuances’, in Vincent Horn and Cornelia

Transnational ageing and the later life course  89

Schweppe (eds), Transnational Aging: Current Insights and Future Challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 141–59. Gedvilaitė-Kordušienė, Margarita (2019), ‘Norms and care relationships in transnational families: The case of elderly parents left behind in Lithuania’, Baltic Journal of European Studies, 5 (2), 90–107. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1992), ‘Towards a definition of transnationalism: Introductory remarks and research questions’, in Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc (eds), Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, New York: New York Academy of Sciences, pp. ix–xiv. Glick Schiller, Nina and Noel B. Salazar (2013), ‘Regimes of mobility across the globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (2), 183–200. Goulbourne, Harry and Mary Chamberlain (eds) (2001), Caribbean Families in the Trans-Atlantic World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Guo, Man, Liu Jinyu, Ling Xu, Weiyu Mao and Iris Chi (2018), ‘Intergenerational relationships and psychological well-being of Chinese older adults with migrant children: Does internal or international migration make a difference?’, Journal of Family Issues, 39 (3), 622–43. Gustafson, Per (2008), ‘Transnationalism in retirement migration: The case of North European retirees in Spain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31 (3), 451–75. Heikkinen, Sari J. and Kirsi Lumme-Sandt (2013), ‘Transnational connections of later-life migrants’, Journal of Aging Studies, 27 (2), 198–206. Horn, Vincent (2019), Aging Within Transnational Families: The Case of Older Peruvians, New York and London: Anthem Press. Horn, Vincent (2021), ‘Transnational aging and quality of life’, in Fermina Rojo-Pérez and Gloria Fernández-Mayoralas (eds), Active Ageing and Quality of Life: From Concepts to Applications, New York: Springer, pp. 185–200. Horn, Vincent and Cornelia Schweppe (eds) (2016), Transnational Aging: Current Insights and Future Challenges, New York: Routledge. Horn, Vincent and Cornelia Schweppe (2017), ‘Transnational aging: Toward a transnational perspective in old age research’, European Journal of Ageing, 14 (4), 335–9. Horn, Vincent, Cornelia Schweppe and Seong-gee Um (2013), ‘Transnational aging: A young field of research’, Transnational Social Review, 3 (1), 7–10. Hunter, Alistair (2018), Retirement Home? Ageing Migrant Workers in France and the Question of Return, IMISCOE Research Series, Cham: Springer. Jia, Zhaobao and Wenhua Tian (2010), ‘Loneliness of left-behind children: A cross-sectional survey in a sample of rural China’, Child: Care, Health and Development, 36 (6), 812–17. Kaiser-Grolimund, Andrea P. (2018), ‘Healthy ageing, middle-classness and transnational care between Tanzania and the United States’, in Azra Hromadžić and Monika Palmberger (eds), Care across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 32–54. Karl, Ute and Sandra Torres (eds) (2016), Ageing in Contexts of Migration, New York: Routledge. King, Russell, Eralba Cela, Tineke Fokkema and Julie Vullnetari (2014), ‘The migration and well-being of the Zero Generation: Transgenerational care, grandparenting and loneliness amongst Albanian older people’, Population, Place and Space, 20 (8), 728–38. King, Russell and Aija Lulle (2017), ‘Grandmothers migrating, working and caring: Latvian women between survival and self-realisation’, Population Horizons, 13 (2), 43–53. King, Russell and Julie Vullnetari (2006), ‘Orphan pensioners and migrating grandparents: The impact of mass migration on older people in rural Albania’, Ageing & Society, 26 (5), 783–816.

90  Handbook on transnationalism

Klok, Jolien, Theo G. van Tilburg, Bianca Suanet, Tineke Fokkema and Martijin Huisman (2017), ‘National and transnational belonging among Turkish and Moroccan older migrants in the Netherlands: Protective against loneliness?’, European Journal of Ageing, 14 (4), 353–63. Kobayashi, Audrey and Valerie Preston (2007), ‘Transnationalism through the life course: Hong Kong immigrants in Canada’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 48 (2), 151–67. Krzyzowski, Łukasz and Janusz Mucha (2014), ‘Transnational caregiving in turbulent times: Polish migrants in Iceland and their elderly parents in Poland’, International Sociology, 29 (1), 22–37. Kuhn, Randall S., Bethany Everett and Rachel Silvey (2011), ‘The effects of children’s migration on elderly kin’s health: A counterfactual approach’, Demography, 48 (1), 183–209. Lamb, Sarah (2002), ‘Intimacy in a transnational era: The remaking of aging among Indian Americans’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 11 (3), 299–330. Levitt, Peggy (2001), The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levitt, Peggy and Nina Glick Schiller (2004), ‘Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society’, International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002–39. Ley, David and Audrey Kobayashi (2005), ‘Back to Hong Kong: Return migration or transnational sojourn?’, Global Networks, 5, 111–27. Li, Wendy W. and Mark D. Chong (2012), ‘Transnationalism, social wellbeing and older Chinese migrants’, Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, 8 (1), 29–44. Lie, Mabel L.S. (2010), ‘Across the oceans: Childcare and grandparenting in UK Chinese and Bangladeshi households’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (9), 1425–43. Lim, Julian (2017), Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lunt, Neil (2009), ‘Older people within transnational families: The social policy implications’, International Journal of Social Welfare, 18 (3), 243–51. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller (2012), Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, New York: Routledge. Marchetti-Mercer, Maria C. (2012), ‘Those easily forgotten: The impact of emigration on those left behind’, Family Process, 51 (3), 376–90. Marchetti-Mercer, Maria C. (2017), ‘“The screen has such sharp edges to hug”: The relational consequences of emigration in transnational South African emigrant families’, Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal, 7 (1), 73–89. McDaniel, Susan A. and Seonggee Um (2016), ‘More than demand and demographic aging: Transnational aging, care, and care migration’, in Vincent Horn and Cornelia Schweppe (eds), Transnational Aging: Current Insights and Future Challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 217–28. McDonald, Steve and Christine A. Mair (2010), ‘Social capital across the life course: Age and gendered patterns of network resources’, Sociological Forum, 25 (2), 335–59. Mellingen Bjerke, Katrine (2017), ‘Bodily attachment to place: The case of elderly migrants in Norway’, Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal, 7 (3), 300–313. Menjívar, Cecilia and Leisy Abrego (2012), ‘Legal violence: Immigration law and the lives of Central American immigrants’, American Journal of Sociology, 117 (5), 1380–1421. Montes de Oca, Verónica (2008), Historias detenidas en el tiempo. El fenómeno migratorio desde la mirada de la vejez en Guanajuato, México: Gobierno de Guanajuato. Montes de Oca, Verónica, San J. García and Rogelia Sáenz (2013), ‘Transnational aging: Disparities among aging Mexican immigrants’, Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal, 3 (1), 65–81. Montes de Oca, Verónica, Ahtziri Molina Roldán and Rosaura Ávalos (2009), Migración, redes transnacionales y envejecimiento, México: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales-UNAM.

Transnational ageing and the later life course  91

Näre, Lena, Katie Walsh and Loretta Baldassar (2017), ‘Ageing in transnational contexts: Transforming everyday practices and identities in later life’, Identities, 24 (5), 515–23. Nedelcu, Mihaela (2009), ‘La “génération zéro”: du sédentaire à l’acteur circulant. Effets de mobilité sur la génération des parents des migrants roumains hautement qualifiés à Toronto à l’ère du numérique’, in Geneviève Cortes and Laurent Faret (eds), Les circulations transnationales. Lire les turbulences migratoires contemporaines, Paris: Armand Colin, pp. 187–98. Nedelcu, Mihaela (2017), ‘Transnational grandparenting in the digital age: Mediated co-presence and childcare in the case of Romanian migrants in Switzerland and Canada’, European Journal of Ageing, 14 (4), 375–83. Nedelcu, Mihaela and Malika Wyss (2016), ‘“Doing family” through ICT-mediated ordinary co-presence: Transnational communication practices of Romanian migrants in Switzerland’, Global Networks, 16 (2), 202–18. Nedelcu, Mihaela and Malika Wyss (2019), ‘Transnational grandparenting: An introduction’, Global Networks, 20 (2), 292–307. Park Hong-Jae, Tessa Morgan, Janine Wiles and Merryn Gott (2019), ‘Lonely ageing in a foreign land: Social isolation and loneliness among older Asian migrants in New Zealand’, Health and Social Care in the Community, 27 (3), 740–747. Pribilsky, Jason C. (2016), ‘Remaking the Yanga Kawsay: Andean elders, children, and domestic abuse in the transmigration logics of highland Ecuador’, in Vincent Horn and Cornelia Schweppe (eds), Transnational Aging: Current Insights and Future Challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 64–84. Prieto, Greg (2018), Immigrants under Threat: Risk and Resistance in Deportation Nation, New York: New York University Press. Pustułka, Paula and Magdalena Ślusarczyk (2016), ‘Cultivation, compensation and indulgence: Transnational short-term returns to Poland across three family generations’, Transnational Social Review – A Social Work Journal, 6 (1–2), 78–92. Ramos, Anne C. and Heidi R. Martins (2019), ‘First‐generation migrants become grandparents: How migration backgrounds affect intergenerational relationships’, Global Networks, 20 (2), 325–42. Repetti, Marion and Toni Calasanti (2019), ‘Retirement migration and transnational grandparental support: A Spanish case study’, Global Networks, 20 (2), 308–24. Romero, Mary (1997), ‘Who takes care of the maid’s children? Exploring the costs of domestic service’, in Hilde L. Nelson (ed.), Feminism and Families, New York: Routledge, pp. 151–69. Schmalzbauer, Leah (2004), ‘Searching for wages and mothering from afar: The case of Honduran transnational families’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 66 (5), 1317–31. Schunck, Reinhard (2011), ‘Immigrant integration, transnational activities and the life course’, in Matthias Winges, Michael Windzio, Helga de Valk and Can Aybek (eds), A Life- Course Perspective on Migration and Integration, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 259–82. Statistisches Bundesamt (2019), Schutzsuchende: Deutschland, Stichtag, Geschlecht/ Altersjahre/Familienstand/Ländergruppierungen/Staatsangehörigkeit, accessed 15 October 2019 at https://​www​.govdata​.de/​web/​guest/​suchen/​-/​details/​destatis​-service​-12521​-0101. Stones, Rob, Kate Botterill, Maggy Lee and Karen O’Reilly (2019), ‘One world is not enough: The structured phenomenology of lifestyle migrants in East Asia’, British Journal of Sociology, 70 (1), 44–69. Sun, Ken C.-Y. (2014), ‘Transnational healthcare seeking: How aging Taiwanese return migrants think about homeland public benefits’, Global Networks, 14 (4), 533–50. Sun, Ken C.-Y. (2017), ‘Negotiating transnational ambivalence: How ageing parents grapple with family separation across time’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 24 (5), 509–605.

92  Handbook on transnationalism

Tarrant, Anna (2015), ‘(Grand)paternal care practices and affective intergenerational encounters using Information Communication Technologies’, in Robert Vanderbeck and Nancy Worth (eds), Intergenerational Space, London: Routledge, pp. 286–99. Timmerman, Christiane, Joris Michielsen, Meia Walravens, Nevriye Acar and Lore van Praag (2018), ‘A migration project in retrospect: The case of the ageing Zero Generation in Emirdağ’, Social Inclusion, 6 (3), 260–269. Treas, Judith (2008), ‘Transnational older adults and their families’, Family Relations, 57 (4), 468–78. Treas, Judith and Shampa Mazumdar (2002), ‘Older people in America’s immigrant families: Dilemmas of dependence, integration, and isolation’, Journal of Aging Studies, 16 (3), 243­–58. UNHCR (2018), Venezuela Situation, accessed 23 October 2019 at https://​data2​.unhcr​.org/​en/​ documents/​details/​65016. Vullnetari, Julie and Russell King (2008), ‘“Does your granny eat grass?” On mass migration, care drain and the fate of older people in rural Albania’, Global Networks, 8 (2), 139–71. Walsh, Katie and Lena Näre (eds) (2016), Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age, New York and London: Routledge. Yahirun, Jenjira J. and Erika Arenas (2018), ‘Offspring migration and parents’ emotional and psychological well-being in Mexico’, Journal of Marriage & Family, 80 (4), 975–91. Yarris, Kristin E. (2017), Care Across Generations: Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational Families, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zimmer, Zachary, Codrina Rada and Catalin A. Stoica (2014), ‘Migration, location and provision of support to old-age-parents: The case of Romania’, Journal of Population Ageing, 7 (3), 161–84. Zontini, Elisabetta (2015), ‘Growing old in a transnational social field: Belonging, mobility and identity among Italian migrants’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38 (2), 326–41.

6. Transnationalism, affect and emotion Raelene Wilding and Loretta Baldassar

When first calling for a new transnational approach to migration, Glick Schiller et al. (1992) did not overtly reflect on the role that emotions might play in that framework. This reflects a longer history of migration studies where the notion of migrant as homo economicus remained largely unchallenged and attention to migrant subjectivities was limited (but see Ong 1999; Skrbiš 2008). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the first edited book on the ‘transnational family’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002) failed to discuss emotion and affect explicitly, or that other key texts continued this pattern. For example, Steven Vertovec’s (2009) summary account of transnationalism acknowledged transnational social formations, communication technologies, politics, economics and religion, but did not directly account for emotions or affect as relevant to any of these. In this chapter, we outline an alternative history of transnationalism, one which has constantly grappled with transnationalism as an emotional or affective state, but most often through proxy concepts, such as ‘transnationalism from below’ and ‘belonging’, as well as through the theorising of families, care and co-presence, or, as Walsh notes, through ‘the language of belonging, homeliness and displacement’ (Walsh 2012, p. 43). It is only recently, as part of the broader ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences, that emotions have been more explicitly acknowledged in studies of migration and transnationalism. (e.g. Hoggett and Thompson 2012). In this chapter, we begin with a brief outline of theories of affect and emotion, before reviewing the evidence of emotion and affect in transnational studies. We then examine three emotions that have dominated the landscape of the transnational families’ scholarship with which we are most familiar: hope, love and guilt.

EMOTIONS, AFFECT AND TRANSNATIONALISM The relationship between emotions and affect is both complex and contested (Pile 2009), yet each concept draws attention to the same fundamental problem: how do we make sense of our feelings as not just personal or bodily responses, but also as social, cultural and political? Recent approaches to emotion and affect seek to move beyond psychological or physiological analyses of feelings such as hunger, cold or thirst, to consider the ways in which feelings and emotions are ‘produced in interaction with others in ways that reinforce or reproduce power’ (Holmes 2014, p. 31). Feelings are increasingly understood as not only fundamentally social and cultural (e.g. Lupton 1998), but also as socially, culturally and historically specific (e.g. Jankowiak 1997; de Boise and Hearn 2017). It is now widely accepted that emotions 93

94  Handbook on transnationalism

are learned as part of our socialisation process and adjusted through ongoing social interactions across the life course as we reflect on, manage and adjust our feelings and our emotional expressions to fulfil what is considered appropriate to any given context. This is what Hochschild (1983) refers to as ‘emotion work’ or ‘emotional labour’, which is embedded in ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1979) that tell us which emotions and emotional expressions are appropriate for particular social roles, in relation to given situations. Such work is fundamental to our social interactions, ensuring our compliance with dominant, normative ideas and frames of reference. While we do not always obey feeling rules, any departures from those rules typically invoke sanctions, or at least raise questions about our legitimacy, morality, or capacity to fulfil the expectations of a given social role. For transnational migrants, the social foundations of feeling rules and emotion work are made more complex by the need to straddle at least two socially and culturally distant contexts (Mazzucato and Schans 2011; Boccagni and Baldassar 2015; Holmes and Wilding 2019). As a result of new communication technologies, the social exchange of appropriate emotional gestures (Hochschild 1979) remains possible across distance, including through the use of letters, visits, emails and text messages (see also Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume; Baldassar et al. 2007). However, the rules that ‘establish the worth of a gesture and are thus used in social exchange as a medium of exchange’ (Hochschild 1979, p. 569) become less certain in transnational social fields. As a result, so-called ‘distant relaters’ (Holmes 2006, 2014) lack clear social and cultural scripts to help them know which gestures are necessary, sufficient, appropriate or expected. This gap can create opportunities for rethinking and reworking the social roles and feeling rules that frame a relationship, through the application of ‘emotional reflexivity’ (Holmes 2014). However, such rethinking is limited by the fact that emotional reflexivity is itself enacted through ‘feeling’ the self into intimacy and relationships (Anderson and Smith 2001). Arguably, it is in those moments of ‘feeling’ one’s way forward in an interaction or a relationship that the broader, unequal structures and expectations continue to shape how men and women respond, with emotions potentially restoring an unspoken conservative response to the novel context of distance relationships. Awareness of this precognitive aspect of feelings is more commonly discussed through the concept of affect, rather than emotions. Scholars of affect seek to bypass the limitations of language, by emphasising that affect exists prior to its translation into the ‘knowable’ terms of emotions. While affect might be the object of emotional reflexivity, it is perceived as existing in spite of that reflexivity, as the source of ‘feeling’ our way into interactions and relationships. Thus, affect has been described as ‘pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act’ (Clough 2008, p. 1). According to this framework, affect has autonomy from conscious perception, language and emotion. This does not necessarily make it pre-social, but rather ‘social in a manner “prior to” the separating out of individuals’ (Massumi 2002, p. 9). Rather than belonging to the personal or the body, affect is instead often defined as a ‘transpersonal capacity’ (Anderson 2006, p. 735). While theorists of emotion emphasise that emotions are produced in social exchange and

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  95

interaction, for theorists of affect, what is more important is a body’s ability to affect and to be affected by others (Ahmed 2004). More than being interpersonal or intersubjective, affect is conceived of as existing both within and between bodies. It is theorised as connecting bodies (including but not limited to human bodies) as well as flowing between them. Pile (2009) usefully identifies the key distinction between emotional and affectual approaches as one of different relationships to the psychological and the cognitive. While emotion ultimately places feelings in ‘what is thought’, affect instead emphasises the non-cognitive and the ‘unthought’. This approach provides the foundations, for example, of Ahmed’s (2004) notion of affective economies. She argues that emotions such as hate and love, loyalty and distaste circulate between bodies, shaping the surfaces of bodies in that circulation. This circulation has tangible effects. As Ahmed (2004, p. 119) explains: ‘In affective economies, emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments’. This capacity to align bodies into collectives can operate, for example, at the level of the nation, the organisation, the community, the couple or the family (Ahmed 2004; Thrift 2004; Holmes 2014; Wilding et al. 2020). It is this capacity for the social exchange of emotions to sustain and reproduce the affectively aligned transnational family or community that has been arguably the most striking thread in transnational approaches to emotion and affect to date (see also Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume; Poeze et al. 2017). For example, when making sense of the transnationalism of working-class Punjabis, Werbner (1999) suggests that transnationalism involves a ‘traffic in objects-persons-people-placessentiments’, emphasising that feelings – towards other people, places, employment prospects, political circumstances and so on – demand recognition as informing the decisions people make about migration and transnational connection. Olwig’s (2002, 2007) ethnography of a transnational Caribbean family network similarly draws attention to the role of emotions such as love, loyalty, belonging, jealousy, pride, guilt, shame, dismay and happiness, in maintaining the transnational family and shaping how it functions. Analyses such as these demonstrate that it is emotions, not just economics, that inform decisions about who will leave and who will stay, who will visit and who will drift apart. Similarly, in their analysis of transnational aged care, Baldassar et al. (2007) identify ‘emotional and moral support’ as the most common and arguably the most important foundation of transnational family practices, being the easiest form of support to exchange across distance (see also Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume). Emotions can also be commoditised for exchange, enabling them to become the central focus of analyses of global care chains (Parreñas 2001a, 2005). While the ‘love for gold’ thesis focuses explicitly on the marketisation and commodification of care, it is also necessarily concerned with the unequal exchange and flow of emotions, indicating that feelings are a valued personal and collective resource (Hochschild 1979; Yeates 2009). The incorporation of emotion into transnational scholarship is most clearly evident in feminist approaches to migration that foreground the agentive role of women in migration networks, as well as those which acknowledge that migration motivations

96  Handbook on transnationalism

often exceed the economic (Yeoh et al. 2005; Silvey 2005; Gorman-Murray 2009). These include attention to global householding (Lam et al. 2006), the diasporic domestic sphere (Baldassar and Gabaccia 2011), emotional geographies of homemaking (Walsh 2009), care circulation (Merla and Baldassar 2014) and the affective moral economy (Velayutham and Wise 2005). What links these approaches is their emphasis on the intimate, everyday and typically gendered forms of kin work, emotion work and affective structures, in particular of love, guilt and shame, that support and shape transnational relationships. It is now clear that emotions are significant at all stages of the migration process (Svasek 2010), prompting decisions to move, informing the reactions of the people left behind, shaping where and how far a migrant will travel, as well as how long they will stay before returning either to visit or permanently. Emotions also shape how a migrant is received in the destination country, how they perceive that reception, and whether and how they continue to relate to family and place in the home country over time and across distance. Thus, it is emotions that constantly shape the migrant’s relationship to family and country, both proximate and distant. Emotions live within bodies, carrying memories of past slights and pleasures, and shape responses to new scenarios and circumstances, informing future preferences and desires – including the avoidance of conflict and discrimination by moving elsewhere (Svasek 2002). In sum, emotions are now increasingly recognised as constitutive of the migrant experience (Skrbiš 2008), not an add-on to economics (Boccagni and Baldassar 2015). The recent development of scholarship on the role of communication technologies in transnational relationships has supported the deeper analysis of emotions and affect. It has become clear that social relationships are being sustained across distance through access to polymedia environments (Madianou and Miller 2012), raising questions about how migrants and those left behind ‘feel’ their way through the transformation of the conditions of their relationship. This includes attention to the creation of new forms of co-presence (Baldassar et al. 2016) and the maintenance of intimacies across distance (Holmes and Wilding 2019), with particular attention to the issue of ambiguity around what to feel. Here, the concept of ‘floating ties’ (Wilding 2018) is also helpful because it focuses on the continued importance of our intimate relationships, even if they are no longer anchored to past ways of relating. As distance between intimates becomes more likely in a mobile world, and in the immobilised world of COVID-19, emotional reflexivity is required to figure out what and how to feel about those who might be emotionally close but geographically distant.

EMOTIONS IN TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES: HOPE, LOVE AND GUILT Studies of transnational families have demonstrated conclusively that ‘the distances between us are always relational, and indeed that we are intimately subjected by emotion’ (Thien 2005, p. 453). As Baldock (2000) argues, the practices and emotions

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  97

of caring for and caring about are important forces in the lives of migrants and their transnational kin. Skrbiš (2008) further suggests that the heavy reliance of transnational family life on emotional labour is a significant factor in this close association between migration, families and emotions. Thus, there are now numerous studies demonstrating the role of emotions in, for example, prompting migration (Madianou and Miller 2012), motivating efforts to maintain familyhood and care across distance and borders (Baldassar et al. 2007; Poeze et al. 2017), and contributing to the creation of oppressive conditions within transnational relationships (Hannaford 2015). In this section, we explore a select set of contributions that demonstrate the nuanced and valuable insights offered by transnational family care scholarship on three emotional states in particular: hope, love and guilt. Hope It could be argued that all migration is in part about maintaining a necessary emotional state for being human: the sustaining of feelings of hope (Hage 2003). In some cases, these feelings are directed towards hope that life might be better elsewhere, particularly for children’s futures, and in others the hope that income earned elsewhere might contribute to making life better at home (Mar 2005). Hope is not a simple emotion. This is clear when we reflect on the role of hope in provoking migration. A lack of local opportunity might push people into decisions to migrate in order to avoid hardship and despair, encouraging individuals, families or communities to take a calculated risk on crossing borders and entering new and unfamiliar labour markets in the hope of improving the lives of the migrant and those they leave behind. Yet, this hope, and the migration it prompts, is always imbued with fear and doubt – fear of failure, fear of the risk leading to worse outcomes, doubts about the capacity to make the most of the opportunity, and doubts about the ability for familyhood and care to be sustained across distance. There are numerous examples that illustrate this complex relationship between migration, transnational familyhood and hope. For example, a study of migrants from the Philippines living in New Zealand alerts us to the particular problems of hope that they face. On the one hand, they remain hopeful of achieving permanent residency and New Zealand citizenship, which would allow them to continue to access well-paid employment as aged care workers. On the other hand, they are aware that this hope comes at a cost: living in New Zealand prevents them from being able to live in close proximity with their own ageing parents in order to provide care in the Philippines (Lovelock and Martin 2016, p. 386). Whereas an economic analysis of migration decisions might focus entirely on the pull of migrants from the Philippines to New Zealand in response to labour market dynamics, attention to the emotional dimensions of these decisions helps us to see another, simultaneous dynamic. On the one hand, hope for a better economic future. On the other hand, fear that this might also lead to failure to fulfil a familial role as a caring son or daughter in a parent’s time of need. Thus, the push-pull explanations of migration might be better reframed in emotional terms as a fear-hope dynamic, each part of the equation supporting and

98  Handbook on transnationalism

feeding into the other. At the same time, any experiences of failure or unfulfilled expectations are likely met with future hope – that the next migration will be better, the next generation will finally achieve elusive goals of improved livelihoods, or that continued effort will ultimately lead to success – both economic and in terms of fulfilling family roles. In his analysis of transnational migration between Hong Kong and Australia in the 1990s, Philip Mar (2005) emphasises another two aspects of hope. First, hope is related to desire, but also incorporates awareness of the constraints of reality. Hope is a mode of ‘looking forward’ with the recognition that what is anticipated may not in fact come to pass. Thus, doubt is part of hope, but hope is also always imagining a future that is in some respects better than and improving on the present. In some cases, hope is the only resource a family or community might have left. For example, some migrants make the difficult decision to leave their children behind in order to have some hope of providing them with a desirable and viable future (McGuire and Martin 2007; Parreñas 2005; Madianou and Miller 2012). When hopes for a better future are only partially realised, they might be carried forward into the next generation, whose members also adopt transnational migration not just as an economic strategy, but also as a strategy for sustaining hope for the future for both themselves and the next and subsequent generations. In this respect, hope arguably plays an essential role in the logics and structures that support unequal global economies and societies. The prospect of hope continues to placate those with relatively fewer opportunities and resources, who hope that continued effort will ultimately fulfil their hopes for the future. Thus, even men and women who feel that their lives are currently worse as a result of migration, continue to hope for a better future. This is captured in the words of a Congolese woman, living as a refugee in South Africa where her circumstances remain dire: ‘We have hope that all will be okay and change will come. We count on that and we know that today’s life will one day change’ (Smit and Rugunanan 2015, p. 197). Nevertheless, such feelings of hope necessarily oscillate with feelings of despair and distress, requiring migrants to continually engage in what Greene (2020) calls ‘tactics of hope’, in order to keep alive their dreams of a better future. This supports Mar’s (2005, p. 365) second argument, that hope is ‘a vital element in imaginatively structuring ongoing projects, particularly long-term speculative projects that involve protracted action and uncertainty’. The temporal scale of hope is not just of today, or even of this lifetime, but also one of anticipated future generations. As one mother, an undocumented migrant in France, explains: ‘it’s just a matter of time, let’s just wait for the next national election and hope that the next government will be more open to immigrants’ (Fresnoza-Flot 2009, p. 265). Hope underpins decisions to sustain transnational familyhood and is not necessarily for the future of the migrant, but might instead be aimed at the future prospects of their imagined or actual children and grandchildren (e.g. Kang 2016). Thus, hope structures and gives substance to imaginings of ‘the good life’ (Hage 2003; Greene 2020). These imaginings are informed by globally circulating images and ideas of the relative qualities and opportunities of the places being left, the destination

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  99

countries and the characteristics of a good family life and hoped-for futures (e.g. Lan 2019). Structures of hope are also informed by religion (Smit and Ragunanan 2015; Sampaio 2020). In some cases, religion frames unfulfilled hopes of the present within longer-term narratives of ultimate success, either for future generations in this world, or for the individual after death. In addition, they can help to frame success as not just reliant on achieving economic goals, but also on fulfilling non-economic goals, such as emotionally relevant goals of care and moral worth (Baldassar 2007a). Love Feelings of love may well be experienced across all cultures and societies (Jankowiak 1997), but the relation between those feelings and the structures, roles and expectations of familyhood are highly variable across social and cultural contexts. For example, Coe (2011, p. 9) argues that in Ghanaian transnational families, ‘both children and adults understand feelings to be expressed through the distribution of material resources’. This means that love can be expressed from migrant parents to their left behind children through the sending of remittances, and from migrant adult children to frail and ageing parents in the same way (see also Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume). This is because love is expressed primarily to a dependent by providing the necessities of life in the form of financial and material support, and from a dependent by feeling free to ask for those necessities. In making such requests, people have a finely tuned sense of what is possible, which limits the expansiveness of their requests and heightens appreciation for gifts given from those with limited resources. In this way, love and emotional attachment are produced within the family in the micro-exchanges of material resources, and in assessments of the willingness and capacity to ask for and receive everyday support. This applies equally to the love exchanged between children and their fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles. In contrast, parental love in some other cultural contexts is strongly associated with emotional intimacy and physical proximity. For example, accounts of motherhood in the Philippines point to the strong gendered norms of parenting that persist even after the disruption of migration, captured in the notion that mothers are ‘the light of the home’ (Asis et al. 2004). Women are expected to develop close emotional bonds with their children and socialise them into tightly knit kinship networks that are relied upon for emotional, practical and moral support across the life course (Lam and Yeoh 2019). Women risk being perceived as bad mothers if they leave their children for any period of time, with accusations of abandonment a constant possibility. Nevertheless, labour migration opportunities have been greater for women than for men in the Philippines for some decades (Asis et al. 2004). Migrant fathers are not necessarily expected to perform the same level of emotional closeness as mothers, their gendered parental roles as breadwinners more easily fulfilled by remittance activities. For mothers, however, transnational migration for work creates a conundrum. Working overseas is desirable for mothers to fulfil their dreams and aspirations for the education, housing and economic prospects of their children. However, the

100  Handbook on transnationalism

nature of the work they provide, which is usually performed in employers’ homes, in combination with the strict laws and regulations preventing family migration into those countries of work and the high costs of providing education and housing for children in those countries of work, means that a large number of mothers must leave their children behind in the Philippines in order to earn the income necessary to provide material support. This necessity, in combination with the gendered ideology of the family that positions women from the Philippines as the ‘heart of the home’, creates the conditions for significant emotional ramifications. As Parreñas (2001b, p. 361) has pointed out, ‘the pain of family separation creates various feelings, including helplessness, regret, and guilt for mothers and loneliness, vulnerability, and insecurity for children’. The pain and heartache associated with transnational mothering has been the subject of national outpourings of grief in nations such as the Philippines and prompted heartbreaking accounts of separation and displaced love (e.g. Parreñas 2001a, 2001b, 2005; Hochschild 2012; Madianou and Miller 2012). In response, women have produced new discourses and strategies that enable them to balance the expectations of close emotional bonds and constant care for their children, alongside the desire to provide a sound economic future for their family (McKay 2007). Discursively, they point to their migration as essential for the well-being of the family; in practice, this discourse is reinforced by consistent remittance activity and intensive relational work via communication technologies, including the implementation of the practices of intensive mothering from afar (Madianou 2012; Katigbak 2015). In some cases, mothers respond to their situation in similar ways to the Ghanaian families discussed earlier. For example, Parreñas (2001b, 2005) argues that mothers from the Philippines resolve the tensions of mothering from afar by buying their children goods as expressions of care. As one woman exclaims, ‘I give them everything they want’ (Parreñas 2001b, p. 372). Another, more recent strategy that mothers use to manage the disjuncture between physical distance and the expectation of love as emotional closeness is to rely more heavily on communication technologies. As new communication tools have emerged on the market, transnational families have embraced them in order to generate a polymedia environment (Madianou and Miller 2012). The layering and complementarity of multiple modes of affordable communication tools enables transnational mothers and their children to convey emotional nuance alongside of the exchange of information, by allowing them to make moral and emotional decisions about when, how and what to communicate. This polymedia environment also creates a virtual social space in which parents and children are able to reproduce the conditions and practices of intimacy, such as sharing meals together, monitoring daily progress at school and discussing everyday problems. As a result, some mothers and children claim that they are able to have relationships that are just as close, if not closer, than the relationships that might be sustained if they were to remain at home (Ahlin 2018; Francisco 2015; Cabalquinto 2018). In addition, they benefit from the economic rewards of working overseas. While the capacity of mothers and children to use technologies to navigate distance in order to exchange and express love is worth acknowledging, scholars nevertheless

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  101

continue to draw attention to the unequal global conditions that produce the necessity for this adaptation. According to these accounts, the love that should normally flow from mother to children in the Philippines, has been appropriated and directed instead to the children of parents in wealthier nations, in what has been termed a ‘global care chain’ (Hochschild 2000; Isaksen et al. 2008; Yeates 2005, 2009, 2012). The transference of love and care from the poorer nations of the world towards richer populations has been characterised as a form of ‘global emotional inequality’, in which some children enjoy the benefit of yet another caring adult, while other children grow up with one less (Hochschild 2013). Evidence for the channelling of love from one nation to another is provided in the interview statements of migrant women who work overseas as nannies, where they are unable to be physically present for their own children. Rosemarie provides one such account, saying, ‘I feel the gap caused by our physical separation especially in the morning, when I pack lunch, because that’s what I used to do for my children … sometimes you feel the separation and you start to cry’ (Parreñas 2001a, p. 119). Other women explain that they pour more love into the children that they nanny, in order to manage the heartache of missing their own children (Hochschild 2013). These laments directly connect to our next theme of transnational emotions: the feelings of guilt that accompany some decisions or requirements to remain physically distant from loved ones. Guilt Baldassar (2015) notes that guilt is not defined in the psychological literature as a ‘universal emotion’ and so is virtually absent in the emotions literature. However, it is not surprising that it features large in the literature on migration and emotions. As one of her participants declares, ‘guilt, guilt, guilt is what all migrants face’ (Baldassar 2015, p. 81). Extending psychological analyses of guilt as intra-psychic to show not only its social and relational features but also to analyse guilt as a cultural process embedded in the process of migration, Baldassar (2015) argues that for post-war Italian migrants, their very departure from the hometown renders the migration process itself an act of abandonment that must be constantly justified through markers of both economic success as well as ongoing emotional commitment to those left behind performed through visits home. Vermot (2015) explores this same ‘guilt as motivator’ dynamic at the micro level of transnational family practices, highlighting how many migration scholars have emphasised the culpability migrants feel because they are not able to fulfil their dutiful family roles due to their absence (Aranda 2007; Baldassar 2007b; Parreñas 2005; Landolt and Da 2005). Drawing on the migration narratives of Argentinian migrants in Miami and Barcelona, Vermot (2015) examines in particular how emotions are gendered. Contrasting the ‘hegemonic models that cast women as “caregivers” and men as “breadwinners”’ (p. 138), she argues that migration is more likely to be experienced by women as causing them to break their caregiver roles, hence resulting in guilt, while men are able to experience migration as a way to fulfil their breadwinner roles. Furthermore, Vermot (2015) shows that, by expressing guilt,

102  Handbook on transnationalism

women can minimise their gender transgression by showing an appropriate response. In this way, emotions such as guilt can be used as ‘a tool of control to justify gender role and to constrain individuals to fulfill their gender’ (Vermot 2015, p. 139). According to Ho (2009, p. 801), emotions can be employed as ‘tools’ to ‘do certain kinds of things’, revealing the ways in which ‘social relations and social structures come to gain ontological status’. Drawing on Baumeister et al. (1994), both Vermot (2015) and Baldassar (2015) highlight the negative and positive functions (often simultaneously) of guilt as a resource that can be used to enhance relationships, exert influence over others and as a mechanism for alleviating inequities in relationships. In this way, guilt can be conceived as a resource that can be used by the less powerful, often women and the elderly, to elicit caregiving responses from those with more power, like wage earning migrants, often to the detriment of individual autonomy. For example, Amin and Ingman (2014, p. 325) in their study of transnational eldercare delivered by Bangladeshi immigrants living in the United States, report that guilt is experienced both as a motivator and ‘absolver’ of transnational care duties, but with significant negative impact on caregiver stress, including depression and anxiety. Despite stereotypes suggesting otherwise, McLeod and Burrows (2014) remind us that even globally mobile affluent young people are not immune to the emotional turmoil of guilt relating to ‘family matters’. However, certain transnational relationships are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of guilt, including the pressure experienced by humanitarian migrants to financially support their families in transit camps (Huennekes 2018) or the heightened yearning for ‘skinship’ experienced by absent mothers for their (under 18 month old) infants (Butt 2018). Butt (2018, p. 156) explains that ‘Affects of guilt can be heightened because migration places women in a difficult moral bind, where the demands of economic contribution and cultural expectations contradict the potent moralities enmeshed in maternal nurturing narratives’. Butt (2018) draws on the notion of the ‘emotional regime’ to feature the role of political regimes in establishing a normative order for emotions. In these studies, guilt can be understood as a set of moral relationships that reproduce gendered cultures of care. Research by Fuller (2017) and Huennekes (2018) provides a useful counterpoint to Vermot (2015) and Butt (2018) because they report on contexts where men cannot fulfil their obligation as breadwinners, resulting in feelings of guilt and shame. Left-behind fathers in Mexico whose adult children have migrated to the US experience guilt and shame on receiving remittances (Fuller 2017). Similarly, Rohingya refugee men living in Malaysia suffer feelings of resentment, obligation and guilt for both sending and receiving remittances (Huennekes 2018). This leads Huennekes (2018, p. 367) to define remittances as ‘emotional resources’, highlighting their ‘ability to carry emotions over long distances … remittances function as a tool to keep [families] together emotionally across distance and time … and to help migrants to belong to multiple places, even those where they have not ever resided’. Similarly, Katigbak (2015) coins the term ‘emotional remittances’ to highlight the importance of seeing emotions and economies as interrelated, particularly in trans-

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  103

national families, where she argues that ‘emotional remittances are the palliative that relieves the scourge of guilt’ (Katigbak 2015, p. 532). Ho (2009) further extends our understandings of the efficacy of guilt as a tool of control. Guilt can be employed by family members not only to justify and constrain individuals to fulfil their gender roles, but also as tools employed by states to constrain citizens to fulfil their civic duty. Drawing on a qualitative study of Singaporean transmigrants in London, she explores the emotional dimensions of citizenship to examine ‘the emotional representations and subjectivities that give rise to the politics of citizenship’ (Ho 2009, p. 801) and the way that citizenship is constituted and contested through emotions. Ho (2009) argues that a key emotional citizenship discourse in Singapore employs notions of guilt to distinguish between ‘stayers’ – the good citizens who remain, and ‘quitters’ – the disloyal citizens who move abroad. Interestingly, her findings suggest that people are far more likely to ‘feel guilty toward left-behind family members rather than toward the country as a unit of political membership. Instead of guilt toward the country, they expressed aversion toward the expectation of gratitude by the Singaporean state’ (Ho 2009, p. 800). In a similar vein, Faria (2014) discusses how affective transnational emotional ties can simultaneously reinforce ties to home and host-lands, as well as nurture transnational community networks: ‘Here, citizenly obligations to family in South Sudan and the United States, although in tension, form part of and are heightened by an emergent duty to the new nation-state’ (Faria 2014, p. 1060). These everyday affective performances are primarily undertaken by women and represent diverse scales. Among the most intimate are discussions with their American-born children about skin colour and bi-cultural identities. They also involved attending and organising local ethno-religious community events where food, language, prayer, music, song and dance are actively promoted to develop national affiliation in the second generation, with a view to ensuring they will return to the Sudan to contribute to its development. Finally, there is the transnational kin work of remitting money, as well as the ‘emotionally wearing’ work of comforting, inquiring, resolving disputes, providing news and so on (Faria 2014, p. 1059). Reinforcing the rationale for this chapter, Faria’s analysis highlights the importance of what emotions do, rather than what they are, and is also one of very few examples that explore the work of emotions in motivating not just individual behaviour but national action and policy (Ho 2009; Walsh 2012).

CONCLUSION What the literature on hope, love and guilt abundantly shows is that these emotions play a central role in helping to restore and sustain transnational relationships. Interestingly, it is the act of migration that results in the rupturing of family roles (women as caregiver, men as breadwinner) that causes guilt. However, as we have seen, this same act that produces guilt is also motivated by the love and hope that exists within that family both prior to and following migration. It might be suggested that emotions ‘leak out’ when roles are ruptured, because it is guilt, love and hope

104  Handbook on transnationalism

that, as Vermot (2015, p. 139) argues, ‘constrain women to fulfill their gender role despite geographical distance’ and in this way can be understood as ‘an emotional answer to their adjustment to belonging’. What should be clear from our discussion of the three key emotions of hope, love and guilt in transnational care is that emotions are fundamental to migration and to transnationalism. Emotions motivate migration, are produced by migration, and produce the outcomes of migration in the form of transnational families or family disruption. The hope that migration will deliver brighter futures comes from both the love for kin in wanting to provide what’s best for them, as well as the guilt and frustration of not being able to provide for them materially by staying put. The forms and frequency of remittances and return visits are shaped by the ongoing dynamic of love, guilt and hope towards those left behind. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that most analyses of migration that acknowledge emotions also feature the role of ambivalence or the experience of emotional ambivalence as a way of resolving or containing the simultaneous and contradictory positive and negative effects of emotions. This ambivalence becomes the focus of emotional reflexivity, prompting migrants and their distant kin to continually question whether the migration itself and the transnational relationship it produces are necessary and sufficient. Is enough money being sent back? Are enough phone calls and text messages being exchanged? Are sufficient declarations of love and care being made? Is the role of daughter/ mother/father/son/sibling being fulfilled and expressed sufficiently well? It is clear that migration can produce quite dramatic transformations in gendered economic roles within a family, especially when women become a family’s primary income earner. However, such transformation in economic roles is rarely accompanied by an equal gendered transformation of familial or caregiving roles. The missing part of the picture is likely the lack of attention to the role of emotions in reproducing particular relational dynamics. As people ‘feel’ their way through transformed relationships, they seek to reproduce what ‘feels’ right. In the process, gender inequalities might be reproduced emotionally, even as they are challenged in economic terms. This helps to explain the ambivalence that both women and men experience in response to the opportunities offered by migration for economic reward, at the cost of role certainty and clarity about feeling rules (e.g. Huennekes 2018). While our discussion has focused on transnational families, and in particular on transnational parenting, partnering and aged care, this is by no means the full extent to which emotions and affect play a role in transnationalism (Wilding 2018). Of particular importance in recent years has been increased attention to the seeking, creation and navigation of love and intimacy between spouses from diverse cultural backgrounds (e.g. Bloch 2011; Faier 2007, Boehm 2011; Pananakhonsab 2016), but also the role of honour, shame and jealousy in those relationships (e.g. Hannaford 2015). Increasingly, it seems necessary for all members of transnational families to become aware of and fluent in multiple idioms of emotions and their expressions. The flows of ideas and media that link both here and there necessarily shape the habits of the body, requiring additional emotion work to synthesise competing structures of feeling. Thus, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2014) suggest that the analysis of what

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  105

they term ‘distant love’ raises important questions about cosmopolitanism and globalisation. However, their acknowledgement of an inability to theorise distant love suggests that there is still significant work to be done in attending to and interpreting the emotional dimensions of transnationalism (see also Holmes and Wilding 2019). What all such accounts need to acknowledge, we suggest, is the ways in which transnational relationships are shaped not only by ideas about familyhood and obligations to care, but also by the bodies that move and the bodies that remain behind, and the emotions that move them, as well as the tools, materials and discourses that connect them across uneven landscapes of access to material and immaterial resources.

REFERENCES Ahlin, Tanja (2018), ‘Only near is dear? Doing elderly care with everyday ICTs in Indian transnational families’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 32 (1), 85–102. Ahmed, Sara (2004), ‘Affective economies’, Social Text, 22 (2), 117–39. Amin, Iftekhar and Stan Ingman (2014), ‘Eldercare in the transnational setting: Insights from Bangladeshi transnational families in the United State’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 29 (3), 315–28. Anderson, Ben (2006), ‘Becoming and being hopeful: Towards a theory of affect’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (5), 733–52. Anderson, Kay and Susan Smith (2001), ‘Editorial: Emotional geographies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26 (1), 7–10. Aranda, Elizabeth (2007), ‘Struggles of incorporation among the Puerto Rican middle class’, The Sociological Quarterly, 48 (2), 199–228. Asis, Maruja M.B., Shirlena Huang and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2004), ‘When the light of the home is abroad: Unskilled female migration and the Filipino family’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 25, 198–215. Baldassar, Loretta (2007a), ‘Transnational families and aged care: The mobility of care and the migrancy of ageing’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33 (2), 275–97. Baldassar, Loretta (2007b), ‘Transnational families and the provision of moral and emotional support: The relationship between truth and distance’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 14 (4), 385–409. Baldassar, Loretta (2015), ‘Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in migration and transnational caregiving’, Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 81–9. Baldassar, Loretta, Cora V. Baldock and Raelene Wilding (2007), Families Caring Across Borders: Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldassar, Loretta and Donna R. Gabaccia (eds) (2011), Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World, New York: Fordham University Press. Baldassar, Loretta, Mihaela Nedelcu, Laura Merla and Raelene Wilding (2016), ‘ICT-based co-presence in transnational families and communities: Challenging the premise of face-to-face proximity in sustaining relationships’, Global Networks, 16, 133–44. Baldock, Cora V. (2000), ‘Migrants and their parents: Caregiving from a distance’, Journal of Family Issues, 21 (2), 205–24. Baumeister, Roy F., Arlene M. Stillwell and Todd F. Heatherton (1994), ‘Guilt: An interpersonal approach’, Psychological Bulletin, 115 (2), 243–67. Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2014), Distant Love, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloch, Alexia (2011), ‘Intimate circuits: Modernity, migration and marriage among post-Soviet women in Turkey’, Global Networks, 11 (4), 502–21.

106  Handbook on transnationalism

Boccagni, Paolo and Loretta Baldassar (2015), ‘Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration’, Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 73–80. Boehm, Deborah A. (2011), ‘Deseos y Dolores: Mapping desire, suffering and (dis)loyalty within transnational partnerships’, International Migration, 49 (6), 95–106. Bryceson, Deborah and Ulla Vuorela (eds) (2002), The Transnational Family: Mew European Frontiers and Global Networks, Oxford: Berg Publishing. Butt, Leslie (2018), ‘Affects of unease: Mother–infant separation among professional Indonesian women working in Singapore’, Global Networks, 18 (1), 151–67. Cabalquinto, Earvin C. (2018), ‘“We’re not only here but we’re there in spirit”: Asymmetrical mobile intimacy and the transnational Filipino family’, Mobile Media & Communication, 6 (1), 37–52. Clough, Patricia T. (2008), ‘The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25 (1), 1–22. Coe, Cati (2011), ‘What is love? The materiality of care in Ghanaian transnational families’, International Migration, 49 (6), 7–24. de Boise, Sam and Jeff Hearn (2017), ‘Are men getting more emotional? Critical sociological perspectives on men, masculinities and emotions’, The Sociological Review, 65 (4), 779–96. Faier, Lieba (2007), ‘Filipina migrants in rural Japan and their professions of love’, American Ethnologist, 34 (1), 148–62. Faria, Caroline (2014), ‘“I want my children to know Sudan”: Narrating the long-distance intimacies of diasporic politics’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104 (5), 1052–67. Francisco, Valerie (2015), ‘“The internet is magic”: Technology, intimacy and transnational families’, Critical Sociology, 41 (1), 173–90. Fresnoza-Flot, Asuncion (2009), ‘Migration status and transnational mothering: The case of Filipino migrants in France’, Global Networks, 9 (2), 252–70. Fuller, Heather R. (2017) ‘The emotional toll of out-migration on mothers and fathers left behind in Mexico’, International Migration, 55 (3), 156–72. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (1992), ‘Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 645, 1–24. Gorman-Murray, Andrew (2009), ‘Intimate mobilities: Emotional embodiment and queer migration’, Social & Cultural Geography, 10 (4), 441–60. Greene, Alexandra (2020), ‘Mobiles and “making do”: Exploring the affective digital practices of refugee women waiting in Greece’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 23 (5), 731–48. Hage, Ghassan (2003), Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press and Merlin. Hannaford, Dinah (2015), ‘Technologies of the spouse: Intimate surveillance in Senegalese transnational marriages’, Global Networks, 15 (1), 43–59. Ho, Elaine, L. (2009), ‘Constituting citizenship through the emotions: Singaporean transmigrants in London’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99 (4), 788–804. Hochschild, Arlie R. (1979), ‘Emotion work, feeling rules and social structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85 (3), 551–75. Hochschild, Arlie R. (1983), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2000), ‘Global care chains and emotional surplus value’, in Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 130­–146. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2012), The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, New York: Metropolitan Press.

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  107

Hochschild, Arlie R. (2013), So How’s The Family? And Other Essays, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hoggett, Paul and Simon Thompson (eds) (2012), Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Holmes, Mary (2006), ‘Love lives at a distance’, Sociological Research Online, 11 (3), 70–80. Holmes, Mary (2014), Distance Relationships: Intimacy and Emotions amongst Academics and their Partners in Dual-Locations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holmes, Mary and Raelene Wilding (2019), ‘Intimacies at a distance: An introduction’, Emotions, Space and Society, 32, 1–4. Huennekes, Josee (2018), ‘Emotional remittances in the transnational lives of Rohingya families living in Malaysia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 31 (3), 353–70. Isaksen, Lise W., Sambasivan U. Devi, and Arlie R. Hochschild (2008), ‘Global care crisis: A problem of capital, care chain, or commons?’, American Behavioral Scientist, 52 (3), 405–25. Jankowiak, William (ed.) (1997), Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience?, New York: Columbia University Press. Kang, Yoonhee (2016), ‘“Beat your child with a flower!”: Asian advantage and educational connectivity between South Korea and Singapore’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 44, 740–761. Katigbak, Evangeline O. (2015), ‘Moralizing emotional remittances’, Global Networks, 15 (4), 519–35. Lam, Theodora and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2019), ‘Parental migration and disruptions in everyday life: Reactions of left-behind children in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45, 3085–104. Lam, Theodora, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang (2006), ‘Global householding in a city-state’, International Development Planning Review, 28 (4), 475–97. Lan, Shanshan (2019), ‘Youth, mobility, and the emotional burdens of youxue (travel and study): A case of Chinese students in Italy’, International Migration, 58 (3), 163–76. Landolt, Patricia and Wei Wei Da (2005), ‘The spatially ruptured practices of migrant families: A comparison of immigrants from El Salvador and the People’s Republic of China’, Current Sociology, 53 (4), 625–53. Lovelock, Kirsten and Greg Martin (2016), ‘Eldercare work, migrant care workers, affective care and subjective proximity’, Ethnicity & Health, 21 (4), 379–96. Lupton, Deborah (1998), The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration, London: Sage Publications. Madianou, Mirca (2012), ‘Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood’, Global Networks, 12 (3), 277–95. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller (2012), Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Mar, Phillip (2005), ‘Unsettling potentialities: Topographies of hope in transnational migration’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26 (4), 361–78. Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Mazzucato, Valentina and Djamila Schans (2011), ‘Transnational families and the well-being of children: Conceptual and methodological challenges’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 73 (4), 704–12. McGuire, Sharon and Kate Martin (2007), ‘Fractured migrant families: Paradoxes of hope and devastation’, Family & Community Health, 30 (3), 178–88. McKay, Deirdre (2007), ‘“Sending dollars shows feeling”: Emotions and economies in Filipino migration’, Mobilities, 2, 175–94. McLeod, Danae and Roger Burrows (2014), ‘Home and away: Family matters in the lives of young transnational couples’, Journal of Sociology, 50 (3), 368–82.

108  Handbook on transnationalism

Merla, Laura and Loretta Baldassar (eds) (2014), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York and London: Routledge. Olwig, Karen Fog (2002), ‘A wedding in the family: Home making in a global kin network’, Global Networks, 2 (3), 205–18. Olwig, Karen Fog (2007), Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Network, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa (1999), Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pananakhonsab, Wilasinee (2016), Love and Intimacy in Online Cross-Cultural Relationships: The Power of Imagination, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2001a), Servants of Globalization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2001b), ‘Mothering from a distance: Emotions, gender and intergenerational relations in Filipino transnational families’, Feminist Studies, 27 (2), 361–90. Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2005), Children of Global Migration, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pile, Steve (2009), ‘Emotions and affect in recent human geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (1), 5–20. Poeze, Miranda, Erenstina Dankyi and Valentina Mazzucato (2017), ‘Navigating transnational childcare relationships: Migrant parents and their children’s caregivers in the origin country’, Global Networks, 17 (1), 111–29. Sampaio, Dora (2020), ‘Caring by silence: How (Un)documented Brazilian migrants enact silence as a care practice for aging parents’, Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, 18 (3), 281–300. Silvey, Rachel (2005), ‘Borders, embodiment, and mobility: Feminist migration studies in geography’, in Lise Nelson and Joni Seager (eds), A Companion to Feminist Geography, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 138–49. Skrbiš, Zlatko (2008), ‘Transnational families: Theorising migration, emotions and belonging’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29 (3), 231–46. Smit, Ria and Pragna Rugunanan (2015), ‘Transnational forced migration and negotiating emotional well-being: The case of women refugees in South Africa’, Social Dynamics, 41 (1), 184–203. Svasek, Maruska (2002), ‘Narratives of “home” and “homeland”: The symbolic construction and appropriation of the Sudeten German heimat’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 9 (4), 495–518. Svasek, Maruska (2010), ‘On the move: Emotions and human mobility’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (6), 865–80. Thien, Debora (2005), ‘After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography’, Area, 37 (4), 450–456. Thrift, Nigel (2004), ‘Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, 86 (1), 57–78. Velayutham, Selvaraj and Amanda Wise (2005) ‘Moral economies of a translocal village: Obligation and shame among South Indian transnational migrants’, Global Networks, 5 (1), 27–47. Vermot, Cécile (2015), ‘Guilt: A gendered bond within the transnational family’, Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 138–46. Vertovec, Steven (2009), Transnationalism, London and New York: Routledge. Walsh, Katie (2009), ‘Geographies of the heart in transnational spaces: Love and the intimate lives of British migrants in Dubai’, Mobilities, 4 (3), 427–45. Walsh, Katie (2012), ‘Emotion and migration: British transnationals in Dubai’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 43–59.

Transnationalism, affect and emotion  109

Werbner, Pnina (1999), ‘Global pathways: Working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds’, Social Anthropology, 7 (1), 17–35. Wilding, Raelene (2018), Families, Intimacy and Globalisation: Floating Ties, London: Red Globe Press. Wilding, Raelene, Loretta Baldassar, Shashini Gamage, Shane Worrell and Samiro Mohamud (2020), ‘Digital media and the affective economies of transnational families’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23 (5), 639–55. Yeates, Nicole (2005), ‘A global political economy of care’, Social Policy and Society, 4 (2), 227–34. Yeates, Nicole (2009), Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yeates, Nicole (2012), ‘Global care chains: A state-of-the-art review and future directions in care transnationalization research’, Global Networks, 12 (2), 135–54. Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Shirlena Huang and Theodora Lam (2005), ‘Transnationalizing the “Asian” family: Imaginaries, intimacies and strategic intents’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 307–15.

7. Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism Jørgen Carling

INTRODUCTION When transnational perspectives on migration flourished in the 1990s, it was imperative to simply acknowledge that migrants’ social worlds are often territorially unbounded. Soon thereafter, scholars began questioning the extent and durability of transnationalism. In this chapter I address a challenge that remains essential to take up: how can we best understand the ways in which transnationalism varies across space and changes over time? The nature of transnationalism depends on the type of societies of origin and destination as well as the history and dynamics of the particular migration flows. It would be futile, therefore, to search for a general theory of change in transnational social fields. What this chapter does instead, is to develop an analytical framework for making sense of differences. As an undergraduate student in the 1990s, I was introduced to migration as a topic within population geography, in awkward juxtaposition with topics such as contraception use and the geography of disease. Since then, the study of migration (and, by extension, transnationalism) has flourished within geography, while population geography as a specialty and identity has waned. Today, the study of migration is more likely to be situated in field such as development geography (Page and Mercer 2012) and political geography (Gamlen 2019). At the same time, the quantitative foundations of population studies have a role to play – not necessarily in the form of sophisticated modelling, but in breaking down complex outcomes into constituent parts, and in relating events to the populations ‘at risk’ of experiencing them. These techniques can be just as insightful when we are concerned with phenomena that are not feasible to measure in meaningful ways. Migrant transnationalism is a case in point. In this chapter, I combine a population studies perspective with insights from broader social science studies of transnationalism in order to address the question I posed initially: how can we best understand the ways in which transnationalism varies across space and changes over time? I start out by delimiting what should be understood by transnationalism and make the case for focusing on the reciprocal agency of individuals separated by borders. From this understanding, I proceed to lay out an analytical framework for explaining why transnational practices are more prevalent in some settings than in others, and why they grow or wane over time. The 110

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  111

chapter foregrounds the analytical concepts and uses diverse empirical material for illustration. Delimiting Transnationalism The most influential definition of transnationalism, offered by Basch et al. (1994, p. 7), remains a valuable reference point, but with one caveat. Transnationalism, they wrote, is ‘the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’. Multi-stranded social relations are indeed the essence, but the work of forging and sustaining them involves agency on both sides of borders and cannot be fully understood by referring to what ‘immigrants’ do. This definition not only leaves out the agency of people in countries of origin, but also reinforces a destination-country bias by referring to migrants as immigrants. The same people would be ‘emigrants’ from an origin-country perspective, which is no less relevant to the study of transnationalism. In the wake of pioneering publications in the 1990s, empirical research has examined specific transnational practices – the things people do that amount to forging and sustaining ties. Around the turn of the millennium, a number of publications proposed classifying transnational practices according to their sphere, scope, level, intensity and other characteristics (Faist 2000; Itzigsohn et al. 1999; Itzigsohn and Saucedo 2002; Landolt 2001; Portes et al. 1999). A minority of migrants are engaged in highly institutionalised and influential transnational practices, such as running transnational firms or political campaigns. Much larger numbers are engaged in broad-based, micro-level practices that are grounded in daily lives, activities and social relationships. This chapter is concerned with variation and change in such transnationalism ‘from below’ (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). But which micro-level practices are transnational? The destination-country bias has contributed to watering down the notion of transnationalism by obscuring the role of reciprocal agency. To be truly transnational, I would argue, a practice must involve people on both sides of the border. When immigrants organise a cultural event in their local community, for instance, this may be a reaffirmation of their ethnic or national identity, but it is not in itself a transnational practice (Maghbouleh 2013; Wilcox 2011). There is also a second way in which the term transnationalism has been deprived of content. The label ‘transnational’ is often used in ways that do not meaningfully exclude anything else as ‘not transnational’ (Portes 2001). The obvious example are casual references to ‘transnational migrants’ (Waite 2012) or ‘transnational migration’ (Mainwaring 2016), which leave open whether transnational is simply a preferred synonym to international, or if there is any connection to the specific phenomenon of forging and sustaining cross-border relations – which many international migrants do not engage in. There are other contexts where a more loose and playful engagement with the transnational is warranted (as shown by Vertovec 1999), but such fuzziness could make it hard to pinpoint variation and change. To address the question posed in the

112  Handbook on transnationalism

opening of this chapter, I therefore take a step in the opposite direction and focus on a specific, unquestionably transnational practice. The Special Place of Remittances It is the sum of transnational practices that underlies the emergence of transnational social fields and the transnational ties within them. But it opens analytical possibilities to narrow the scope, and there are several factors that make remittance transactions stand out. First, remittance-sending is a widespread practice across cultures and political contexts. Along with communication and family visits, sending remittances is part of the broad-based, popular backbone of transnationalism. Second, remittances are evidently important to both senders and receivers (Åkesson 2011; Carling 2014, Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume). Many migrants make considerable sacrifices to fulfil expectations for remittances (Datta 2012; Lindley 2010; Akuei 2005), and non-migrant recipients often depend on this income for family subsistence (Adams 2011; Akobeng 2016; Amare and Hohfeld 2016; Mondal and Khanam 2018; Wagle and Devkota 2018). I will focus on remittances with the assumption that the real cost of sending remittances makes it a good indicator of migrants’ broader transnational commitments. Third, remittances lie at the heart of concerns about the sustainability of transnationalism in countries of origin. What is known as ‘the remittances decay hypothesis’ in the literature is closely related to the broader question of how transnationalism develops over time (Brown 1998; Grieco 2004; Simati and Gibson 2001; Makina and Masenge 2015; Meyer 2020). Finally, sending remittances is a relatively well-defined act with quantifiable outcomes. This makes it possible, within the limits of methodological challenges, to make comparisons across groups and over time.

A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING VARIATION AND CHANGE The strength of migrant transnationalism differs across locations, between groups, and over time. As an example, imagine that the transnational ties of Poles in Norway are stronger than those of Sri Lankans, evident in more widespread and frequent communication and exchanges with the country of origin. If that is the case, how do we start explaining it? The central argument in this chapter is that differences in the strength of transnational ties can be broken down into two factors: prevalence and substance. The prevalence of transnational ties is the density of cross-border relationships that can mediate transnational practices. If transnationalism requires reciprocal agency, as I argue above, there must be individuals who are connected across borders, and who can interact. The prevalence of transnational ties thus refers to the number of

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  113

such potential conduits for transnational practices. Migrant transnationalism at the micro-level is overwhelmingly channelled through cross-border family relationships (Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). Therefore, the prevalence of transnational ties is primarily determined by the interaction of migration processes and family structures. Relationships across borders only enable migrant transnationalism. The variation in whether they are conduits for transnational practices or not, is what I refer to as the substance of transnational ties. Going back to the example of immigrants in Norway, we now have two possible explanations for the weaker transnationalism among Sri Lankans, compared to Poles. First, it could be that they are less likely to still be connected to people in their country of origin (lower prevalence of ties). Second, it could be that such relationships are less likely to be filled with transnational practices (lower substance). It is tempting to start problematising the notion of ‘relationships’ and the idea that transnational practices of various kinds can be added together to reach a specific level of transnationalism. In later sections, I will discuss both prevalence and substance in greater detail. But first, let us pursue the basic model further with the example of remittances. The populations of interest are the non-migrant residents at the origin (e.g. the populations of Poland and Sri Lanka) and the population of migrant origin at the destination (e.g. Polish and Sri Lankan migrants in Norway). These groups encompass the people who potentially engage in sending and receiving remittances. For now, we make three simplifying assumptions: 1. People are assumed to either have transnational family ties or not. 2. People are classified as either taking part in remittance exchanges or not. 3. Remittances are sent only between family members. The first two assumptions simply set a threshold for something that, in reality, is a matter of degree. People could have progressively more distant relatives abroad, but for analytical purposes, we could restrict ‘family ties’ to a specific set of kinship relations, depending on the cultural context. Similarly, the cut-off point for sending remittances could be defined by amount or frequency. The third assumption – that remittances are sent only between family members – is never entirely correct but can still be justifiable on both empirical and conceptual grounds. Studies that have specifically identified remittances between non-relatives have found that they are of marginal importance (Blue 2004; Orozco 2004; Simmons et al. 2005). Moreover, the money that migrants do send to the country of origin, but not to a family member, often represents something other than person-to-person remittances. For instance, many migrants shift money across borders for their own consumption or investment, rather than as remittances to others (Carling 2014; Boccagni and Erdal 2021). Some also make cross-border donations to charitable or political causes (Gardner 2018; Borchgrevink and Erdal 2017; Horst 2008). In a later section I return to the significance of these other transfers.

114  Handbook on transnationalism

If we, for now, accept the three simplifying assumptions, we see that family ties are necessary, but not sufficient for remittances to be sent. Figure 7.1 visualises the resulting breakdown of people at the origin and destination.

Figure 7.1

A model of actors in transnational exchange

At the place of destination – the right-hand side of the model – the largest circle is the entire migrant population (D3). Some of them have relatives at the origin (D2), and some of those who have relatives send remittances (D1). The relative sizes of the three groups of people allow us to define the concepts prevalence and substance. The prevalence of transnational ties can be defined as the proportion of people at the destination who have family members in the country of origin (D2 / D3). Similarly, the proportion of remittance-senders among those who have relatives at the origin (D1 / D2) is a simple operationalisation of the substance. In this way, prevalence and substance can both be expressed as a fraction or percentage. For instance, it could be that 50 per cent have family in the country of origin, and that among those who do, 20 per cent send remittances. These figures roughly match those for Sri Lankan immigrants in Norway. In this case, family members are restricted to parents, spouse and children and the threshold for remitting is set at sending money at least five times during the past year.1 The question we are ultimately interested in, is why the proportion of remittance-senders in the entire migrant population is large or small, growing or shrinking. We can approach an explanation by rethinking this proportion as ‘prevalence × substance’. If, as in the example of Sri Lankans, 50 per cent have family in the country of origin and 20 per cent of those who do send remittances, the calculation is 0.5 × 0.2 = 0.1. That is, every tenth Sri Lankan immigrant in Norway sends remittances on a regular basis. Among Poles, by contrast, every third migrant remits. This could either be because the prevalence of ties is higher, or because their substance is greater. Depending on which is the case, we would need to seek explana-

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  115

tions in different ways.2 For instance, differences in income – affecting the capacity to remit – would only affect the substance of ties, while differences in migration history shape the prevalence of ties. It is also possible to study the prevalence and substance of transnational ties from the perspective of the origin, i.e. the left-hand side of Figure 7.1. Here, the overall proportion of people receiving remittances can be seen as the proportion having family abroad (prevalence) multiplied by their likelihood of receiving remittances from those family members (substance). This separation invites analytical questions. For instance, if the poorest people rarely receive remittances, is it because they are unlikely to have family abroad (low prevalence) or because the emigrant relatives they do have fail to send any money (low substance)? In my own doctoral research in Cape Verde, West Africa, I used the separation of prevalence and substance to compare the transnational ties of people in different age groups (Carling 2007). The proportion of remittance-receivers followed a U-shaped curve, with highest levels among the young and the old. The likelihood of receiving remittances was virtually the same for people in their twenties and people above the age of 60, but for different reasons: the prevalence of transnational ties declined steadily with age, but the substance of those ties was highest among the elderly. Put differently, relatively few older persons had relatives abroad, but those who did could usually count on receiving remittances. Four Types of Change Over Time It follows from the arguments above that transnational exchanges can change over time in different ways. The ties are potential conduits for transnational practices that could see an expansion or contraction, meaning that progressively more, or fewer, people are connected with others across borders. Alternatively, the ties could remain the same while their substance could change. If the ties are gradually emptied of substance in the form of transnational exchanges, there is a process of depletion. Conversely, an intensification of transnational ties would mean increased levels of exchange within existing relationships. Table 7.1 gives an overview of this terminology. Table 7.1 Definition

Definitions and terminology Prevalence of transnational ties

Substance of transnational ties

The extent to which there are transnational

The extent to which existing transnational family

family ties between migrant populations and the ties are conduits for transnational practices population at their place of origin Decrease

Contraction

Depletion

Increase

Expansion

Intensification

The symmetrical design of Figure 7.1 and the conceptual model is deliberate. Transnational ties must be understood as reciprocal relationships between actors at

116  Handbook on transnationalism

opposite sides of transnational social fields. The transformation of transnational ties can therefore be observed from both perspectives. It is a strength of the proposed framework that it can be applied empirically to either the origin, the destination, or both, depending on the research design and data.

THE PREVALENCE OF TRANSNATIONAL TIES One person’s migration can be the beginning of a cycle that involves both the expansion and the contraction of transnational ties. The first migrants in a family stretch kinship ties across borders while subsequent migrants might close the gap. This pattern is exemplified by the experience of countries that supplied Europe with guest workers in the 1960s and early 1970s (Åkesson et al. 2012; Böcker 1994; Bilecen 2016). Figure 7.2 provides a simplified illustration of the expansion and contraction of transnational ties, based on my own research on migration from Cape Verde to the Netherlands (Carling 2008a, 2008b). When a young man migrated to the Europe in the 1960s, he started sending remittances to his wife and to his mother as soon as he found work (first stage). The money he sent also benefited his children and his father. After several years, he was able to bring his wife and children to the Netherlands. This meant the ‘de-transnationalisation’ of the ties with his wife and children, and only the remittance flow to his mother persisted (second stage). After a while, he started sending remittances to his sister (third stage). In the past he found that he could not afford it, first because he was remitting much of his income to his wife and mother, and then because setting up his family in the Netherlands was costly. After his parents passed away, the remittance flow to his sister remained (fourth stage). The loss of his parents also meant the end of his closest transnational family ties. When he and his sister are dead, the relationship between their children, who are cousins, will represent the only remaining transnational ties (stage five). These ties are not conduits for remittances today, and are unlikely to be so in the future. A Dynamic Web of Transnational Ties This stylised family history illustrates several important points that are relevant to migrant transnationalism more generally. First, remittance flows can wax and wane purely because of the expansion and contraction of transnational ties (Grieco 2004; de Haas and Plug 2006; Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume). In this example, only the third stage, when the initial migrant started sending remittances to his sister, represented a change in the substance of an existing transnational tie. Second, ties with elderly parents in the country of origin can be an important factor in slowing the decline of remittance flows after family reunification. The parent–child relationship is, in many contexts, one with strong obligations to provide support, and parents are much less likely than spouses and children to migrate through family reunion. Not only is it the case that parents may be unwilling to move

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  117

Figure 7.2

The evolution of remittance flows in a transnational family

to another country, but European countries, amongst others, have restrictive policies that severely limit the opportunities for parents to be reunified with their children (Bonizzoni 2015; Pellander 2018; Bolzman et al. 2008). In the Netherlands, for instance, this was, until 2012, only an option if the parent was single, and there was not a single child left in the country of origin who could provide care. In 2012 family reunification for elderly parents was abandoned altogether, though an opening was later created for exceptional cases where, in addition to meeting all other criteria, the parent was verifiably in ‘the last phase of life’ (Everaert Advocaaten 2020). It is not surprising, then, that remittances to parents account for a large proportion of the transfers to countries of origin. Surveys of remittance-senders from developing countries living in Norway, Canada and Australia have found that parents are the principal

118  Handbook on transnationalism

remittance receivers (Brown and Poirine 2005; Gulløy et al. 1997; Simmons et al. 2005). Third, transnational ties are unmade in two ways: when the non-migrant party migrates to join the migrant, and when one of the parties dies. When guest worker migration to north-western Europe was followed by family reunification on a large scale in the late 1970s and the 1980s, this constituted a massive contraction of transnational ties and endangered the remittance flows. For some countries, such as Morocco, emigration to new destinations in Southern Europe and North America has ensured the continued inflow of remittances. For Turkey, by contrast, there has been no corresponding diversification and remittances have indeed declined to very low levels. As noted above, the retention of ties with parents may also have slowed the decline in remittances significantly. When the parent generation passes away, however, there could be a substantial contraction of transnational ties (Beaton et al. 2017; James 1997; Horn, Chapter 5 in this volume). The fourth point emerging from the family history is that the loss of transnational ties is usually not experienced at the individual level in the country of origin, but only at the societal level. In the typical scenario presented in Figure 7.2, transnational ties with the migrants’ spouse and children come to an end through unification, and the ties with parents are dissolved when the parents die. Neither process involves a loss of remittances to any individual, but both contribute to the decline of total remittance flows. Only if the migrant happened to die before his sister (in the fifth stage) would anyone in the country of origin see their remittance income disappear. Still, when the primary recipient dies or migrates, others in the household who benefited from remittances will see the income disappear unless the transfers are sustained with one of the remaining household members as the primary recipient. Fifth, there is an element of ordering of transnational ties in terms of genealogical distance and genealogical asymmetry. The most important ties are those that involve expectations of support which pre-existed migration and were reinforced by it. The cousin-to-cousin relationships that remains in the fifth stage are perhaps less likely to produce remittances not only because they are more distant ties, but also because they are lateral ones without specific obligations. Furthermore, the parent generation have embodied intermediate ties that sheltered the children from the necessity or expectation of remitting. Such general shifts in transnational ties are a general feature, but how they play out is also culturally specific. Also, ties between siblings or cousins are, in some contexts, asymmetrical regardless of migration, for instance where elder brothers are expected to provide for younger ones. The sequence of migrations in the example of family history presented above is closely associated with the context of labour migration to north-western Europe in the post-war era. The increasingly restrictive immigration policy after the mid-1970s partly sustained transnational ties by obstructing the migration of siblings and other relatives who may otherwise have followed (Carling 2008b). However, the provisions for family reunion contributed to the depletion of transnational ties, and the restrictions on new, independent migration suppressed the expansion of transnational ties. The fact that migration continued unabated after the so-called ‘immigration

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  119

stop’ is widely publicised but fixating on the gross flow obscures the shift from migration that expanded transnational ties to migration that contracted these ties. The Changing Generational Composition If we limit the prevalence of transnational ties to the existence of transnational kinship relations, we must still grapple with ambiguity. In theory, kinship relations expand outwards from the individual in a never-ending network of progressively more distant ties. Across cultural contexts, there is also great variation in the meaning of different kinship relations and the interaction of social and biological aspects of relatedness. Such differences can limit the applicability of key elements of migration theory (Sana and Massey 2005). As a starting point, genealogical distance is still the best crude yardstick for proximity. The contraction of transnational ties can be seen as a dual process towards fewer ties and more distant ties. The changing generational composition of immigrant populations is an important element in this process. Children of immigrants are likely to have transnational kinship ties that are more distant in genealogical terms, than those of their parents. The scenario presented in Figure 7.2 is typical in that the initial first-generation migrant has siblings and parents in the country of origin while his children have transnational relationships with cousins and grandparents. Furthermore, those who are born in the country of residence have not formed close relationships in the country of origin that are later transnationalised through migration. Their upbringing away from the country of origin may also affect their feelings about kinship ties, so as to weaken their propensity to send remittances, for instance (Zhou 1997; Bledsoe and Sow 2011; Chung 2013; Lee 2006). While analyses of prevalence and substance help explain changes in transnationalism in the short and medium term, long-term transformation can only be understood by examining how the second and subsequent generations relate to their family’s country of origin (Bolognani 2014; Levitt and Waters 2002; Rusinovic 2008).

THE SUBSTANCE OF TRANSNATIONAL TIES Differences in the substance of transnational ties imply that some ties are conduits for transnational practices while others are not. A migrant could have two siblings in the country of origin and remit to only one of them – for whichever reason. Such synchronous differences in the substance of ties are mirrored by changes across time: transnational ties could endure, but be depleted of meaningful exchanges that contribute to creating a transnational social field. The previous section showed how changes in the prevalence of ties can be explained by a handful of intermediate factors – migration, family formation and death. By contrast, changes in the substance of transnational ties are elusive. Transnational practices are composite reciprocal transactions that defy simple explanation. Consequently, it is not possible to formulate a general theory of how the sub-

120  Handbook on transnationalism

stance of transnational ties varies or changes. However, explanations in specific cases can be found in four realms: attributes of the migrant, attributes of the non-migrant, characteristics of the relationship between the two, and external influences. Relevant attributes of the migrant include their access to resources as well as their priorities in allocating these resources (Carling et al. 2012; Carling and Hoelscher 2013). For instance, the propensity to remit may be higher among migrants who have a secure income or who intend to return to the country of origin. Beyond remittances, transnational practices such as return visits (Oeppen 2013; Marschall 2017; Duval 2004), political campaigning (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003; Boccagni et al. 2016), or the construction of a house (Boccagni and Erdal 2021; Lopez 2010) require resources that are in limited supply – and more so for some people than for others – and have alternative uses. In the country of origin, the individuals that are often seen to be on the receiving end of transnationalism are not without influence. They exercise agency in the reciprocal transactions of transnationalism, including the way in which remittances are requested, received and acknowledged. Moreover, the traits of societies of origin and the people who live there – as these traits are perceived by migrants – affect migrants’ decisions about engaging in transnational practices or not (Lee 2006; Strijp 1997). For instance, in a public Facebook video that was widely shared in the Cape Verdean diaspora in 2020, an emigrant in the US called on remittances to stop because, as he put it, ‘if the people doesn’t feel hunger’ they will not confront their leaders to ‘take what belongs to the people’. The same kind of argument about the reactionary effect of remittances has been made (and countered) by political scientists (Escribà-Folch et al. 2018). Characteristics of the relationship between potential senders and receivers can provide additional explanations for the presence or absence of transnational practices. As I argued in the context of the family migration history presented in Figure 7.2, genealogical distance is particularly important. In addition, the relationship could be shaped by the two parties’ history of co-residence, and material or moral debts. Finally, the substance of transnational ties is shaped by external influences, for instance, associated with the changing spheres of policy and technology. As an example, the dramatic fall in prices of international phone calls provided a stimulus for transnationalism in the 1990s (Vertovec 2004). More recently, social media has transformed communication within transnational families worldwide (Yount-André 2018; Almenara-Niebla and Ascanio-Sanchez 2020; Marino 2019; Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). Humanitarian crises often lead to short-term increases in remittances, though there is often a subsequent slump in transfers (Bragg et al. 2018). These four realms obviously overlap. The point is not to neatly categorise, but to be attentive to how the substance of ties is shaped in multiple ways from both sides of the transnational social field.

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  121

Two Key Factors: Policy and Time The hypothetic family history (Figure 7.2) illustrated how transnational ties may expand and contract with the passing of time under specific immigration policy regimes. Both immigration policy and time itself can also affect the substance of transnational ties. In a situation where non-migrants have strong aspirations to join their family members abroad, but are restricted from doing so by immigration policies, transnational ties can come under strain. Settled immigrants then acquire a gatekeeper role vis-à-vis their relatives who wish to migrate and are dependent on support in terms of family migration sponsorship, financing of migrant smugglers, or in other ways (Walton-Roberts 2003; Böcker 1994; Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak 2020). Emigrants can feel frustrated by their non-migrant relatives’ unrealistic requests for help to emigrate, and the relatives can be upset by their relatives’ unwillingness to help. In such situations, immigration policy not only affects the prevalence of ties, but also plays a role in the interpersonal relations that shape the substance of transnational ties. Maintaining transnational exchanges over several decades of separation requires continuous effort. It is not surprising, therefore, if the ties are depleted over time. But what is the effect of time itself? This question lends itself to empirical studies of remittance flows. Many studies have assessed the remittance decay hypothesis with disparate conclusions (Amuedo-Dorantes et al. 2005; Bettin and Lucchetti 2016; Menjívar et al. 1998; Simati and Gibson 2001). In most cases, however, the authors have not been able to isolate the effect of time by controlling for changes in the prevalence of transnational ties. A notable exception is Richard Brown’s (1998) study of remittance-sending among Tongans and Samoans, in which he concludes that ‘once all other variables are controlled for, the passage of time itself does not have a significant effect on migrants’ remittance behavior’ (Brown 1998, p. 137). This finding resonates with ethnographic studies from different parts of the world (Carling 2014). A migrant who remits to her parents, for instance, will cease to remit if the parents die or join her abroad – outcomes that are increasingly likely as years go by – but she is unlikely to stop sending money simply because the bond fades with time.

PREVALENCE AND SUBSTANCE AS TOOLS FOR RESEARCH In this chapter, I have shown how migrant transnationalism can be disaggregated into the prevalence and substance of ties, and that this partition helps explain variation and change. Data on remittances provide opportunities for quantified precision in the analysis, but that is certainly no requirement. The transnational turn in migration studies was fuelled by ethnographic methods, and conceptual advances must accommodate the messy and elusive realities of social relations. Beyond the realm of quantification, prevalence and substance can serve as tools for raising analytical questions about the withering or blooming of migrant transnationalism, at the level

122  Handbook on transnationalism

of individuals, households, groups or societies. And when the two concepts seem difficult to distinguish, this tension can itself be a springboard for thinking. One conceptual challenge is the potential circularity of determining the prevalence of transnational ties. In contexts where the link between genealogical relations and kinship are heavily modified by social practice, prevalence and substance may become almost indistinguishable. In short, if an emigrant relative’s status of ‘cousin’ is manifested by his regular remittances while other children of parents’ siblings are ignored, substance analytically precedes prevalence rather than the other way around. But the separation of prevalence and substance can also be applied at the societal level, without relying on reported kinship relations. Some countries have a huge proportion of their nationals abroad, suggesting highly prevalent transnational ties, while others have very few emigrants. Cutting across this diversity is variation in the transnational activities of each migrant. Again, remittances can be used to illustrate. Cape Verde, Lebanon and Yemen all receive remittances in the order of 12 per cent of GDP, but this similarity obscures underlying differences. Transnational ties are by far the most prevalent in Cape Verde, with more than 40 emigrants for every 100 residents. The corresponding figures for Lebanon and Yemen are 12 and 4, respectively.3 Notwithstanding data quality issues, this breakdown provides an entry point to understanding the processes at work. While Cape Verdeans are often permanently settled abroad, Yemeni migrants are primarily contract workers or recent refugees. Each Yemeni’s remittances might be modest in dollar terms, but they weigh heavily in a country ravaged by poverty and war. In the study of transnationalism, as in social science more generally, the things that should count are often not the same as the ones that can be counted. But migrant transnationalism always has a demographic dimension. The separation of prevalence and substance makes use of this fact to start sorting out complexity and identify what needs to be explained by other means. As this chapter has shown, much can be learned from attention to the structures of cross-border ties and generational shifts – in individual families and at the level of populations. Where transnationalism changes over time and varies across space, those structures are a fruitful starting point for seeking explanations.

NOTES 1. Calculated on the basis of data from the survey ‘Living conditions among immigrants in Norway 2016’ (Holmøy and Wiggen 2017). 2. In this case, prevalence and substance are both higher. Almost 90 per cent of Poles in Norway have family members in Poland and, among those who do, roughly 40 per cent send remittances. 3. Data used in this paragraph is provided by the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database.

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  123

REFERENCES Adams, Richard H. (2011), ‘Evaluating the economic impact of international remittances on developing countries using household surveys: A literature review’, Journal of Development Studies, 47 (6), 809–28. Åkesson, Lisa (2011), ‘Remittances and relationships: Exchange in Cape Verdean transnational families’, Ethnos, 76 (3), 326–47. Åkesson, Lisa, Jørgen Carling, and Heike Drotbohm (2012), ‘Mobility, moralities and motherhood: Navigating the contingencies of Cape Verdean lives’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (2), 237–60. Akobeng, Eric (2016), ‘Out of inequality and poverty: Evidence for the effectiveness of remittances in sub-Saharan Africa’, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 60, 207–23. Akuei, Stephanie R. (2005), ‘Remittances as unforeseen burdens: The livelihoods and social obligations of Sudanese refugees’, Global Commission on International Migration, Geneva. Almenara-Niebla, Silvia and Carmen Ascanio-Sanchez (2020), ‘Connected Sahrawi refugee diaspora in Spain: Gender, social media and digital transnational gossip’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 23, 768–83. Amare, Mulubrhan and Lena Hohfeld (2016), ‘Poverty transition in rural Vietnam: The role of migration and remittances’, Journal of Development Studies, 52 (10), 1463–78. Amuedo-Dorantes, Catalina, Cynthia Bansak and Susan Pozo (2005), ‘On the remitting patterns of immigrants: Evidence from Mexican survey data’, Economic Review, 90 (1), 37–58. Andrikopoulos, Apostolos and Jan W. Duyvendak (2020), ‘Migration, mobility and the dynamics of kinship: New barriers, new assemblages’, Ethnography, 21, 299–318. Basch, Linda G., Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Beaton, Kimberly, Svetlana Cerovic, Misael Galdamez, Metodij Hadzi-Vaskov, Franz Loyola, Zsoka Koczan, Bogdan Lissovolik, Jan K. Martijn, and Yulia Ustyugova (2017), ‘Migration and remittances in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engines of growth and macroeconomic stabilizers?’, International Monetary Fund Working Paper No. 17/144. Bettin, Giulia and Riccardo Lucchetti (2016), ‘Steady streams and sudden bursts: Persistence patterns in remittance decisions’, Journal of Population Economics, 29 (1), 263–92. Bilecen, Başak (2016) ‘Guest worker families in Europe’, in Constance L. Shehan (ed.), Encyclopedia of Family Studies, New York: Wiley. Bledsoe, Caroline H. and Papa Sow (2011), ‘Back to Africa: Second chances for the children of West African immigrants’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 73, 747–62. Blue, Sarah A. (2004), ‘State policy, economic crisis, gender, and family ties: Determinants of family remittances to Cuba’, Economic Geography, 80 (1), 63–82. Boccagni, Paolo and Marta Bivand Erdal (2021), ‘On the theoretical potential of “remittance houses”: Toward a research agenda across emigration contexts’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47 (5), 1066–83. Boccagni, Paolo, Jean-Michel Lafleur, and Peggy Levitt (2016), ‘Transnational politics as cultural circulation: Toward a conceptual understanding of migrant political participation on the move’, Mobilities, 11 (3), 444–63. Böcker, Anita (1994), ‘Chain migration over legally closed borders: Settled immigrants as bridgeheads and gatekeepers’, The Netherlands’ Journal of Social Sciences, 30, 87–106. Bolognani, Marta (2014), ‘Visits to the country of origin: How second-generation British Pakistanis shape transnational identity and maintain power asymmetries’, Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 14 (1), 103–20.

124  Handbook on transnationalism

Bolzman, Claudio, Elisabeth H. Durrett, Simon Anderfuhren-Biget, Marilène Vuille and Monique Jäggi (2008), ‘Migration of parents under family reunification policies: A national approach to a transnational problem – the case of Switzerland’, Retraite et Sociéte, 93–121. Bonizzoni, Paola (2015), ‘Uneven paths: Latin American women facing Italian family reunification policies’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (12), 2001–2020. Borchgrevink, Kaja and Marta Bivand Erdal (2017), ‘With faith in development: Organizing transnational Islamic charity’, Progress in Development Studies, 17, 214–28. Bragg, Catherine, Glenn Gibson, Haleigh King, Ashley A. Lefler and Faustin Ntoubandi (2018), ‘Remittances as aid following major sudden-onset natural disasters’, Disasters, 42 (1), 3–18. Brown, Richard P.C. (1998), ‘Do migrants’ remittances decline over time? Evidence from Tongans and Western Samoans in Australia’, Contemporary Pacific, 10 (1), 107–51. Brown, Richard P.C. and Bernard Poirine (2005), ‘A model of migrants’ remittances with human capital investment and intrafamilial transfers’, International Migration Review, 39 (2), 407–38. Carling, Jørgen (2007), ‘Transnationalism in the context of restrictive immigration policy’, PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. Carling, Jørgen (2008a), ‘The human dynamics of migrant transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31 (8), 1452–77. Carling, Jørgen (2008b), ‘Toward a demography of immigrant communities and their transnational potential’, International Migration Review, 42 (2), 449–75. Carling, Jørgen (2014), ‘Scripting remittances: Making sense of money transfers in transnational relationships’, International Migration Review, 48 (s1), S218–S262. Carling, Jørgen, Marta Bivand Erdal and Cindy Horst (2012), ‘How does conflict in migrants’ country of origin affect remittance-sending? Financial priorities and transnational obligations among Somalis and Pakistanis in Norway’, International Migration Review, 46 (2), 283–309. Carling, Jørgen and Kristian Hoelscher (2013), ‘The capacity and desire to remit: Comparing local and transnational influences’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (6), 939–58. Chung, Angie Y. (2013), ‘From caregivers to caretakers: The impact of family roles on ethnicity among children of Korean and Chinese immigrant families’, Qualitative Sociology, 36, 279–302. Datta, Kavita (2012), Migrants and Their Money: Surviving Financial Exclusion, Bristol: Policy Press. de Haas, Hein and Roald Plug (2006), ‘Cherishing the goose with the golden eggs: Trends in migrant remittances from Europe to Morocco 1970–2004’, International Migration Review, 40, 603–34. Duval, David T. (2004), ‘Conceptualizing return visits’, in Tim Coles and Dallen J. Timothy (eds), Tourism, Diasporas and Space, London: Routledge, pp. 50–61. Escribà-Folch, Abel, Covadonga Meseguer and Joseph Wright (2018), ‘Remittances and protest in dictatorships’, American Journal of Political Science, 62 (4), 889–904. Everaert Advocaaten (2020), ‘Ouder van buiten de EU naar Nederland laten komen’, Everaert Advocaaten, accessed 17 November 2020 at https://​www​.everaert​.nl/​nl/​ouders. Faist, Thomas (2000), The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gamlen, Alan (2019), Human Geopolitics: States, Emigrants, and the Rise of Diaspora Institutions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardner, Katy (2018), ‘Our own poor: Transnational charity, development gifts and the politics of suffering in Sylhet and the UK’, Modern Asian Studies, 52, 163–85. Grieco, Elizabeth M. (2004), ‘Will migrant remittances continue through time? A new answer to an old question’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 6 (2), 152–61.

Understanding variation and change in migrant transnationalism  125

Gulløy, Elisabeth, Sverre Blom and Agnes A. Ritland (1997), Levekår blant innvandrere 1996. Dokumentasjonsrapport med tabeller, Notater, 97/6, Oslo: Statistisk sentralbyrå. Holmøy, Aina and Kjersti S. Wiggen (2017), Levekårsundersøkelsen blant personer med innvandrerbakgrunn 2016. Dokumentasjonsrapport, Notater, 2017/20, Oslo: Statistics Norway. Horst, Cindy (2008), ‘The transnational political engagements of refugees: Remittance sending practices amongst Somalis in Norway – analysis’, Conflict, Security & Development, 8 (3), 317–39. Itzigsohn, José, Carlos D. Cabral, Esther H. Medina and Obed Vázquez (1999), ‘Mapping Dominican transnationalism: Narrow and broad transnational practices’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 316–39. Itzigsohn, José and Silvia G. Saucedo (2002), ‘Immigrant incorporation and sociocultural transnationalism’, International Migration Review, 36 (3), 766–98. James, K.E. (1997), ‘Reading the leaves: The role of Tongan women’s traditional wealth and other “contraflows” in the process of modern migration and remittance’, Pacific Studies, 20, 1–27. Landolt, Patricia (2001), ‘Salvadoran economic transnationalism: Embedded strategies for household maintenance, immigrant incorporation, and entrepreneurial expansion’, Global Networks, 1 (3), 217–41. Lee, Helen (2006), ‘“Tonga only wants our money”: The children of Tongan migrants’, in Stuart Firth (ed.), Globalisation and Governance in the Pacific Islands, Canberra: Australian National University Press. Levitt, Peggy and Mary C. Waters (eds) (2002), The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lindley, Anna (2010), The Early Morning Phone Call: Somali Refugees’ Remittances, New York: Berghahn Books. Lopez, Sarah L. (2010), ‘The remittance house: Architecture of migration in rural Mexico’, Buildings & Landscapes, 17, 33–52. Maghbouleh, Neda (2013), ‘The Ta’arof tournament: Cultural performances of ethno-national identity at a diasporic summer camp’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (5), 818–37. Mainwaring, Ċetta (2016), ‘Transnational migration and control: Immigration detention on the edge of Europe’, in Rich Furman, Douglas Epps and Greg Lamphear (eds), Detaining the Immigrant Other: Global and Transnational Issues, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 117–28. Makina, Daniel and Andries Masenge (2015), ‘The time pattern of remittances and the decay hypothesis: Evidence from migrants in South Africa’, Migration Letters, 12 (1), 79–90. Marino, Sara (2019), ‘Cook it, eat it, Skype it: Mobile media use in re-staging intimate culinary practices among transnational families’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 22 (4), 788–803. Marschall, Sabine (2017), ‘Migrants on home visits: Memory, identity and a shifting sense of self’, International Journal of Tourism Research, 19, 214–22. Menjívar, Cecilia, Julie DaVanzo, Lisa Greenwell and R. Burciaga Valdez (1998), ‘Remittance behavior among Salvadoran and Filipino immigrants in Los Angeles’, International Migration Review, 32 (1), 97–126. Meyer, Silke (2020), ‘“Home is where i spend my money”: Testing the remittance decay hypothesis with ethnographic data from an Austrian-Turkish community’, Social Inclusion, 8 (1), 275­–84. Mondal, Ripon K. and Rasheda Khanam (2018), ‘The impacts of international migrants’ remittances on household consumption volatility in developing countries’, Economic Analysis and Policy, 59, 171–87. Oeppen, Ceri (2013), ‘A stranger at “home”: interactions between transnational return visits and integration for Afghan-American professionals’, Global Networks, 13, 261–78.

126  Handbook on transnationalism

Orozco, Manuel (2004), Distant but Close: Guyanese Transnational Communities and their Remittances from the United States, Report Commisioned by USAID, January, Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue. Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva (2003), ‘The politics of migrants’ transnational political practices’, International Migration Review, 37, 760–786. Page, Ben and Claire Mercer (2012), ‘Why do people do stuff? Reconceptualizing remittance behaviour in diaspora-development research and policy’, Progress in Development Studies, 12 (1), 1–18. Pellander, Saara (2018), ‘The ageing body as a bordering site: Narrowing definitions of dependency for elderly family reunification in Finland’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8, 159–66. Portes, Alejandro (2001), ‘Introduction: The debates and significance of immigrant transnationalism’, Global Networks, 1, 181–93. Portes, Alejandro, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt (1999), ‘The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promises of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 217–37. Rusinovic, Katja (2008), ‘Transnational embeddedness: Transnational activities and networks among first- and second-generation immigrant entrepreneurs in the Netherlands’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34 (3), 431–51. Sana, Mariano and Douglas S. Massey (2005), ‘Household composition, family migration, and community context: Migrant remittances in four countries’, Social Science Quarterly, 86 (2), 509–28. Simati, Aunese M. and John Gibson (2001), ‘Do remittances decay? Evidence from Tuvaluan migrants in New Zealand’, Pacific Economic Bulletin, 16 (1), 55–63. Simmons, Alan, Dwaine Plaza and Victor Piché (2005), The Remittance Sending Practices of Haitians and Jamaicans in Canada, Mexico City: Population Division, United Nations Secretariat. Smith, Michael P. and Luis E. Guarnizo (eds) (1998), Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Strijp, Ruud (1997) ‘De mensen hier maken je gek. Marokkaanse migranten en hun bindingen met Marokko’, Migrantenstudies, 13, 148–66. Vertovec, Steven (1999), ‘Conceiving and researching transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22, 447–62. Vertovec, Steven (2004), ‘Cheap calls: The social glue of migrant transnationalism’, Global Networks, 4 (2), 219–24. Wagle, Udaya R. and Satis Devkota (2018), ‘The impact of foreign remittances on poverty in Nepal: A panel study of household survey data, 1996–2011’, World Development, 110, 38–50. Waite, Louise (2012), ‘Neo-assimilationist citizenship and belonging policies in Britain: Meanings for transnational migrants in northern England’, Geoforum, 43, 353–61. Walton-Roberts, Margaret (2003), ‘Transnational geographies: Indian immigration to Canada’, The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien, 47, 235–50. Wilcox, Hui (2011), ‘Movement in spaces of liminality: Chinese dance and immigrant identities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (2), 314–32. Yount-André, Chelsie (2018), ‘Gifts, trips and Facebook families: Children and the semiotics of kinship in transnational Senegal’, Africa, 88, 683–701. Zhou, Min (1997), ‘Growing up American: The challenge confronting immigrant children and children of immigrants’, Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 63–95.

PART II VARIETIES OF TRANSNATIONALISM

8. Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics Gerasimos Tsourapas

INTRODUCTION The October 2018 assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who had emigrated to the United States, inside Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate served as a brutal demonstration of how migrants and diaspora groups remain within reach of the long arm of authoritarian states. As the international politics of migration become more complex, it is necessary to understand the evolution of authoritarian practices in order to address their citizens’ cross-border mobility. With nationals of autocracies finding it exceedingly difficult to ‘exit’ the grip of their homelands, there is a pressing need for a deeper understanding of the strategies these governments are employing against their emigrant and diaspora communities, even those living in liberal democracies. Despite the growing interest in transnational state practices, we currently lack an adequate comparative framework for comprehending how autocracies adapt to migration, as researchers working separately on authoritarianism, diaspora studies and the sociology of migration have yet to integrate their findings into a coherent body of international studies scholarship. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, combined insights from these subfields are crucial in understanding autocratic practices across much of the world, from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa to Central Asia. Based on work on global autocracies (Tsourapas 2021), this chapter seeks to provide a novel transnational perspective on state practices in order to help consolidate an emerging research agenda on the interplay of international migration and authoritarianism. It focuses on the interaction between migrants, diasporas and the repressive strategies developed by authoritarian countries of origin. The chapter examines how autocracies are increasingly focused on silencing citizens’ ‘voice’ abroad. It proposes the term transnational authoritarianism in order to comprehend the practices of states that aim to effectively maximise the material benefits of citizens’ cross-border mobility while minimising political and security risks. In doing so, the chapter aims to amend the territorially bound concept of authoritarianism in order to achieve greater global applicability, by looking at a range of state-led transnational practices towards political exiles, journalists, students and others in the diaspora. The chapter proceeds as follows: it briefly sketches the emergence of transnational authoritarianism within political science, paying particular attention to interdisciplinary discussions between scholars of comparative politics, international relations 128

Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics  129

and migration studies, as well as transnationalism and diaspora studies. It proceeds to analyse the workings of transnational authoritarianism, namely any effort to prevent acts of political dissent against an authoritarian state by targeting one or more existing or potential members of its emigrant or diaspora communities. The main body demonstrates the diverse state practices of authoritarian states with regard to distinct strategies of coercion, legitimation and co-optation, as well as cooperation with a variety of non-state actors. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the importance of this emerging research agenda that brings together insights from the study of authoritarianism, transnationalism and international migration.

MIGRATION AND TRANSNATIONAL AUTHORITARIAN STATE PRACTICES Research on authoritarianism traditionally adopted an intra-state, rather than transnational, focus. More recently, scholars have examined the drivers that motivate international actors to promote or hinder democratisation abroad (Whitehead 1996; Levitsky and Way 2006), while others investigate the effects of such actions on authoritarian regime durability (Yom 2016). A strand of the literature has also focused on the politics of cross-border mobility in terms of Western destination countries’ relations with authoritarian countries of origin and/or transit, either in the context of Cold War bipolarity (Zolberg 1995) or in the management of forced migration (Betts and Loescher 2011). An emerging line of research examines how authoritarian regimes themselves behave in the international arena (Tansey 2016), by analysing processes of diffusion (Darwich 2017), learning (Heydemann and Leenders 2011), or interstate cooperation (Weyland 2017). Yet, while this work identifies key socio-political and security dynamics in transnational authoritarian contexts (Cooley and Heathershaw 2017), it does not theorise on specific policies towards citizens beyond the territorial boundaries of the authoritarian nation-state. This absence is particularly noticeable given the importance of citizens abroad for the survival of an autocratic regime: research has identified that they may challenge non-democracies via diasporic activism (Betts and Jones 2016), or they may reinforce the position of a hegemonic party via out-of-country voting (Brand 2010; see also Ford, Chapter 11 in this volume); that migrant remittances might strengthen authoritarianism in certain sending states (Ahmed 2012), or destabilise it in others (Escribà-Folch et al. 2018; see also Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume); that expatriates may affect processes of conflict at home (Miller and Ritter 2014); and that they transmit back information about social and political norms, including democratic values (Pérez-Armendáriz 2014). A similar gap exists in migration studies due to the historical tendency to approach the management of cross-border mobility through a Western lens focusing on immigration (Natter 2018). This perspective has identified the considerable material benefits that countries of origin – authoritarian or otherwise – stand to gain from mass emigration, primarily in the form of remittances (De Haas 2010; see also Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume). Yet, contrary to the expectations of this line of thinking,

130  Handbook on transnationalism

not all autocracies allow mass emigration. Even those that do may continue to target specific citizens living abroad. The subfield of diaspora studies has shed some light on such practices, although the sizeable literature on democracies’ diaspora policies is not mirrored in work on authoritarian states’ extraterritorial practices, which remains limited to single- or small-N research (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003a; Brand 2006; Glasius 2017). At the same time, it is debatable whether autocracies’ specific strategies towards political exiles, émigrés, or other individuals abroad that are perceived as threats to a regime constitute part of a state’s broader diaspora policy. In fact, in the context of Global South politics, these would tend to fall under the jurisdiction of Ministries of Interior, Security, or Defence rather than Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Migration, or Diaspora. Albert Hirschman (1978) has identified the mutually exclusive processes of exit versus voice, a framework that has informed work on transnationalism and diaspora studies. In the context of migration politics, citizens who are dissatisfied within an existing polity can either protest against it – i.e. exercise voice – or emigrate – i.e. engage in exit (cf. Dowding et al. 2000). In recent years, work on transnationalism and diaspora mobilisation demonstrates that Hirschman’s binary is not clear-cut (Ahmadov and Sasse 2016). Migrants are able to exercise their voice against authoritarian rule back home, as research on transnational advocacy networks and human rights issues also demonstrates (cf. Keck and Sikkink 1998).1 How do autocracies respond to the political and security risks generated by émigrés’ voice? One possibility would be for them to return to the mercantilist and communist tradition of restricting mass emigration, but that would produce severe economic and political drawbacks in an era of global interconnectedness. In fact, recent trends suggest that autocracies seek to reap the material benefits of free movement while ensuring that migrant and diaspora groups pose little political or security threat to their survival. Taking this into account, this chapter proposes the term transnational authoritarianism in order to encapsulate the practices of autocracies that aim to benefit economically from liberal migration policies, while addressing any political and security risks by monitoring and taking action against their populations abroad – in effect, silencing the voice of citizens abroad and their descendants. As defined here, transnational authoritarianism represents any effort to prevent acts of political dissent against an authoritarian state by targeting one or more existing or potential members of its emigrant or diaspora communities. Transnational authoritarianism may be constituted by one of three sets of practices – as they are implemented by states, international organisations, or non-state actors. The next sections detail the emergence of transnational authoritarianism and delineate three types of transnational authoritarian practices that illustrate its workings.

THE RISE OF TRANSNATIONAL AUTHORITARIANISM Given that autocracies may perceive cross-border mobility as a political or security threat, it is not surprising that states have engaged in a wide range of transna-

Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics  131

tional authoritarian practices either directly against targeted groups abroad or via cooperation with countries of transit and/or destination. I build on Gerschewski’s (2013) framework on the three pillars of autocratic stability – namely, repression, legitimation and co-optation – as it has been applied to the politics of migration and diasporas (Glasius 2017; Tsourapas 2019). As per my recent work on the workings of global autocracies (Tsourapas 2021), I synthesise transnational state practices by non-democracies into specific strategies of transnational repression, legitimation and co-optation (cf. Moss 2016; Cooley and Heathershaw 2017; Lemon 2019; Öztürk and Taş 2020). Finally, I expand on Adamson’s (2020) work on diasporas’ practices of transnational repression, by identifying how states cooperate with a number of non-state actors, namely diaspora groups, multinational corporations (MNCs), international organisations (IOs) and information and communications technology providers (ICTs). Strategies of repression aim at ‘direct’ or ‘physical’ state control of transnational space (Collyer and King 2015). The most extreme practices involve physical violence – the killing or kidnapping of citizens who have sought safety on foreign soil. While the Khashoggi case may constitute the most gruesome recent example of Saudi violence, the kingdom has been implicated in a number of disappearances of political dissenters, including the 2003 kidnapping of Prince Sultan bin Turki in Geneva and the 2015 disappearance of Prince Turki bin Bandar al-Saud, who had applied for asylum in France (Hearst 2018). In the context of the Cold War, the Bulgarian Secret Service was implicated in the assassination of Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov in London via a micro-engineered pellet containing ricin that was fired into his leg from an umbrella. The Pinochet regime ordered the killing of former diplomat Orlando Letelier, who used his post in the Institute for Policy Studies to become a key voice of Chilean resistance abroad; he died by a car bomb explosion in September 1976 in Washington, DC. More recently, prominent Chinese critics have reportedly been subjected to illicit renditions, for example the journalist and activist Li Xin who disappeared while seeking refuge in Thailand in January 2016, only to reportedly reappear in China a few days later (Buckley 2016). Similarly, the disappearance of five people associated with the Causeway Bay Books independent bookstore in Hong Kong (specialising in books on Chinese politics that are not available in the People’s Republic), has sparked concern for state-led renditions and contributed to the rise of Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. A range of states have developed transnational infrastructure of political operatives who are interlinked in social networks of emigrants and diaspora. One example with a long tradition in hard repressive strategies of transnational authoritarianism is Russia. A history of violence against its citizens abroad dates back to the early Soviet years, as Moscow targeted those opposed to the Bolsheviks and who had migrated abroad (the so-called ‘white émigrés’). The Joint State Political Directorate, the Soviet secret police, was believed to be implicated in the political assassinations of Pyotr Wrangel in Paris, Alexander Kutepov in Paris and others. From 1934 onwards, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) became responsible for such efforts, including the 1940 assassination of high-profile political dissident Leon

132  Handbook on transnationalism

Trotsky in Mexico City. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been implicated in violence against citizens that have received political asylum in Western countries – most notably, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London (2006), and Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury (2018). Many of these cases remain unresolved – for instance, Mikhail Lesin, the former media director of the Russian energy company Gazprom who had relocated to the United States in 2011, was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel room as a result of a blunt-force trauma to his head; and former business tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who had been granted asylum in the United Kingdom in 2003, was found dead in 2013 under mysterious circumstances, following two alleged unsuccessful assassinations attempts in 2003 and 2007. Given that only a small number of (high-profile) cases make international news, it is not unlikely that the number of victims of Russian transnational authoritarianism is much higher. But repression extends well beyond violence: a number of countries, including Syria and Iran, have employed digital surveillance of expatriate activities while also threatening their well-being or the safety of their relatives and friends back home (Moss 2016; Michaelsen 2018; Adamson and Tsourapas 2020). Malek Jandali, a well-known German-born Syrian-American pianist, reported that, following the performance of Watani Ana (I Am My Homeland), Syrian security forces beat up his parents in Homs, telling them ‘this is what happens when your son mocks the government’ (Kelemen 2011). In 2017, members of China’s Uighur community who were studying abroad were ordered to return home, with family members being held hostage by Chinese authorities until they did so (Radio Free Asia 2017). Central Asian states have also not hesitated to threaten residents who are relatives or friends of émigré activists (Cooley and Heathershaw 2017), while Turkey and other Middle Eastern states tend to rely on their consular and embassy services in order to control and intimidate overseas citizens and diaspora members (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003b). Israeli spy software is used by Saudi Arabia (which purchased the Pegasus spyware for $55 million in 2017), as well as by other Gulf monarchies to target diaspora dissidents, including Yahya Assiri, Ghanem al-Dosari and, reportedly, Khashoggi himself. Human Rights Watch has investigated how the Ethiopian government has sent emails to citizens abroad containing attachments infected with FinFisher, a German spyware programme that allows unfettered access to citizens’ computers (Horne 2014). One historical example of a state engaging in such forms of transnational authoritarianism is Algeria (Tsourapas 2020). In 1957, the newly-independent Algerian state established the Amicale des Algériens en France (the Friendship Society of Algerians in France, or AAF), ostensibly an organisation that represented the interests of Algerian emigrants abroad, tasked with the provision of Arabic-language classes and culture to the growing expatriate community across France (Collyer 2006). At the same time, the AAF provided effective surveillance of Algerian migrants abroad, and reported directly to the Algerian Ministry of the Interior. In fact, the Algerian state expanded AAF offices across France in a cell-like structure reminiscent of strategies developed by Algerian resistance during the Algerian War

Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics  133

of Independence. Mahmoud Guennez, a key actor during that war, became the AAF’s first president. Abdelkrim Gheraieb, the AAF’s second president, would boast about how it was tasked with monitoring dissent and reporting back to Algiers: ‘once a month, [Algerian President] Boumediene would summon me, very worried about the actions of political opponents in France’ (Beau 1995, p. 88). At some point, the AAF ‘reportedly sent daily detached reports to Algiers regarding developments in the community in France’ (Brand 2011, p. 5). Beyond repression, states’ legitimation strategies involve seeking ‘to guarantee active consent, compliance with the rule, passive obedience, or mere toleration within the population’ (Gerschewski 2013, p. 18) or, as Shain (2005) has argued, promoting discourses of ‘national loyalty’ abroad. Glasius (2017, p. 10) has demonstrated how these strategies may aim either at inclusion of populations abroad as ‘patriots’ or their exclusion as ‘traitors’. A number of regimes have aimed at promoting patriotism abroad for security reasons. In the Eritrean case, patriotism is mobilised via youth organisations or satellite television stations. For years, the Egyptian regime under Sadat and Mubarak would reward select groups of its diaspora community in the United States with complementary annual trips to the homeland, where expatriates would meet with high-ranking political elites (Brownlee 2012; Tsourapas 2015). More recently, in 2017, the Saudi Arabian Ministry of the Interior launched a new campaign, Kulluna Amn (‘We are All Security’), that encourages Saudi citizens to report on anyone who ‘published terrorist or extremist ideas’ at home or abroad, complete with a governmental mobile phone app (Hubbard 2017). The Syrian regime has reportedly used loyalists to infiltrate diasporic events in order to ensure compliance: Syrians living in the United States and Great Britain have reported how ‘[pro-regime Syrians] would take part in our community affairs and gala dinners … but we would never have the confidence or relaxation to speak in front of them openly about anything to do with the regime’ (Moss 2016, p. 487). Autocracies’ use of exclusivist legitimation strategies is also widespread. In the context of the Cold War, Soviet dissidents would duly have their citizenship removed – such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author of the 1973 classic The Gulag Archipelago. Members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who managed to flee Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s would also be denationalised and forbidden from returning to the homeland (Mitchell 1969). Moroccan expatriates who did not take part in social activities organised by the state-sponsored Fédération des Amicales des Marocains (modelled after Algeria’s AAF), have either expressed fear about returning to the Kingdom, or have met with a number of difficulties by border officials (Brand 2002). Hirt and Mohammad (2017) identify how those Eritreans leaving the state are seen as traitors: they are made to sign ‘letters of regret’ and promise to repay their loyalty via a 2 per cent diaspora tax, incurred for any consular transaction. In sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade, many returnees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo face suspicion by police officers upon arrival and at times arbitrary arrest and detention, particularly with regard to ‘unpatriotic’ activity while abroad (Alpes 2019).

134  Handbook on transnationalism

A key case of a state engaging in transnational authoritarianism via a strategy of legitimation was the state of Tunisia under the rule of Habib Bourguiba (1956–87) and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987–2011). Following the Algerian and Moroccan model for transnational authoritarianism, Tunisia fostered the development of an extensive network of Amicales des Travailleurs Tunisiens en France in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Nice in the late 1950s (and later in other locations within France and across Western Europe). Loyal Tunisian expatriates would be praised by the homeland: in fact, the Tunisian Minister of the Interior advised Tunisians in France that ‘your role is to preserve this outstanding image of Tunisiens résidents à l’étranger and to fight with us against these intruders who are generally as useless at home as they are abroad’ (Brand 2006, p. 112). Select expatriates would be rewarded by being allowed to partake in the administration of the Amicales. At the same time, exclusivist strategies included the denial of passport renewals for political activists abroad (Natter 2015). Rather than rely on repression, transnational authoritarianism in the Tunisian context relied on an intricate web of legitimation strategies that rewarded – or punished – expatriates accordingly. Beyond repression or legitimation, autocracies’ transnational practices involve co-optation, which include efforts at making populations abroad part of the elite via personal perks aimed at ensuring loyalty to the ruling regime. Across a number of autocracies, government schemes exist to shoulder the financial burden of emigration and living abroad, for a number of years, with the expectation that citizens would return to their home country and, typically, seek a position within the government. This is particularly common across the oil-producing Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia (Misnad 1985). In the past, when one’s ability to emigrate was subject to political rather than economic constraints, those citizens rewarded with the privilege of studying, training or working abroad would solidify their place in the state’s elite. The linkages between elite Western academic institutions and autocracies are extensive. The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the United Kingdom has trained generations of foreign royals – four reigning Arab monarchs (the rulers of Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman) have graduated from the Academy (BBC 2014). Most conspicuously, states have provided direct payments to members of their diasporas in order to provide intelligence – as the recent case of Jerry Chun Shing Lee highlights. In 2018, Lee (a former CIA officer and naturalised American citizen), was discovered to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in unexplained bank deposits, potentially in exchange for providing information to China (Goldman and Apuzzo 2018). Kazakhstan illustrates autocracies’ use of co-optation in their transnational authoritarianism strategies. It developed the Bolashak International Scholarship scheme in 1993, through which postgraduate students have been enabled to pursue opportunities abroad. The scheme constitutes a means towards creating a young, educated elite that remains loyal to the regime. By tying migrants’ future prospects to the fate of the ruling regime, Kazakhstan minimises political dissent abroad without using repression or legitimation tactics. At the same time, Kazakhstan avoids any risk of citizens’ time abroad affecting their social values by restricting the programme to only

Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics  135

funding postgraduate study, and encouraging students on the Bolashak programme to forge links with each other via Kazakh Societies, and the umbrella organisation KazAlliance (see Del Sordi 2018). Finally, autocracies have also developed strategies that involve varying degrees of cooperation with a range of non-state actors. Diaspora communities may form part of a state’s strategies of transnational authoritarianism in a variety of ways: for one, specific diaspora organisations within key host states may serve as instrument of autocracies abroad. For example, back in 1979, Britain withdrew its recognition of the National Union of Iraqi Students following the discovery of an internal directive asking its members to identify anti-Ba’ath activists across British universities (Makiya and al-Halīl 1998). In 2017, a Chinese graduating student caused a social media furore for criticising the Chinese government in a commencement event at the University of Maryland (Human Rights Watch 2020). MNCs’ cooperation with autocratic regimes in terms of their treatment of specific individuals in their employment is also a key dimension of transnational authoritarianism, particularly with regard to punishment for dissent: Cathay Pacific airlines (in which Air China has a minority stake) threatened to fire employees in Hong Kong who supported or participated in the local 2019 pro-democracy protests. Chief Executive Robert Hogg argued that ‘Cathay Pacific Group’s operations in mainland China are key to our business … we must and will comply’ (BBC 2019a). A number of IOs have cooperated with authoritarian states and have implicated themselves in the workings of transnational authoritarianism. For one, the Gulf Cooperation Council (which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) has been a key instrument for the diffusion of repressive measures, as oil-rich Arab monarchies have aimed to tackle the perceived transnational threat of the Muslim Brotherhood (Darwich 2017). Beyond this, over the last few years, there has been a proliferation of the use of ICTs as an effective component of autocracies’ transnational state practices (see also Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). Öztürk and Taş (2020) describe how Turkey developed a smartphone application for its German diaspora community to report potential members of the Gülen movement to Ankara. Persian Gulf countries, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are among those that have purchased Pegasus, the Israeli-made software that allows its operator to record phone calls and intercept text messages, including those made or sent on nominally encrypted apps (Groll 2016). Overall, this chapter has sketched how strategies of transnational authoritarianism may be employed by states, multilateral organisations or non-state organisations. At the same time, it is worth noting that these strategies are ideal types of transnational authoritarian practices – frequently, autocracies may employ a combination of strategies in order to minimise political dissent outside their borders. In the case of Libya under Colonel Gaddafi, the long arm of the state kept a close watch on the Libyan diaspora and did not hesitate to engage in frequent violent acts against political dissenters abroad. Libyan embassies and consulates abroad became centres of transnational authoritarian practices. At the same time, the Libyan regime moved beyond strategies of repression: Omar Sodani was charged with mobilising Libyan

136  Handbook on transnationalism

students against potential anti-regime activists in the 1980s, while the regime would duly reward loyalist members of its diaspora.

CONCLUSION ‘Anyone who says anything about our country, what happens to them?’ Nabila Makram, Egypt’s Minister for Immigration, asked in July 2019, during a private party for Egyptian expatriates in Toronto. ‘We cut’, she said while making a throat-slitting gesture with her hand (BBC 2019b). Given the rise of interest in the workings of transnational state practices, this chapter has aimed to explain how a range of autocracies has aimed at maintaining political control of their emigrant and diaspora communities abroad. It argued that this constitutes a departure from traditional understandings of authoritarianism, which tend to focus on how autocracies function within the borders of the nation-state. The chapter drew on a range of sources in order to examine the historical evolution of the phenomenon of transnational authoritarianism, which involves strategies of repression, legitimation, co-optation as well as cooperation with non-state actors. While the chapter has inductively demonstrated how each type of transnational authoritarianism operates to crush dissent abroad via a range of cases from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America, autocracies are not expected to limit their strategies to one type. In fact, authoritarian regimes are keen on combining these strategies, rather than using them in isolation, in order to maximise their effectiveness. Victims’ reports demonstrate this all too clearly: Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian-American digital activist, has argued that strangers would approach her on Facebook by using ‘fake accounts that have a generic name with a generic photo or without a photo. […] They tried to add us as friends with these new weird accounts and to get into our circles and monitor us’ (quoted in Michaelsen 2018, p. 255). In fact, the combination of different strategies produces an environment of fear that prevents exiles from escaping the long arm of their state – whether this is real or imagined. As Syrian refugees abroad would report, the Syrian regime’s totalitarian-style state repression has produced ‘a disposition of silence … carried beyond the homeland’ (quoted in Pearlman 2017, p. 25). Transnational authoritarianism, rather than intra-state coercion, arguably provides a more apt demonstration of the repertoires of disciplinary power, akin to the Foucauldian panopticon. Beyond contributing to the discussion on transnational state practices, the chapter seeks to pave the way for a new research on an unexplored dimension of authoritarian politics: for one, should we expect to observe transnational authoritarianism among certain autocracies? Would monarchical regimes engage with political dissent abroad in different ways than personalist regimes or military juntas? How may state strength affect variation, and does this explain why some states – such as Yemen – may not engage in transnational authoritarianism? What is the importance of the country of destination’s regime type in the development of autocracies’ strategies? Beyond this, how does transnational authoritarianism affect the domestic politics of liberal

Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics  137

democracies? Washington’s recent emphasis on diverting flows of highly qualified Chinese research talent to other countries in order to combat espionage has created fears of undue suspicion on immigrants with a Chinese connection (Yang 2020). In the United Kingdom, a Foreign Affairs Committee (2019) identified that the drive to recruit more international students led universities to be ‘undermined by overseas autocracies’ via ‘financial, political, and diplomatic pressure’ (BBC 2019c). At the same time, many processes of transnational repression, legitimation and co-optation exist in non-autocratic contexts. Israel’s targeted assassination programme, for instance, or extraordinary rendition policies by the United States demonstrate how a focus on extra-state repressive actions blurs the line between liberal and illiberal practices. A sustained discussion on the nature of transnational authoritarianism has the potential of revealing the wide repertoire of illiberal practices at the disposal of the modern state.

NOTE 1. Hirschman has also introduced the concept of ‘loyalty’, which he downplayed in later work, and which is not discussed here.

REFERENCES Adamson, Fiona B. (2020), ‘Non‐state authoritarianism and diaspora politics’, Global Networks, 20 (1), 150–169. Adamson, Fiona B. and Gerasimos Tsourapas (2020), ‘At home and abroad: Coercion-by-proxy as a tool of transnational repression’ [special report], Freedom House, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​freedomhouse​.org/​report/​special​-report/​2020/​home​-and​-abroad​-coercion​ -proxy​-tool​-transnational​-repression. Ahmadov, Anar K. and Gwendolyn Sasse (2016), ‘A voice despite exit: The role of assimilation, emigrant networks, and destination in emigrants’ transnational political engagement’, Comparative Political Studies, 49 (1), 78–114. Ahmed, Faisal Z. (2012), ‘The perils of unearned foreign income: Aid, remittances, and government survival’, American Political Science Review, 106 (1), 146–65. Alpes, Jill (2019), ‘After deportation, some Congolese returnees face detention and extortion’, Migration Policy Institute, 23 May, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​ www​ .migrationpolicy​.org/​article/​after​-deportation​-some​-congolese​-returnees​-face​-detention​ -and​-extortion. BBC (2014), ‘Sandhurst’s Sheikhs: Why do so many Gulf royals receive military training in the UK?’, BBC News, 26 August, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​ magazine​-28896860. BBC (2019a), ‘Cathay threatens to fire staff over HK protests’, BBC News, 12 August, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​business​-49317221. BBC (2019b), ‘Egypt Minister downplays threat to “cut” critics abroad’, BBC News, 24 July, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​world​-middle​-east​-49101954. BBC (2019c), ‘Universities “undermined by overseas autocracies”’, BBC News, 5 November, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​news/​education​-50302762. Beau, Nicolas (1995), Paris, Capitale Arabe, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

138  Handbook on transnationalism

Betts, Alexander and Will Jones (2016), Mobilising the Diaspora: How Refugees Challenge Authoritarianism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Betts, Alexander and Gil Loescher (eds) (2011), Refugees in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brand, Laurie A. (2002), States and Their Expatriates: Explaining the Development of Tunisian and Moroccan Emigration-Related Institutions, Working Paper No. 52, San Diego, CA: University of California-San Diego, The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. Brand, Laurie A. (2006), Citizens Abroad: Emigration and the State in the Middle East and North Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brand, Laurie A. (2010), ‘Authoritarian states and voting from abroad: North African experiences’, Comparative Politics, 43 (1), 81–99. Brand, Laurie A. (2011), Migrants and Sending States: Reflections on the Relationship, CARIM AS 2011/32, Robert Schuman Centre for Advance Studies, San Domenico di Fiesole, Florence, European University Institute. Brownlee, Jason (2012), Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance, New York: Cambridge University Press. Buckley, Chris (2016), ‘Journalist who sought refuge in Thailand is said to return to China’, The New York Times, 3 February, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​ 2016/​02/​04/​world/​asia/​china​-thailand​-li​-xin​.html. Collyer, Michael (2006), ‘Transnational political participation of Algerians in France: Extra-territorial civil society versus transnational governmentality’, Political Geography, 25 (7), 836–49. Collyer, Michael and Russell King (2015) ‘Producing transnational space: International migration and the extra-territorial reach of state power’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (2), 185–204. Cooley, Alexander A. and John Heathershaw (2017), Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Darwich, May (2017), ‘Creating the enemy, constructing the threat: The diffusion of repression against the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East’, Democratization, 24 (7), 1289–306. De Haas, Hein (2010), ‘Migration and development: A theoretical perspective’, International Migration Review, 44 (1), 227–64. Del Sordi, Adele (2018), ‘Sponsoring student mobility for development and authoritarian stability: Kazakhstan’s Bolashak programme’, Globalizations, 15 (2), 215–31. Dowding, Keith, Peter John, Thanos Mergoupis and Mark Vugt (2000), ‘Exit, voice and loyalty: Analytic and empirical developments’, European Journal of Political Research, 37 (4), 469–95. Escribà-Folch, Abel, Covadonga Meseguer and Joseph Wright (2018), ‘Remittances and protest in dictatorships’, American Journal of Political Science, 62 (4), 889–904. Gerschewski, Johannes (2013), ‘The three pillars of stability: Legitimation, repression, and co-optation in autocratic regimes’, Democratization, 20 (1), 13–38. Glasius, Marlies (2017), ‘Extraterritorial authoritarian practices: A framework’, Globalizations, 15 (2), 179–97. Goldman, Adam and Matt Apuzzo (2018), ‘Mysterious bank deposits fueled suspicion of former C.I.A. officer’, The New York Times, 24 January, accessed 8 July 2020 at https://​ www​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​01/​24/​world/​asia/​jerry​-lee​-bank​-deposits​-cia​-officer​-china​.html. Groll, Elias (2016), ‘The UAE spends big on Israeli spyware to listen in on a dissident’, Foreign Policy, 25 August, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​foreignpolicy​.com/​2016/​ 08/​25/​the​-uae​-spends​-big​-on​-israeli​-spyware​-to​-listen​-in​-on​-a​-dissident/​. Hearst, David (2018), ‘Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi criticised the regime – and paid with his life’, The Guardian, 8 October, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.theguardian​ .com/​commentisfree/​2018/​oct/​08/​saudi​-journalist​-jamal​-khashoggi​-istanbul.

Transnational state practices and authoritarian politics  139

Heydemann, Steven and Reinoud Leenders (2011), ‘Authoritarian learning and authoritarian resilience: Regime responses to the “Arab Awakening”’, Globalizations, 8 (5), 647–53. Hirschman, Albert (1978), ‘Exit, voice, and the state’, World Politics, 31 (1), 90–107. Hirt, Nicole and Abdulkader Saleh Mohammad (2017), ‘By way of patriotism, coercion, or instrumentalization: How the Eritrean regime makes use of the diaspora to stabilize its rule’, Globalizations, 15 (2), 232–47. Horne, Felix (2014), ‘How Ethiopia spies on its diaspora in Europe’, Human Rights Watch, 1 April, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.hrw​.org/​news/​2014/​04/​01/​how​-ethiopia​ -spies​-its​-diaspora​-europe. Hubbard, Ben (2017), ‘Saudi Arabia detains critics as new Crown Prince consolidates power’, The New York Times, 14 September, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.nytimes​ .com/​2017/​09/​14/​world/​middleeast/​saudi​-arabia​-clerics​.html. Human Rights Watch (2020), ‘China’s global threat to human rights’, Human Rights Watch World Report 2020, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.hrw​.org/​world​-report/​2020/​ china​-global​-threat​-to​-human​-rights. Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink (1998), Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kelemen, Michele (2011), ‘Syrian exiles fear long reach of secret police’, National Public Radio, 3 October, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.npr​.org/​2011/​10/​03/​141014954/​ syrian​-exiles​-fear​-long​-reach​-of​-secret​-police. Lemon, Edward (2019), ‘Weaponizing Interpol’, Journal of Democracy, 30 (2), 15–29. Levitsky, Steven and Lucan A. Way (2006), ‘Linkage versus leverage: Rethinking the international dimension of regime change’, Comparative Politics, 38 (4), 379–400. Makiya, Kanan and Samīr al-Halīl (1998), Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Michaelsen, Marcus (2018), ‘Exit and voice in a digital age: Iran’s exiled activists and the authoritarian state’, Globalizations, 15 (2), 248–64. Miller, Gina Lei and Emily Hencken Ritter (2014), ‘Emigrants and the onset of civil war’, Journal of Peace Research, 51 (1), 51–64. Misnad, Sheikha (1985), The Development of Modern Education in the Gulf, London: Ithaca Press. Mitchell, Richard P. (1969), The Society of the Muslim Brothers, London: Oxford University Press. Moss, Dana M. (2016), ‘Transnational repression, diaspora mobilization, and the case of the Arab Spring’, Social Problems, 63 (4), 480–498. Natter, Katharina (2015), ‘Revolution and political transition in Tunisia: A migration game changer?’, Migration Policy Institute, 28 May, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​ www​.migrationpolicy​.org/​article/​revolution​-and​-political​-transition​-tunisia​-migration​ -game​-changer. Natter, Katharina (2018), ‘Rethinking immigration policy theory beyond “Western liberal democracies”’, Comparative Migration Studies, 6 (1). Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva (2003a), Transnational Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany, London and New York: Routledge. Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva (2003b), ‘Turkey and the “Euro Turks”: Overseas nationals as an ambiguous asset’, in Eva Østergaard-Nielsen (ed.), International Migration and Sending Countries: Perceptions, Policies and Transnational Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 77–98. Öztürk, Ahmet Erdi and Hakkı Taş (2020), ‘The repertoire of extraterritorial repression: Diasporas and home states’, Migration Letters, 17 (1), 59–69. Pearlman, Wendy R. (2017), We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, New York: HarperCollins.

140  Handbook on transnationalism

Pérez-Armendáriz, Clarisa (2014), ‘Cross-border discussions and political behavior in migrant-sending countries’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 49 (1), 67–88. Radio Free Asia (2017), ‘Uyghurs studying abroad ordered back to Xinjiang under threat to families’, 9 May, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.rfa​.org/​english/​news/​uyghur/​ ordered​-05092017155554​.html. Shain, Yossi (2005), The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tansey, Oisín (2016), The International Politics of Authoritarian Rule, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsourapas, Gerasimos (2015), ‘Why do states develop multi-tier emigrant policies? Evidence from Egypt’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (13), 2192–214. Tsourapas, Gerasimos (2019), The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt: Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsourapas, Gerasimos (2020), ‘The long arm of the Arab state’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43 (2), 351–70. Tsourapas, Gerasimos (2021), ‘Global autocracies: Strategies of transnational repression, legitimation, and co-optation in world politics’, International Studies Review, 23 (3), 616–44. Weyland, Kurt (2017), ‘Autocratic diffusion and cooperation: The impact of interests vs. ideology’, Democratization, 24 (7), 1235–52. Whitehead, Laurence (ed.) (1996), The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yang, Yuan (2020), ‘US-China tech dispute: Suspicion in Silicon Valley’, Financial Times, 21 January, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.ft​.com/​content/​e5a92892​-1b77​-11ea​ -9186​-7348c2f183af. Yom, Sean L. (2016), From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East, New York: Columbia University Press. Zolberg, Aristide R. (1995), ‘From invitation to interdiction: U.S. foreign policy and immigration since 1945’, in Michael S. Teitelbaum and Myron Weiner (eds), Threatened Peoples, Threatened Borders: World Migration and US Policy, New York: W.W. Norton.

9. Transnational migration and homemaking Paolo Boccagni

INTRODUCTION Transnational migration occurs, Levitt (2004) wrote, ‘when “home” means more than one country’. Indeed, migrant transnationalism has fundamentally to do with the location(s) and distribution(s) of home, both in a symbolic sense and in a literal one. Hints to home and homemaking, and (less frequently) explicit reflections on this specific topic, can be found all across transnational migration studies in the last three decades. Yet, and despite the burgeoning literature on transnationalism, the heuristic potential of home as a lens on cross-border migration is yet to be fully appreciated. The same holds for the social study of home as a place or an infrastructure, a set of relationships associated with it and a critical indicator of the distribution, persistence and consequences of migrant transnational ties. Against this background, my contribution aims to analyse the main ways of using home as a category in transnational migration studies. It also presents the reasons why a more consistent focus on homemaking across borders can advance research on migrant transnationalism. In doing so I draw on a variety of empirical examples, including my research within ERC HOMInG.1

ON THE HOME–MIGRATION NEXUS: A BACKGROUND Migrants may have a plurality of homes as places of residence, as sources of identification and emotional attachment, even as housing infrastructures. However, how do the views, feelings and practices of home evolve under circumstances of transnational migration? This question requires some conceptual work on the notion of home and on the ways it is used in migration studies. Whether for migrants or for anybody else, discussing what home means and how it is experienced makes for a fundamental reflexive exercise into one’s biographical trajectory and living conditions. Over the last decades, a large interdisciplinary literature has shown that the notion of home conflates a spatial and material dimension with an emotional and ideational one (Blunt and Dowling 2006). From a sociological perspective, home can be seen less as a house or a place as such than as an attempt to emplace a sense of security, familiarity and control on a socio-material setting, on a variety of scales (Boccagni 2017a). Home is a fundamentally relational experience (Nowicka 2007) that covers all attempts to make oneself at home, as long as they are driven by a ‘homing’ need and desire, although their empirical outcomes are significantly diverse and uneven. 141

142  Handbook on transnationalism

Research in migration studies has moved well beyond the view of the migrant condition as ontologically opposite to being at home. Rather, migrants’ life experience exposes in a particularly vivid way the tension between the ascriptive dimension of home as place of origin and all that comes afterwards – which is marked, in this case, by an unusually high degree of geographical, and possibly socio-cultural discontinuity. Under circumstances of migration, home may be less a matter of full-fledged domesticity than an experience being cultivated from the margins, from far away or from the outside, thus illuminating questions of broader societal significance. ‘Questions of home and migration’ (Ahmed et al. 2003) can be investigated all across migration systems, casting light both on migrants’ experience and on the social consequences of migration. Having said this, the notion of home can be used for substantially different definitional purposes and empirical phenomena. What do people mean – researchers and their migrant interlocutors alike – whenever they use the word home, or its equivalent, across languages? By way of generalisation, and for sake of analytical clarity, three conceptual dimensions are worth distinguishing. The first designates the ascriptive side of home as a point of origin: the place, and the biographical and family circumstances that lie behind each of us in time (and, for people on the move, in space). Home is often used as synonym for place of origin. This raises the question of the ‘what’ of that place and of the related ways of living that persist over time, after displacement. For sure, home as ‘where I come from’ is important for purposes of self-identification, no less than external categorisation. Asking immigrants ‘where they come from’ may be a problematic question, as it unnecessarily privileges ethno-national background over other axes of identification. Yet the question does resonate with the weight of people’s past life experiences, and with their need to come to terms with it. For first-generation immigrants, in particular, home as ascription and birthplace keeps operating as a cognitive anchor and reference for identity and self-understanding, as I illustrate below. Simultaneous with the previous understanding is another constellation of meanings, which regards the socio-material side of home: a dwelling, or a functional equivalent for it. The place(s) and households in which people live are the most obvious marker of home in a descriptive sense, although not necessarily the most meaningful in an emotional sense. The migration experience, in particular, is a major source of discontinuity in housing and household conditions and pathways. By definition, migration entails physical (possibly forced) detachment from the previous dwellings; hence, different degrees of separation, temporary or otherwise, with household members and domestic structures, as well-discussed in the literature on transnational family living (cf. Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). Moreover, home as an infrastructure can hardly be disjointed from the domestic routines and material cultures associated with it as a lived space, whether in proximity or, for a number of migrants, over a distance. Last, there are many ways of understanding home that refer primarily to its practical and performable dimension, as an emplaced social experience. The emphasis shifts to the influence of different settings, infrastructures and socio-emotional

Transnational migration and homemaking  143

conditions on homemaking, i.e. on the ways of attaching a positive sense of home to particular portions of space. This is the context-dependent side of home, the latter notion being assumed in a normative, emotionally driven and morally shaped sense. In this optic, home can be made, unmade and remade again, on a variety of scales and rhythms, parallel to the life and migration course (Freund 2015; Ní Mhurchú 2021). As a social process, homemaking is temporally patterned and can rely on meaningful connections with the past (mediated by home-like memories and emotions), and/or with the future (in terms of projections, imaginaries, fears and desires). As important, the meaning of what should be made ‘home-like’ varies over time and across social groups and cultural contexts. Against this background, migrants’ transnational engagement opens up a wide research field to investigate questions of plurilocation, portability, immateriality and rootedness of home. In approaching these questions, I privilege a relatively narrow definition of transnationalism, focused on cross-border transactions that can be empirically observed and which exert distinctive social consequences (Boccagni 2012, 2017b). This leaves in a more peripheral position the ways of reproducing past or ethnic-related attitudes and practices that do not result in substantive connections with a transnational ‘elsewhere’. While I do consider transnationally oriented memories, imaginaries and emotions that have no direct influence on transnational social fields, I tend to focus more on migrant ways of bridging migration-related distance, and on the forms of homemaking that underpin them.

WHY DEFINING AND RESEARCHING HOME MATTERS TO TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION STUDIES At its core, a transnational optic subverts the commonsensical view of home as a single place, or a relatively fixed and unchanging life environment associated with it. As long as migrant individuals, families or groups are engaged in more locations far away from each other, they may have no inherent reason to call home any of them in particular, including those where they used to live in the past. They could indeed construct or even ‘have’ multiple places as home, and make themselves at home in more than one national context. In this sense, the transnational perspective is an invitation to move beyond a dichotomous view of the world along a neat division between one fixed and exclusive place that is called home, whatever the scale, and all that lies outside or far away from it (Rapport and Dawson 1998; Ahmed 1999; Al-Ali and Khoser 2002). Deconstructing the essentialised representation of home, along a pathway informed by the critiques of sedentarism (Malkki 1992) and methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003), means to open up a large, potentially indefinite space for the social definition, experience and study of home. What are the main characteristics of this space, and how far it can be appropriated through migrants’ transnational relationships, is the question to be discussed here. Home, to repeat, is not always the place in which one resides. Rather, as the migration literature has revealed, it can go transnational. People on the move can frame as

144  Handbook on transnationalism

home one or more locations simultaneously, including places that are geographically remote from them. These multi-sited ways of framing have significant and real consequences, as I illustrate below. Some form of home dislocation, as part and parcel of migrant transnational engagement, can be appreciated at four analytical levels: (i) labels and metaphors of home; (ii) emotions and identifications associated with it; (iii) practices of homemaking; and (iv) settings and ways of emplacing home. The discussion that follows relates home to the transnational, meaning by this the reach and impact of social action over a distance (Giddens 1990) – in this case, the ways of distant interaction between migrants and their points of reference elsewhere. In all of these respects, migrant transnational engagement is typically selective and time- and context-dependent (Boccagni 2012; Werbner 2013; Waldinger 2015). Moreover, it proceeds in parallel with a variety of trajectories of incorporation into receiving countries (possibly fragmented ones, all the more so in the case of transit, circular or step-wise migration). Put differently, the transnational facets of migrant everyday lives are neither the only relevant nor, generally speaking, the predominant ones. Rather, they need to be appreciated in the economy of their patterns of local incorporation, as individuals and members of families and larger social networks. Calling a Place Home and Appealing to it, Transnationally Under conditions of large-scale migration, the notion of home can be associated with a variety of extra-domestic scales, including a country as a whole – and including migrant countries of origin. This dual process of scaling up and reaching out of home, as a metaphor and a way of claiming control over space, raises interesting questions on the entanglements between migration, international relations and diaspora politics. What place is called home, why, and which actors are entitled to do so are issues that deserve in-depth discussion (Brickell 2012). For someone who has been living far away from the country of origin, calling the latter home is an apparently obvious and natural act. Affective, identitarian, moral and mnemonic aspects of home are all conflated in it. Several case studies suggest that the home–homeland equation tends to be prevalent among first-generation migrants, especially at the early stages of their stay abroad (e.g. Wiles 2008). This is only one of the several ways in which the notion of home, once seen from a distance, ‘scales up’ from the domestic space to an aggregate entity in the public domain – a country, but potentially also a city or a neighbourhood of origin. A parallel conflation underpins diaspora-reaching appeals from the countries of origin. It is not uncommon for them to stress migrants’ attachment to their national homes as a device to cultivate nostalgic allegiance and, more pragmatically, to attract money and human capital investments (Ralph 2009). In a similar vein, policy schemes to encourage return migration, often under the aegis of migration-and-development, may evoke migrants’ supposedly unabated sense of home (Flahaux 2017). However, the top-down discursive manipulation of home is instrumental to all sorts of political agendas. Home sounds in an equally evocative, vague and unproblematic tone in the wording of programmes for voluntary assisted return, including those supported

Transnational migration and homemaking  145

by the European Union. Even the initiatives for refugee return driven by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), portrayed as a sustainable and inherently desirable solution, appeal to the evocative and morally cogent power of homecoming. The same rhetorical device can be used to announce deportation plans against undocumented migrants or failed asylum seekers, like in the famous ‘Go Home Van’ campaign of the United Kingdom government in 2013 (Lowndes and Madziva 2014). In this case, constructing the country of origin as home is instrumental to depicting it as the natural and right place for migrants to stay, all the more so if they do not comply with a given legal status. The labelling of migrant countries of birth as home, whether from above or below, has both symbolic and concrete consequences. However, several studies suggest scepticism on the actual persistency of the homeland–home equation over time. From the perspective of immigrant newcomers, all that the previous home stood for may become more blurred and discontinuous as a result of their extended mobility and the socio-legal, cultural and psychological aftermaths (FitzGerald 2014; Waldinger 2015). How the bases of their past home experience are then reproduced and distributed on a local and transnational scale is critical to migrant identification with their host and home societies, from an often marginal position vis-à-vis both contexts (Boccagni 2017a). Indeed, the experiential bottom-up side of the homeland–home conflation is existentially ambiguous (Tete 2012). Instead, the top-down side can easily be exposed as instrumental to restrictive or downright hostile political agendas. It is no exaggeration to conclude that refusing the automatic overlapping between country of origin and home is far more than a lexical argument. Rather, it is foundational to a critical research agenda on the manipulation of the moral power of home, as a metaphor in the international debate on immigrants and refugees (Dobel 2010; Davies 2014). Feeling at Home, Transnationally There is more than instrumentalism, however, in the homeland–home conflation. Migrants’ projection of a sense of home towards some physically remote space varies along the life course and generally tends to fade over time. Nonetheless, it is enough as a social fact to warrant more reflection, as it purposefully combines two analytically distinct meanings of home, such as normality and belonging. What matters here is first of all the use of home to designate an ordinary and ‘natural’ state of things. Even long-settled migrants may keep referring to home to define their ‘normal’ ways of doing things; that is, the lifestyles, values and expected patterns of behaviour to which they were socialised in the countries of origin, depending also on their demographics (class, gender, urban or rural background, age at departure, ethnicity and so forth). Even people with little residual attachment to the country of origin may retain the latter as an implicit frame of reference to see and judge things in the place where they ‘actually’ live. This is no simple matter of cultural continuity or ethnic retention. Deeper than that, the question is how past life experiences, embedded in specific and meaningful places called home(s), are a term

146  Handbook on transnationalism

of comparison for what comes next – with all the revisits and selective memories of the past that follow. In this sense, home embraces memories of the past life in the country of origin, but also cognitive schemata and scripts of behaviour with a resilience and a life course of their own. Ways of eating, dressing, or spending leisure time include many cases in point. So do the ordinary rhythms of everyday life, which may significantly differ between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Feeling some aspects of (life in) the country of origin as home, then, is an exercise in biographical continuity with the past. It is a routinary act with affective, cognitive and moral bases; indeed, an emotion one should feel obliged to nourish or at least display, particularly upon return visits (Baldassar 2000; Wilding and Baldassar, Chapter 6 in this volume). In another, more explicit and intentional sense, feeling home (also) ‘there’ is an act to claim belonging and membership in a distinctive territorial location, on a continuum of scales between the entire country of origin and a particular dwelling. Along the early course of migration, the centrality of home as the community and family left behind is part of the moral repertoire of justifications of migration itself. If leaving home tends to raise high emotional and material risks, asserting its unabated centrality fulfils a number of functions. It is a form of sense-making, a source of solace and emotional compensation, but also a matter of concrete obligations and investments, like remittances. As far as so-called labour migrants are concerned, there may be little more generalisable than the initial reported view of migration as the way, and the price, to achieve a better future back home. While the following developments often reveal this attitude to be unrealistic, the construction of the context of origin as the ‘real home’ may persist further. At some level, this is indeed a mechanism of compensation. Under conditions of socio-legal marginality, or at least of decreased social status, the place a person comes from is home, as long as migrant identity and belonging are not in question there; in ‘the place’, quoting Robert Frost (1914), ‘where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in’. As long as migrants attach a sense of home to that particular place, the preconditions exist for a range of cross-border practices, or at least for a perceived need to enact them. However, the need or desire to locate home in a place that is emotionally close but physically distant has a temporal dimension, no less than a spatial one. All that has to do with projects, fantasies or myths of return can be appreciated as a way of projecting a sense of home towards the future, by deferring the actual enjoyment of a place that should feel like home (Markowitz and Stefansson 2004). The construction of the country of origin as home, then, has a future dimension – entangled with return – but also a past one, whenever migrants retain something of ‘what’ used to be their home place through ways of sociability and cultural activities. Whether a displaced sense of home is cultivated towards the past or towards the future, it may keep informing the intergenerational experience of so-called diasporas. This is often informed by an ambivalent fascination with an ancestral homeland, which may take the shape of an evocative and indeterminate ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1995). Among first-generation migrants, instead, return may well be a real fact, possibly resulting in circular mobility patterns (Anghel et al. 2019). Foundational to return is not only the persistent construction of the local community of origin as

Transnational migration and homemaking  147

home, but also some investment in tangible practices of homemaking – even home building – to prepare it, successfully or not. This calls for more attention in its own right. Making Home, Transnationally Whenever migrants are engaged in transnational relationships with their dear ones elsewhere, they articulate a view of home as more than an ascriptive state of things, even when it does overlap with the community of origin. Rather than simply lying there, home needs to be (co-)produced anew – it demands some meaningful attachment and investment from the migrant. In this optic, cross-border transactions between migrants and left-behinds, such as those related to remittances, transnational caregiving and cross-border investments, are also forms of transnational homemaking (Sandu 2013). The notion of homemaking has multiple meanings. A sociological way of understanding it emphasises ‘the active work of stabilization required to produce a reliable base, made up of repeated configurations of people, places and things, around which both habits and meaning can form’ (Lauster and Zhao 2017, p. 499). Importantly, such an ‘active work of stabilization’ can also be taken up across borders – in order to safeguard the pre-existing ‘reliable base’ – although at a higher cost and with more uncertainty. In this sense, transnational homemaking alludes to all forms of material, relational and emotional work whereby migrants reproduce and substantiate their attachment to at least another place, and/or a set of people, far away from them. Whether transnational homemaking results in sending remittances, in patterns of circular mobility or in sustained communication over a distance, it is meant as an attempt to bridge the physical distance between the relevant parties, or to counter the possible downsides of their long-term separation (Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume). Moreover, migrants’ dislocation of a sense of home is a temporal matter, no less than a spatial one. If all forms of transnational caregiving can be seen as a reaction to the spatial dislocation of home, long-term homebound investments (in housing, land ownership, microbusiness, etc.) have rather to do with a temporal dislocation of home. Their enactment follows a deep-rooted expectation that the communities of origin will return being home in a literal sense. As such, they lie at the core of a special investment, although this may be discontinuous and does not necessarily end up in homecoming. Migrant transnational housing investments, in particular, are an obvious example of a transnational social practice stricto sensu – one that, besides its intended function, is also a vehicle of cultural diffusion or of social remittances (López 2015). In both respects, transnational housing deserves more attention under the rubric of the transnational emplacement of home. Emplacing Home, Transnationally Home, as an optic and a set of place-related views, emotions and practices, involves also the infrastructures on which cross-border transactions rely. A significant part of

148  Handbook on transnationalism

transnational relationships involves primarily the family life of those concerned, and therefore everyday interactions in, or close to, the domestic space. Migrants’ houses, then, are both a privileged setting to research their connectedness over time, and one of the desired outcomes of their transnational investments. The process of improving or building anew migrants’ houses, dependent as it is on remittances, is an ideal subject to investigate the ebbs and flows of their transnational engagement. Whether such houses are completed or not, taken care of or not, inhabited or not, they have something to ‘say’ on the reach, contents and durability of the transnational ties of their owners (Boccagni 2017a). A ‘remittance house’, as the recent literature shows, is central to the material, affective and moral economy of the interactions between migrants and their close family members, as long as the latter live in the context of origin (López 2015; Schaab and Wagner 2020). Its very existence testifies to migrants’ economic and moral engagement to ‘be there’ in some way, and possibly return in the future. Whenever, instead, a remittance house is left incomplete, abandoned or ruined it convenes the opposite message: its owners abroad have a decreasing interest, or maybe just decreasing resources to reach out to the community of origin. Indeed, once there are no more close family members living there, the very sense of home associated with that place loses much of its emotional and moral power. Even in that case remittance houses are a privileged research venue for two fundamental reasons. First, they are exemplary of the frictions, dilemmas and limitations that migrants’ transnational action encounters. From the very outset, an investment in transnational housing reflects a decision to allocate savings in a housing arrangement where no migrant lives at present – in a sense, a second home. No wonder that such expense may clash with the ordinary housing costs in the context of settlement; all the more so if migrants opt to invest in home ownership abroad. Relatively little research has been done on the interaction between house-related expenses here and there, in the light of migrant housing strategies, preferences and resources (among exceptions, van der Horst 2010; Kuuire et al. 2016). However, there is no reason to expect that this interaction be exempt from trade-offs and dilemmas. In the second place, remittance houses could be expected to be a channel of transnational cultural diffusion. This may occur wherever the ways of building, furnishing, decorating and using them reproduce the infrastructural or aesthetic patterns that migrants noticed and appreciated abroad. Nonetheless, the bulk of ethnographies conducted so far suggests a different story (e.g. Klaufus 2010; Byrne 2016; Pauli and Bedorf 2018). Leaving aside basic infrastructural differences, the lived experience of these houses shows rather the diffusion of migrants’ own tastes, memories and claims for status. This is something far more selective, piecemeal and context-dependent than any distinctive cultural pattern being imported from elsewhere, whether this regards façades, interiors, or the allocation of domestic space. In an optic of cultural circulation, then, remittance houses are primarily a form of embodiment of migrants’ personal and family histories. In all of these respects, what a remittance house lacks or does not show – unfinished parts, deteriorated infrastructures, decorations left half-way – is as telling as what it displays or even shows off.

Transnational migration and homemaking  149

REVISITING THE TRANSNATIONAL AFTER ‘HOME’: (UN) PORTABILITY, (IM)MATERIALITY, AND BEYOND Little of the argument made so far is totally new to transnational migration studies. Nonetheless, a comprehensive understanding of the ways of claiming, feeling, making and emplacing home casts new light on the interdependence between scales and locations of migrants’ multilocal ties. It also provides a background to appreciate their variable reach and intensity over time. Furthermore, a home optic facilitates critical and reflexive elaboration on transnationalism in several respects. The first of them is portability (Smith 2014; Andersen and Pedersen 2018). Once we assume a multidimensional and flexible view of home, a question soon emerges – one that conjugates research interest with existential significance: what is fixed and what is portable, or in any way mobile, in the social experience of home after migration. The question is which material, relational or emotional elements of erstwhile home travel or circulate parallel to migration, and which stay put, or behind; parallel with this, what of the past home migrants are willing to carry with themselves, and what they end up carrying anyway, regardless of their intentions. This leads to yet another question, namely, how the infrastructural, relational and emotional bases of home change along the migration process and after it. There are obvious infrastructural limitations to the portability of home in a physical sense. Part of the significance of transnational object circulation (Povrzanović Frykman 2019), as well as the consumption of food or other cultural items evoking home (Bailey 2017; Kim 2019), has precisely to do with their being attempts to bridge this distance. These forms of material culture create settings or atmospheres that evoke the material or natural environment of past home, sensorially or mnemonically. Likewise, the growth in accessibility and use of ICT-based interactions can facilitate communication and perceived proximity with a place or a group of people that keep feeling home-like (e.g. Cabalquinto 2018). Yet, this can hardly replace bodily proximity and co-presence. A short vignette from my fieldwork in Ecuador illustrates this point. Upon my last visit there, I had the opportunity of a short stay at the newly built house (in absentia) of my Italo-Ecuadorian friend Miriam. Once I was back to visit her in Italy, we watched together a video I had taken inside her refurbished, clean and empty dwelling. This turned out to be a remarkably reflexive and moving experience. ‘It’s there, and I’m here’, whispered Miriam at the end, in an inadvertent overturn of the ‘I’m here, but I’m there’ that underpins, at least as a deep-rooted desire, transnational caregiving practices (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997). There was something uncanny in the distance between that place and her present life as an Italian citizen who had reunified her family and had no particular reason or interest to return. While that video was enough to give her some virtual co-presence, it seemed to articulate a twofold distance in front of her: in space, as the materiality of the building in which she had invested several years of remittances was simply un-portable; and in time, as the video was enough to highlight the distance between her early aspirations and imaginaries (i.e. a relatively short stay abroad and return to the new house), and

150  Handbook on transnationalism

all that had happened afterwards. While the spatial distance could still be bridged at the price of costly return visits, the distance in time was simply there to stay – or indeed, to increase further. Another broader question illuminated by migrant homemaking practices regards the working balance between the material and the immaterial side of home, and between the ascriptive and the achievable one. At the end of the day, (re)producing the past home, only to find out that this is possible in some respects but not in others, is not necessarily the most important question. More crucial is whether migrants are in a position – i.e. with sufficient resources, opportunities and rights, or not – to make themselves at home again, in the sense of attaching security, familiarity and control to their life circumstances; and what is the role of the transnational repertoires accessible to them, relative to the structure of opportunities they encounter abroad. Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2017) study of Latinos in Los Angeles urban gardens is a good case in point. By cultivating familiar plants in a context of joint sociability, her informants make themselves at home in ways that interweave senses, memories, tastes, bodily practices and even a deep-rooted connection with the earth. There is much more to this than a mechanical reproduction of their group identities, locally or transnationally articulated. It is then important to investigate how far forms of transnational homemaking – including those mediated by object circulation – have to do only with the ascriptive dimension of home, which may be a source of solace but also of oppression, or also with the performable one, i.e. with attempts to make oneself at home regardless of their (dis)continuity with the past, as discussed earlier in the chapter. At either analytical level, something deeply ambivalent occurs whenever home, or at least the need for it, tends to be de-materialised – i.e. associated with emotional repertoires of people and things far away in time and space, based at best on online interactions, but not with the place where people physically live. The de-materialisation of home may not be an inherently desirable development. Wherever migrants feel at home – if they do at all – only in online interactions or in ‘bubbles’ of past-related domesticity, rather than in the place where they live, this has to do with marginalised housing and living conditions more than with ‘grassroots cosmopolitanism’. A strong sensorial investment into some (imagined) home elsewhere can be a way to counter the lack of any material space that meets the minimal requirements to be called home in the here-and-now. In other words, cultivating home on the move, through all sorts of portable or immaterial means and routines, is a remarkable social fact in itself. However, it is not necessarily an emancipatory one. Moreover, as the existing research shows, the lack of a comfortable material infrastructure to be called home, or the distance from a fixed place that used to be called home, does not eliminate the need and desire to achieve that infrastructure or recover that place (Miller 2008; Brun and Fabos 2015). If anything, the more vulnerable people’s life circumstances, including on the move, the greater the need for some fixed place to be called home – whether that already exists or not. Ironically, research across non-material homemaking practices suggests a creeping urgency for materiality – even for rootedness – that should not go unnoticed. The very existence and maintenance of ‘remit-

Transnational migration and homemaking  151

tance houses’ points to the retention of highly localised forms of place attachment, at least among first-generation migrants. Overall, migrants’ experience of home under conditions of transnational connectedness may not fully overlap either with the place they live in or with the one they come from. Yet, what stems from this is not necessarily a bi- or multi-location of home. The latter may be hard to sustain over time, given the attendant material, relational and emotional costs. A case could rather be made, broadly speaking, for the persistence of some particular places and contexts – whether proximate or distant – as the predominant, or even exclusive sources of a sense of home for migrants. It is ultimately an empirical question, which has much to do with the opportunities for integration abroad, whether this potential bifocality ends up in a dual presence or, instead, in Sayad’s (2004) double absence. A pragmatic and intermediate arrangement, with the bulk of homemaking practices being concentrated ‘here’ while leaving some symbolic and affective intermittent connection with ‘there’, may well be the more sustainable and prevalent one over time. In this respect, it is probably better to have at least one place to call home, than having none.

CONCLUSIONS There are many ways to use the notion of home in a transnational framework, as this chapter shows. One of them follows the idea that the social experience of home has gained increasing autonomy from the material and contextual physicality of any particular place, as it would operate primarily through different features – such as online connectedness and the reproduction of a sense of home through the senses. This would make a notion of localised and contained place irrelevant, or anyway of little analytical purchase. In fact, it is my argument that for most international migrants this approach is overly simplistic. As much research shows, migrants’ home-related views, emotions and practices do rely also on non-material and non-proximate bases, which have a potential to convey meaningful emotions, attachments and relational engagements. Yet, this does not eliminate their need to bring the connections down to the ground and materialise them at some point, possibly within a (fixed) house. Whenever this is not achievable, major questions of social (in)justice and of denial of the right to make oneself at home are at stake (Kim 2019) – not celebrations of free-floating post-home cosmopolitanism. In short, political questions of access to, and control over, some material home-like space are crucial to transnational – no less than local – migration studies. Migrant views, emotions and practices about home are indeed fluid and always in the (un)making – a ‘lifelong project’ that ‘requires constant work’ (Freund 2015, p. 66). That said, their need to tie them down to specific material locations, or at least objects, should not go unnoticed. Emphasising the need for some degree of fixity helps also illuminate another major point: the path-dependency of home-related views, emotions and cultures. Home is also a matter of connections with the past, whether people wish to reproduce them or not. It is not just something to be recreated

152  Handbook on transnationalism

from scratch, wherever and with whomever. There is a tension between ascriptive and open-ended dimensions of what home means to people, and migrants’ transnational engagement makes it only more visible and complex. To conclude, it is worth drawing a distinction in the home and transnationalism debate, and leave it open for further elaboration, between two fundamentally different concepts: migrant homemaking as a strictly transnational development, which connects two or more different locales and groups herein, as a source of social change within the different parties in a transnational social field; and migrant homemaking as a transtemporal development, i.e. all the practices that involve a sensorial recreation of past life memories, stories and styles, without necessarily affecting the country of origin or other meaningful places in migrant lives. While the former version of homemaking is central to the life condition of first-generation migrants, the second home illuminates the societal consequences of migration over time, across countries and generations. A transition from a transnational optic (on the here-and-now) to a diasporic one (in a longer time perspective) could then be a valuable way ahead to make the most of a homemaking lens into migration studies.

NOTE 1. This chapter has been written in the scope of HOMInG – The Home-Migration Nexus – a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC-StG 678456, 2016-2021) and based at the University of Trento, Italy. More information is available at homing. soc.unitn.it. An early version of the chapter was presented at the National University of Singapore in August 2019. I am grateful to Sylvia Ang and Brenda Yeoh for the comments I received there.

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara (1999), ‘Home and away: Narratives of migration and estrangement’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2 (3), 329–47. Ahmed, Sara, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller (eds) (2003), Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Oxford: Berg. Al-Alì, Nadje and Khalid Koser (eds) (2002), New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home, London: Routledge. Andersen, Dorte J. and René E. Pedersen (2018), ‘Practicing home in the foreign: The multiple homing practices of artisan journeymen on the tramp’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8 (2), 82–90. Anghel, Remus G., Margit Fauser and Paolo Boccagni (eds) (2019), Transnational Return and Social Change, New York: Anthem. Bailey, Ajay (2017), ‘The migrant suitcase: Food, belonging and commensality among Indian migrants in The Netherlands’, Appetite, 110, 51–60. Baldassar, Loretta (2000), Visits Home: Migration Experiences Between Italy and Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Blunt, Alison and Robyn Dowling (2006), Home, Abingdon: Routledge. Boccagni, Paolo (2012), ‘Rethinking transnational studies’, European Journal of Social Theory, 15 (1), 117–32.

Transnational migration and homemaking  153

Boccagni, Paolo (2017a), Migration and the Search for Home, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Boccagni, Paolo (2017b), ‘Transnationalism’, in Bryan S. Turner, Chang Kyung-Sup, Cynthia F. Epstein, Peter Kivisto, William Outhwaite and J. Michael Ryan (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, New York: Wiley, accessed 9 December 2020 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​9781118430873​.est0391. Brah, Avtar (1995), Cartographies of Diaspora, London: Routledge. Brickell, Katherine (2012), ‘Geopolitics of home’, Geography Compass, 6 (10), 575–88. Brun, Cathrine and Anita Fabos (2015), ‘Making homes in limbo? A conceptual framework’, Refuge, 31 (1), 5–17. Byrne, Denis (2016), ‘Heritage corridors: Transnational flows and the built environment of migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42 (14), 2360–2378. Cabalquinto, Earvin C. (2018), ‘Home on the move: Negotiating differential domesticity in family life at a distance’, Media, Culture & Society, 40 (6), 795–816. Davies, Margaret (2014), ‘Home and state: Reflections on metaphor and practice’, Griffith Law Review, 21 (2), 153–75. Dobel, Patrick J. (2010), ‘The rhetorical possibilities of “home” in homeland security’, Administration and Society, 42 (5), 479–503. FitzGerald, David S. (2014), ‘The sociology of international migration’, in Caroline C. Brettell and James F. Hollifield (eds), Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, New York: Routledge, pp. 115–47. Flahaux, Marie-Laurence (2017), ‘Home, sweet home? The effect of return migration support mechanisms on reintegration’, Espace population sociétés, 1, 1–16. Freund, Alexander (2015), ‘Transnationalizing home in Winnipeg: Refugees’ stories of the places between the “here-and-there”’, Canadian Ethnic Studies, 47 (1), 61–86. Frost, Robert (1914), ‘The death of the hired man’, accessed 9 December 2020 at http://​www​ .poetryfoundation​.org/​poems/​44261/​the​-death​-of​-the​-hired​-man. Giddens, Anthony (1990), The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (2017), ‘At home in inner-city immigrant community gardens’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 32 (1), 13–28. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette and Ernestine Avila (1997), ‘“I’m here, but I’m there”: The meanings of Latina transnational motherhood’, Gender and Society, 11 (5), 548–71. Kim, Helen (2019), ‘Making homes here and away: Korean German nurses and practices of diasporic belonging’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 36 (3), 251–70. Klaufus, Christen (2010), ‘Watching the city grow: Remittances and sprawl in intermediate central American cities’, Environment and Urbanization, 22 (1), 125–37. Kuuire, Vincent Z., Godwin Arku, Isaac Luginaah, Michael Buzzelli and Teresa Abada (2016), ‘Transnationalism-integration nexus: Examining the relationship between transnational housing investment and homeownership status in Canada’, Geoforum, 75, 168–79. Lauster, Nathanael and Jing Zhao (2017), ‘Labor migration and the missing work of homemaking: Three forms of settling for Chinese-Canadian migrants’, Social Problems, 64 (4), 497–512. Levitt, Peggy (2004), ‘Transnational migrants: When “home” means more than one country’, Feature – Migration Information source, accessed 9 December 2020 at https://​ www​ .migrationpolicy​.org/​article/​transnational​-migrants​-when​-home​-means​-more​-one​-country. López, Sarah L. (2015), The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lowndes, Vivien and Roda Madziva (2014), ‘“When I look at this van, it’s not only a van”: Symbolic objects in the policing of migration’, Critical Social Policy, 36 (4), 672–92. Malkki, Liisa (1992), ‘National geographic: The rooting of peoples and territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees’, Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 24–44.

154  Handbook on transnationalism

Markowitz, Fran and Anders H. Stefansson (eds) (2004), Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Miller, Daniel (2008), ‘Migration, material culture and tragedy: Four moments in Caribbean migration’, Mobilities, 3 (3), 397–413. Ní Mhurchú, Aoileann (2021), ‘Intimately inhabiting borders: Walking in-between belonging and otherness through constructions of home’, Geopolitics, 26 (2), 404–24. Nowicka, Magdalena (2007), ‘Mobile locations: Construction of home in a group of mobile transnational professionals’, Global Networks, 7 (1), 69–86. Pauli, Julia and Franziska Bedorf (2018), ‘Retiring home? House construction, age inscriptions, and the building of belonging among Mexican migrants and their families in Chicago and rural Mexico’, Anthropology & Aging, 39 (1), 48–65. Povrzanović Frykman, Maja (2019), ‘Transnational dwelling and objects of connection’, Journal of European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis, 1, 28–45. Ralph, David (2009), ‘“Home is where the heart is”? Understandings of “home” among Irish-born return migrants from the United States’, Irish Studies Review, 17 (2), 183–200. Rapport, Nigel and Andrew Dawson (eds) (1998), Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement, Oxford: Berg. Sandu, Adriana (2013), ‘Transnational homemaking practices: Identity, belonging and informal learning’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 21 (4), 496–512. Sayad, Abdelmalek (2004), The Suffering of the Immigrant, Cambridge: Polity Press. Schaab, Titus and Lauren Wagner (2020), ‘Expanding transnational care networks: Comparing caring for families and caring for homes’, Global Networks, 20 (1), 190–207. Smith, Alana (2014), ‘Interpreting home in the transnational discourse: The case of post-EU enlargement poles in Dublin’, Home Cultures, 11 (1), 103–22. Tete, Suzanne Y.A. (2012), ‘“Any place could be home”: Embedding refugees’ voices into displacement resolution and state refugee policy’, Geoforum, 43 (1), 106–15. Van der Horst, Hilje (2010), ‘Dwellings in transnational lives: A biographical perspective on “Turkish-Dutch” houses in Turkey’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (7), 1175–92. Waldinger, Roger D. (2015), The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Werbner, Pnina (2013), ‘Migration and transnational studies’, in Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani (eds), A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 106–24. Wiles, Janine (2008), ‘Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London’, Global Networks, 8 (1), 116–37. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller (2003), ‘Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: An essay in historical epistemology’, The International Migration Review, 37 (3), 576–610.

10. Transnational organisations Ludger Pries and Rafael Bohlen

Transnationalisation as a process refers to increasing social, cultural, economic and political relations and interactions between locales across the borders of nation-states and national societies. From a social science perspective, transnationalisation leads to and is sustained by pluri-local cross-border social spaces at the micro, meso and macro level. At the micro level, transnationalisation refers to habitual and accountable patterns of transnational perception and action in everyday life (such as telecommunication, shipment of goods or sending of money and information seeking across borders). At the macro level, it includes social institutions as complex programmes of routines, rules and norms that increasingly structure significant terrains of life and span different countries (such as transnational educational careers or labour markets). Finally, at the meso level, transnationalisation is linked to the growth of organisations as stable and dense loci of cooperation with rules of membership, given structures and processes, and stated goals which span different countries. In the first section, we show how the understanding of organisations and of transnational organisations has evolved in the social sciences. In the following two sections, we then deal separately with multinational companies as transnational profit organisations, and with transnational non-profit organisations, offering some conceptual and empirical insights for each type of transnational organisation. The chapter concludes with desiderata for further research.

CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS OF TRANSNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS In the social sciences, organisations can be defined as relatively durable interaction frameworks of work with three characteristics: (1) planned, specific and variable goals and ends (why does the organisation exist, what are its aims; this distinguishes organisations from social groups with unspecific destinies and from social institutions where goals and ends are not settled explicitly); (2) membership rules (who belongs and who does not belong; this differentiates organisations from informal networks or spontaneous gatherings of persons); (3) deliberately established structures and processes of division of labour (who has to do what), rules and rituals of actions (what is accepted and expected behaviour) and power (who says what is to be done and who reports to whom). Organisations emerged with modern bourgeois societies as their principles of free association and free spatial mobility were crucial preconditions for their existence. In the twenty-first century, organisations significantly structure the life of people all over the world. We live in ‘societies of organizations’ 155

156  Handbook on transnationalism

(Perrow 1991), as seen in the crucial role of schools, hospitals, companies, soccer clubs, health insurance associations, universities or public administration bodies in social life. Scientific theory and research on organisations have developed in economics, sociology, psychology and administrative sciences. Drawing on social science perspectives, this chapter deals with profit and non-profit organisations separately as corresponding research has developed quite differently in these two areas. In a broad sense, transnational organisations can be defined as those organisations with activities that span the borders of different nation-states. In such a general understanding, the term ‘transnational’ is used synonymously to terms such as ‘international’ or ‘multinational’ or ‘cross-border’. In contrast, the concept of transnational organisation is used here in a more specific sense in accordance with two different strands of social science research on transnational organisations. First, since the 1980s, the notion of transnational organisation has emerged in studies of multinational companies as profit organisations. Here it characterises a specific type of company that operates across borders of different countries (Bartlett and Ghoshal 1989). Second, since the 1990s, the concept of transnational organisation arose in the context of transnationalism studies. Focusing mainly on everyday life and social spaces spanning places in different countries, here the model of transnational organisations is used in the context of specific aspects of transnational life and to refer to non-profit organisations such as social movement organisations or migrant organisations (Basch et al. 1994; Cohen and Kennedy 2000; Ford, Chapter 11 in this volume). The first stream of literature developed as part of organisation studies and business research. During the second half of the twentieth century, research interest focused on the relation between local, regional and national institutional structures and market conditions on the one hand, and the resource structures, coordination mechanisms and norm orientations of border crossing companies on the other (Dunning 1979). Based on studies by Perlmutter (1969) and Porter (1986), Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) developed four ideal types of multinational companies, where the term transnational organisation was given a specific and prominent meaning. While in former organisation studies ‘transnational’ was regularly used in an unspecific way of ‘cross-border’, Bartlett and Ghoshal attributed a specific meaning based on the criteria of pattern of resource distribution and strength of coordination between the different entities of an international organisation. Beginning in the 1990s and more scientifically nuanced during the 2000s, transnationalism developed as a specific research programme which gave detailed attention to transnational organisations. Almost at the same time and due to international peace and environmental coordinated protests, in social movement analysis, the perspective extended from analysing national movements to transnational social movements. Transnational non-profit organisations and their role in social movements (such as International Women’s Rights Action Watch and Greenpeace) became of growing interest. Transnational organisations were conceived as crucial pillars of social movements and the characteristics of countries and their corresponding functions for the transnational dynamics (e.g. as places of resource mobilisation, political opportunity functions, claims-making) became of special interest (Smith and Guarnizo 1998;

Transnational organisations  157

Tarrow 2005). In parallel and based on the emergence of influential border-spanning associations of labour migrants, interest in transnational migrant organisations also spawned questions such as: Are the principal aims and strategies of these organisations mainly oriented towards the countries of migrants’ origin (e.g. development issues) or the countries of migrants’ arrival (e.g. claims-making and the struggle for recognition)? Are the members of transnational migrant organisations concentrated in one country or distributed over several countries? Is the coordination of activities across borders (e.g. communication and meetings) weak or strong (Portes et al. 2007; Pries 2001; Pries and Sezgin 2012)? Thus, the social science literature on profit and non-profit transnational organisations developed in different contexts, using different theoretical framings and focused on different empirical objects. The following two sections focus on each body of research in turn.

TRANSNATIONAL COMPANIES AS PROFIT ORGANISATIONS Since the 1960s, researchers in the field of organisation and business studies increasingly focused on companies that were active in more than one country. They referred to classic studies on the relation between structure, strategy and environment of profit organisations (Chandler 1995 [1962]; Child 1972). Extending these approaches, guiding questions referred to the profiles and contours of internationalisation of business units and their relation to economic success, survival and expansion. In a classic study, Perlmutter (1969) analysed the aspects of organisational complexity, authority and decision making, evaluation and control, rewards and punishments, incentives, communication, information flow, identification, and perpetuation of personnel (recruiting, staffing, development). Strategies of successful internationalisation were identified along three axes: an ethnocentric or international strategy (spreading the headquarters’ products, production systems and cultural orientations around the world), a polycentric or multinational strategy (adapting local subsidiaries’ structures and strategies to the specificities of the corresponding country), and a geocentric or global strategy (overcoming headquarters’ and subsidiaries’ characteristics by developing worldwide standards, products and procedures and exploiting resource mobilisation at a global scale). This formulation was extended to encompass four ideal types of strategies (ethnocentric, polycentric, region-centric and geocentric) (Perlmutter and Heenan 1974). Many scholars developed similar models, based mainly on dimensions such as the degree of geospatial differentiation or homogenisation of resources, structures and strategies, and the strength of coordination of worldwide activities (Mueller 1994; Ruigrok and van Tulder 1995; Boyer et al. 1998). Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) presented a pioneering study and argued that the most promising answer to the differing and often contradicting requirements of cross-border active companies would be ‘the transnational solution’. Taking into account the configuration of values and capaci-

158  Handbook on transnationalism

ties, the role of foreign subsidiaries and the development and diffusion of knowledge, they differentiated between the two important dimensions, namely, the pattern of resource distribution and the strength of control and coordination. Companies with internationally decentralised resources (e.g. investments, employment, production facilities, research and development) and weak coordination features (control and communication direction and intensity) were characterised as multinational organisations. Companies with centralised resources and strong coordination were coined global organisations. Companies with centralised resources and weak coordination were called international or focal organisations. Finally, they characterised as transnational organisations all those with decentralised resources and strong coordination. For Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989), transnational organisations allow for ‘squaring the circle’ of adapting fully to local conditions and, at the same time, guaranteeing a global flow of knowledge. Empirical studies focusing on the actual type of profit organisations’ cross-border configurations found some evidence for the existence of transnational organisations (Leong and Tan 1993). But many studies also presented differentiating or even opposing evidence. Mees-Buss et al. (2019) found that Unilever, the company that Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) presented as an example of a transnational organisation developed towards becoming a global organisation. They argue in favour of organisational cycles rather than a clear linear tendency towards a (best-practice) ‘transnational solution’. In contrast to business studies, social science research tends to approach transnational organisations not primarily by using the criterion of efficiency or profitability (Clegg and Dunkerly 1987 [1980]). The term is used in a more general sense to refer to border-crossing organisations. The main aim is to understand the specific configurations of cross-border structures and strategies as embedded in internal, everyday social life and in external societal environments. Neo-institutional concepts approach organisations as open systems (Scott 2014 [1995]) and hold that individual and collective actors not only consider the rationally defined goals and aims of their organisations but also orient their behaviour according to the expectations of what they perceive as the organisational field, or the environment of the organisation (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). In this approach, organisational dynamics are influenced by specific norms and values as well as habits and action programmes, which are institutionalised in an organisational field by regulative, normative and cognitive pillars. A growing vein of literature has applied a neo-institutional frame for analysing dynamics of organisational transnationalisation (Arias and Guillén 1998; Adick et al. 2015; Tempel and Walgenbach, 2007). Studies focus mainly on the question of differences between institutional settings and the possibility of transferring certain organisational practices to subsidiaries, such as industrial models (Abo 1994, 1998), internationalisation strategies (Armagan and Ferreira 2005), production or manufacturing systems (Geppert and Matten 2006; Maurice et al. 1980; Pries 2003) and the subsidiaries’ reactions to differences in business systems and organisational practices (Morgan and Kristensen 2006; Reay and Hinings 2009).

Transnational organisations  159

Social science studies on institutional environments of cross-border and transnational organisations often include the concept of culture. Therein, culture is often conceptualised as a stable and substantial characteristic in the sense that ‘countries have culture’. Although this has been criticised as an essentialist approach, it is still quite influential. Many comparative and cross-cultural management studies follow the concept of Hofstede (1980), measuring the influences of a limited number of cultural dimensions (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity–femininity, collectivism–individualism, time orientation). In turn, studies of transnational organisations focus on the tensions between organisational and national cultures, and here, the field of transnational Human Resource Management (HRM) is of specific relevance. Particular aspects that feature in these studies include transnational intra-organisational mobility, expatriate staffing strategies, expatriates’ effectiveness or job satisfaction in the context of subsidiary characteristics (Adick et al. 2015; Froese and Peltokorpi 2011), or more generally, the preferences, expectations and behaviour of organisation members according to countries and regions (Warneke and Schneider 2011). Studies that consider social institutions often focus on a particular set of HRM practices, such as recruiting, training, promotion, compensation, the structure of work (Muller-Camen et al. 2011); the transfer of HRM policies (Ferner et al. 2005); home and host country effects in MNC or HRM practices (Gooderham et al. 2006; Pudelko and Harzing 2007); and the convergence, divergence or isomorphism of HRM practices (Paik et al. 2011). With regard to global staffing, Gaur et al. (2007) found that transnational companies often rely more on Parent Country Nationals (PCN) in institutionally distant environments for reasons related to the efficient transfer of management practices and company-specific capabilities. In general, the success of expatriate staffing is related to the institutional distance between the host and home country as well as to the subsidiary experience. These authors argue that PCNs are more often contracted in order to fulfil control tasks, while Host Country Nationals (HCNs) often provide a higher degree of legitimacy. In addition, the use of PCNs and HCNs is supposed to depend on the functional units. The more specific knowledge about the host country is required to perform well (e.g. in human resources or marketing), the more transnational companies rely on HCNs (Harzing 2001). In general, personnel management was found to be the most localised function in MNCs. In sum, transnational profit organisations trigger the transnationalisation of social relations and social spaces.

TRANSNATIONAL NON-PROFIT ORGANISATIONS During the last twenty years, substantial literature on transnational non-profit organisations has emerged, especially in migration studies and social movement research. Pioneering sociological and anthropological cross-border research between Mexico, Caribbean countries and the United States found that for long-term family relations between different countries, transnational organisations played a crucial role, such as to facilitate the sending of goods or money, and maintain community life and

160  Handbook on transnationalism

communication (Kearney and Nagengast 1989; Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Basch et al. 1994). Transnational migrant organisations were seen as having cultural and social influence, but also as having potential for economic impact, and for political lobbying in migrants’ countries of origin and of arrival (Itzigsohn et al. 1999; Vertovec 1999, 2004). Migrant organisations are not limited to a specific goal or activity. They can focus on providing community services, humanitarian or development aid, raising or facilitating private or public funding for investment projects, supporting certain social, religious or political interests and services, and mobilising for claims-making and collective action in the countries of migrants’ origin or arrival, or in both (Pasura, Chapter 17 in this volume). Although often interconnected with migration issues, transnational organisations also developed quite separately in social movement research on, for example, women rights, labour regulation and environmental protection (Ford, Chapter 11 in this volume). Even more pronounced than in the case of profit organisations, the term transnational is used in an unspecific way to indicate social relations, social fields or social spaces that span the borders of nation-states. But in contrast to classic studies on migrant organisations that focused on the countries of arrival, the new transnationalism addressed organisational relations between countries of origin and arrival (López et al. 2001; Itzigsohn and Saucedo 2002; Smith and Bakker 2005). Only few studies use the term transnational organisation in a specific way as first proposed by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) applying it to those organisations that are decentralised concerning their resources and structures, and at the same time strongly coordinated with respect to their mechanisms of control and cooperation (Pries 2008). In this more specific perspective, four questions were differentiated: (1) How are resources of these organisations mobilised and distributed (including membership, money and infrastructure) between places and countries? (2) What are the main goals, themes and demands (including subjects, target groups and allies)? (3) How and where are external activities arranged (including publication strategies, public activities and events)? (4) How are internal activities coordinated and controlled (including communication flows, meetings, internal elections and decision-making)? (Pries and Sezgin 2012, p. 19). In a pioneering study, Levitt (2001) examined migrant networks between the Dominican Republic and the USA. Although not explicitly concentrating on migrant organisations she takes them into account in explaining the functionality of migrant networks and their capacities to deeply influence everyday life, both in the country of origin and the country of arrival. In her work on transnational migration between Zacatecas/Mexico and places in the USA, Goldring (2002) examines relations between the Mexican state and ‘transmigrant organisations’ by showing how the former uses transnational migrant organisations as a possible leverage for implementing transnational and national policies. She focuses on hegemony and control exercised by the Mexican government to reintegrate (and to connect or bond) Mexicans living abroad with the Mexican homeland. As a result, transnational migrant organisations could gain considerable power as they are necessary for the

Transnational organisations  161

Mexican state to reach and influence its citizens abroad, and in so doing, also gain influence in the political arena in Mexico. Connected to the idea of exercising influence and promoting development in the country of origin are studies on so-called hometown associations (HTAs) (Fox and Bada 2008; Lamba-Nieves 2018). These can broadly be defined as those organisations whose members originate from a common area in the host country, mostly conceptualised rather locally than nationally, and who are providing support to these specific localities in terms of economic, social and political affairs. Originally set up mostly as cultural or social organisations to foster certain traditions from the homeland and to maintain close ties, these transnational organisations have grown in influence in recent decades, developing political agendas and engaging politically, for example, in their fight for political representation in the countries of origin and of arrival. In a large-scale study, Orozco and Lapointe (2004) examined over 100 Mexican HTAs, focusing on their activities, organisational history, structure and partnerships with other organisations in order to develop further typologies and a more nuanced understanding of these organisations. The study of HTAs gained prominence during the 2000s, and remains one of the core topics in studying transnational organisations to understand their potential in influencing development in their countries of origin. The vast majority of studies on HTAs in recent years has focused on the Latin American context (Strunk 2014; Bada 2014; Rivera-Salgado 2015; Duquette-Rury and Bada 2017), although some examples on other world regions have also emerged recently (Okamura 2014; Joseph et al. 2018). More generally, studies of transnational migrant organisations in terms of their demands, structures and agendas have mostly focused on Latin American migration to the USA (Portes et al. 2007; Schütze 2019) and Turkish migration in Europe (Caglar 2006; Pries and Sezgin 2012). Portes et al. (2007) broadened the horizon of transnational research on migrant organisations by examining the interrelationship of transnational migrant organisations and the migrants’ integration in the country of arrival. By comparing 90 Colombian, Dominican and Mexican migrant organisations in the USA and their projects in their country of origin, they find a significant level of civic, philanthropic, cultural and political transnational activities among these organisations. Given their role in development projects in countries of origin, these organisations are also attracting the attention of sending states. In showing that ‘contexts of exit and reception determine the origin, strength, and character of transnational organizations’ (Portes et al. 2007, p. 276), they analytically connect both the circumstances of leaving one’s country of origin and the reception in the country of arrival, with the likelihood and design of collective engagement in transnational migrant organisations. They conclude that there is a higher likelihood of engagement among migrants who reside in the country of arrival over a longer period, as well as those with higher levels of education compared to those who do not fulfil these criteria. In the European context, Østergaard-Nielsen’s (2003) study on Turkish organisations in Germany focuses on political engagement and lobbying rather than development work. She shows how these organisations address governments and institutions in the country of origin as well as in the country of arrival. She provides a typology

162  Handbook on transnationalism

of political practices of transnational migrant organisations by differentiating transnational immigration politics, homeland politics, diaspora politics and translocal politics. In a similar vein, Koopmans and Statham’s (2003) study of the political demands of migrant organisations in various European countries helps us understand how European citizenship and models of integration may influence transnational claims-making. Using a case study of Turkish HTAs in Germany, Caglar (2006) also highlights power structures in proposing a framework for HTAs that takes into account specific relations of spaces and states in neoliberalism. More recently, greater efforts have been made to connect research on International Relations (IR) with migrant organisations. Dijkzeul and Fauser (2020) present a variety of studies focusing on different roles of migrant organisations in lobbying for portable migrant labour rights (Bada and Gleeson 2020), promoting faith and secularism (Carpi and Fiddian-Quasmiyeh 2020), and in conflict management and peacebuilding (Zach 2020). In stark contrast to methodological nationalism and realism in traditional IR theory, the authors underline that transnational organisations can leverage their influence and strength by building and maintaining organisational networks, and thus have to be considered as powerful players in lobbying for their interests in the political arena (Dijkzeul et al. 2020). As seen, the field of transnational non-profit organisations is extensive, diverse and difficult to grasp. In contrast to scholars of migrant transnationalism who adopted a clear, yet not homogeneous, understanding of transnational processes and characteristics of migrant organisations. Those working from the perspective of Social Movement Theory have used the term ‘transnational organisation’ in a more diffused way, where ‘transnational’ is often synonymous with global, international or generally cross-border in describing social movements. Thus, the term could refer to large-scale NGOs such as Greenpeace, or small-scale specialised organisational entanglements, such as between European collective actors and the Polish lesbian and gay movement (Ayoub and Chetaille 2017) or the transnational migrant rights networks that Withers and Piper describe in Chapter 18 in this volume. As Social Movement Studies concentrate on a variety of actor groups and action levels that relate to specific dynamics and discourses of social movements, organisations and transnational organisations are not in the bull’s eye of attention. Examples include Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) analysis of cross-border advocacy networks and related NGOs, and Tarrow’s (2005) work that explicitly touched on the relation between international organisations such as the United Nations and social movements, arguing that established organisations could be considered as the relatively stable ‘coral reef’ vis-à-vis the volatile waves of social movements that come and go. In this light, (international or transnational) organisations structure, canalise and offer infrastructure to social movements by offering norms, regimes and resources, and in turn, social movements and transnational activism nurture organisations and help them adapt to new environments (della Porta and Diani 2006 [1997]; McAdam and Scott 2007 [2005]).

Transnational organisations  163

OUTLOOK AND FURTHER RESEARCH In a world that moves between globalisation and re-nationalisation – worldwide mobility of information, goods and people on the one hand, and localisation of belonging and claims-making on the other – transnational organisations are of crucial relevance. As non-profit organisations, they connect social lifeworlds and realities between places in different countries; work as channels of interests, power and leverage in cross-border political regimes; and feature in important ways for migration, social movements, humanitarian crises, interest representation, claims-making and feelings of belonging. As profit organisations they structure global value chains and span across local and national economies; promote and guide production models, culture and Human Resource Management strategies; and reflect and structure the distribution of power and other resources beyond the borders of national societies. Transnational organisations have been understood in a general sense as any kind of cross-border organisations, or in a more specific sense highlighting decentralised resource distribution and strong coordination. More analytical approaches to transnational organisations need to pay heed to their internal structures and processes, goals and tasks, values and culture, self-perceptions and definitions, hierarchies and formalisations, their access to and distribution of resources and their institutional organisational field. Similarly, transnationalism studies could gain much from an explicit approach to organisational research. Between micro-level research on everyday life, identity, families or individual mobility on the one hand, and the macro-level study of migration systems or governance structures, societal institutions, citizenship, value chains, nation-states or national societies on the other, focusing attention on organisations will allow us to give weight to an intersecting meso-level. This meso-level analysis is useful in tackling some of the challenges that the study of transnationalism faces. In organisational research, there exists a long tradition of differentiating between transnational and other types of international organisations such as multinational, global or focal ones. Adopting a precise and narrow concept of transnationalism, transnationalisation and transnationality can be helpful in overcoming the notion that transnationalism is nothing more than a fashionable and catch-all term with little rigour. The organisational approach is also helpful in reflecting on the relation between geographic and societal spaces more explicitly. Another advantage of concentrating on organisations is the large body of work on criteria, indicators and the operationalisation of their vital aspects. Organisations – in contrast to social movement or networks – are defined by more or less explicit structures and boundaries, as indicated by membership criteria as to who belongs and who does not. At the same time, there is a long tradition of developing and testing instruments in order to characterise and measure the structure of organisations. Ultimately, an organisational approach allows for comparisons of profit and non-profit organisations, thus integrating different streams of transnational studies and also interdisciplinary research among historians, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, lawyers and others. By leveraging

164  Handbook on transnationalism

transnationalism approaches into the broader social sciences, the study of transnational organisations has a promising future.

REFERENCES Abo, Tetsuo (ed.) (1994), Hybrid Factory: The Japanese Production System in the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Abo, Tetsuo (1998), ‘Hybridization of the Japanese production system in North America, newly industrializing economies, South-East Asia, and Europe: Contrasted configurations’, in Robert Boyer, Elsie Charron, Ulrich Jürgens and Steven Tolliday (eds), Between Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer and Hybridization of Productive Models in the International Automobile Industry, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 216–30. Adick, Christel, Bruno Gandlgruber, Martina Maletzky and Ludger Pries (eds) (2015), Cross-Border Staff Mobility. A Comparative Study of Profit and Non-Profit Organisations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Arias, Maria E. and Mauro Guillén (1998), ‘The transfer of organizational techniques across borders: Combining neo-institutional and comparative perspectives’, in José L. Alvarez (ed.), The Diffusion and Consumption of Business Knowledge, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 110–137. Armagan, Sungu and Manuel P. Ferreira (2005), ‘The impact of political culture on firms’ choice of exploitation–exploration internationalization strategy’, International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 5 (3), 275–91. Ayoub, Phillip M. and Agnès Chetaille (2017), ‘Movement/countermovement interaction and instrumental framing in a multi-level world: Rooting Polish lesbian and gay activism’, Social Movement Studies, 19 (1), 21–37. Bada, Xóchitl (2014), Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bada, Xóchitl and Shannon Gleeson (2020), ‘Transnational networks for portable migrant labor rights in North America’, in Dennis Dijkzeul and Margit Fauser (eds), Diaspora Organizations in International Affairs, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 43–63. Bartlett, Christopher A. and Sumantra Ghoshal (1989), Managing across Borders: The Transnational Solution, London: Century Business. Basch, Linda G., Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Boyer, Robert, Elsie Charron, Ulrich Jürgens and Steven Tolliday (eds) (1998), Between Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer and Hybridization of Productive Models in the International Automobile Industry, New York: Oxford University Press. Caglar, Ayse (2006), ‘Hometown associations, the rescaling of state spatiality and migrant grassroots transnationalism’, Global Networks, 6 (1), 1–22. Carpi, Estella and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2020), ‘Keeping the faith? Examining the roles of faith and secularism in Syrian diaspora organizations in Lebanon’, in D. Dijkzeul and M. Fauser (eds), Diaspora Organizations in International Affairs, London and New York: Routledge, pp.  129­­–49. Chandler, Alfred D. (1995 [1962]), Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Child, John (1972), ‘Organizational structure, environment and performance: The role of strategic choice’, Sociology, 6 (1), 1–22.

Transnational organisations  165

Clegg, Stewart and David Dunkerley (1987 [1980]), ‘Typologies of organizations’, in Stewart Clegg and David Dunkerley (eds), Organization, Class and Control, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 136–70. Cohen, Robin and Paul Kennedy (2000), Global Sociology, New York: New York University Press. della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani (2006 [1997]), Social Movements: An Introduction, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Dijkzeul, Dennis and Margit Fauser (eds) (2020), Diaspora Organizations in International Affairs, London and New York: Routledge. Dijkzeul, Dennis, Margit Fauser and Rafael Bohlen (2020), ‘Conclusions: What is the relevance of DOs for IR theory and research?’, in Dennis Dijkzeul and Margit Fauser (eds), Diaspora Organizations in International Affairs, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 176–93. DiMaggio, Paul and Walter W. Powell (1983), ‘The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields’, American Sociological Review, 48, 147–60. Dunning, John H. (1979), ‘Explaining changing patterns of international production: In defence of the eclectic theory’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 41 (4), 269­–95. Duquette-Rury, Lauren and Xóchitl Bada (2017), ‘Continuity and change in Mexican migrant hometown associations: Evidence from new survey research’, Migraciones Internacionales, 7 (1), 65–99. Ferner, Anthony, Phil Almond and Trevor Colling (2005), ‘Institutional theory and the cross-national transfer of employment policy: The case of “workforce diversity” in US multinationals’, Journal of International Business Studies, 36 (3), 304–21. Fox, Jonathan A. and Xóchitl Bada (2008), ‘Migrant organization and hometown impacts in rural Mexico’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 8 (2–3), 435–61. Froese, Fabian J. and Vesa Peltokorpi (2011), ‘Cultural distance and expatriate job satisfaction’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 35, 49–60. Gaur, Ajai S., Andrew Delios and Kulwant Singh (2007), ‘Institutional environments, staffing strategies, and subsidiary performance’, Journal of Management, 33 (4), 611–36. Geppert, Mike and Dirk Matten (2006), ‘Institutional influences on manufacturing organization in multinational corporations: The “cherrypicking” approach’, Organization Studies, 27 (4), 491–515. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (1992), ‘Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 645 (1), 1–24. Goldring, Luin (2002), ‘The Mexican state and transmigrant organizations: Negotiating the boundaries of membership and participation’, Latin American Research Review, 37 (3), 55–99. Gooderham, Paul, Odd Nordhaug and Kristen Ringdal (2006), ‘National embeddedness and calculative human resource management in US subsidiaries in Europe and Australia’, Human Relations, 59 (11), 1491–513. Harzing, Anne-Wil (2001), ‘Of bears, bumble-bees, and spiders: The role of expatriates in controlling foreign subsidiaries’, Journal of World Business, 36 (4), 366–79. Hofstede, G.H. (1980), Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Itzigsohn, Jose, Carlos D. Cabral, Esther H. Medina and Obed Vazquez (1999), ‘Mapping Dominican transnationalism: Narrow and broad transnational practices’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 316–39. Itzigsohn, Jose and Silvia G. Saucedo (2002), ‘Immigrant incorporation and sociocultural transnationalism’, International Migration Review, 36 (3), 766–98.

166  Handbook on transnationalism

Joseph, Sophonie M., Clara Irazábal and Alison M. Désir (2018), ‘Trust and hometown associations in Haitian Post‐earthquake reconstruction’, International Migration, 56 (1), 167–95. Kearney, Michael and Carole Nagengast (1989), Anthropological Perspectives on Transnational Communities in Rural California. Davis, CA: California Institute for Rural Studies, Working Group on Farm Labor and Rural Poverty (Working Paper No. 3). Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink (1998), Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Koopmans, Ruud and Paul Statham (2003), ‘How national citizenship shapes transnationalism: A comparative analysis of m claims-making in Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands’, in Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (eds), Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 195–238. Lamba-Nieves, Deepak (2018), ‘Hometown associations and the micropolitics of transnational community development’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (5), 754–72. Leong, Siew Meng and Chin Tiong Tan (1993), ‘Managing across borders: An empirical test of the Bartlett and Ghoshal [1989] organizational typology’, Journal of International Business Studies, 24 (3), 449–64. Levitt, Peggy (2001), The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. López, Felipe H., Luis E. Rabadan and Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda (2001), ‘Migrant associations, remittances, and regional development between Los Angeles and Oaxaca, Mexico’, Research Report Series No. 10, Los Angeles, CA: University of California. Maurice, Marc, Arndt Sorge and Malcolm Warner (1980), ‘Societal differences in organizing manufacturing units: A comparison of France, West Germany, and Great Britain’, Organization Studies, 1 (1), 59–86. McAdam, Doug and William R. Scott (2007 [2005]), ‘Organizations and movements’, in Gerald F. Davis, William R. Scott, Doug McAdam and Mayer Zald (eds), Social Movements and Organization Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 4–41. Mees-Buss, Jacqueline, Catherine Welch and D. Eleanor Westney (2019), ‘What happened to the transnational? The emergence of the neo-global corporation’, Journal of International Business Studies, 50 (9), 1513–43. Meyer, John W. and Brian Rowan (1977), ‘Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony’, American Journal of Sociology, 83 (2), 340–363. Morgan, Glenn and Peer H. Kristensen (2006), ‘The contested space of multinationals: Varieties of institutionalism, varieties of capitalism’, Human Relations, 59 (11), 1467–90. Mueller, Frank (1994), ‘Societal effect, organizational effect and globalization’, Organization Studies, 15 (3), 407–28. Muller-Camen, Michael, Richard Croucher, Matt Flynn and Heike Schröder (2011), ‘National institutions and employers’ age management practices in Britain and Germany: “Path dependence” and option exploration’, Human Relations, 64 (4), 507–30. Okamura, Jonathan Y. (2014), ‘Filipino hometown associations in Hawaii’, in Franklin Ng (ed.), Asian American Family Life and Community, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 341–53. Orozco, Manuel and Michelle Lapointe (2004), ‘Mexican hometown associations and development opportunities’, Journal of International Affairs, 57 (2), 31–51. Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva (2003), Transnational Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany, London and New York: Routledge. Paik, Yongsun, Irene H.S. Chow and Charles M. Vance (2011), ‘Interaction effects of globalization and institutional forces on international HRM practice: Illuminating the convergence‐ divergence debate’, Thunderbird International Business Review, 53 (5), 647–59. Perlmutter, Howard V. (1969), ‘The tortuous evolution of multinational enterprises’, Columbia Journal of World Business, 4 (1), 9–18.

Transnational organisations  167

Perlmutter, Howard V. and David A. Heenan (1974), ‘How multinational should your top managers be?’, Harvard Business Review, 52 (6), 121–32. Perrow, Charles (1991), ‘A society of organizations’, Theory and Society, 20 (6), 725–62. Porter, Michael E. (1986), ‘Competition in global industries: A conceptual framework’, in Michael E. Porter (ed.), Competition in Global Industries, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, pp. 15–60. Portes, Alejandro, Cristina Escobar and Alexandria W. Radford (2007), ‘Immigrant transnational organizations and development: A comparative study’, The Center for Migration and Development, Working Paper Series #05-07, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Pries, Ludger (ed.) (2001), New Transnational Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies, London: Routledge. Pries, Ludger (2003), ‘Emerging production systems in the transnationalisation of German car manufacturers: Adaptation, application or innovation?’, New Technology, Work and Employment, 18 (2), 82–100. Pries, Ludger (ed.) (2008), Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-Link of Organisations, London: Routledge. Pries, Ludger and Zeynep Sezgin (eds) (2012), Cross-Border Migrant Organizations in Comparative Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pudelko, Markus and Anne-Wil Harzing (2007), ‘Country‐of‐origin, localization, or dominance effect? An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries’, Human Resource Management, 46 (4), 535–59. Reay, Trish and C.R. Hinings (2009), ‘Managing the rivalry of competing institutional logics’, Organization Studies, 30 (6), 629–52. Rivera-Salgado, Gaspar (2015), ‘From hometown clubs to transnational social movement: The evolution of Oaxacan migrant associations in California’, Social Justice, 42 (3/4), 118–36. Ruigrok, Winfried and Rob van Tulder (1995), The Logic of International Restructuring: The Management of Dependencies in Rival Industrial Complexes, London and New York: Routledge. Schütze, Stephanie (2019), ‘Migration und transnationale Organisationsformen’, in Günther Maihold, Hartmut Sangmeister and Nikolaus Werz (eds), Lateinamerika, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 643–52. Scott, Richard (2014 [1995]), ‘Institutional theory meets organizations studies’, in Richard Scott (ed.), Institutions and Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 21–54. Smith, Michael P. and Matt Bakker (2005), ‘The transnational politics of the Tomato King: Meaning and impact’, Global Networks, 5 (2), 129–46. Smith, Michael P. and Luis E. Guarnizo (1998), ‘The locations of transnationalism’, in Michael Peter Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below: Comparative Urban and Community Research, New York: Routledge, pp. 3–34. Strunk, Christopher (2014), ‘“We are always thinking of our community”: Bolivian hometown associations, networks of reciprocity, and indigeneity in Washington D.C.’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40 (11), 1697–715. Tarrow, Sidney (2005), The New Transnational Activism, New York: Cambridge University Press. Tempel, Anne and Peter Walgenbach (2007), ‘Global standardization of organizational forms and management practices? What new institutionalism and the business-systems approach can learn from each other’, Journal of Management Studies, 44 (1), 1–24. Vertovec, Steven (1999), ‘Minority associations, networks and public policies: Reassessing relationships’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 25 (1), 21–42. Vertovec, Steven (2004), ‘Trends and impacts of migrant transnationalism’, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 3, Oxford: University of Oxford. Warneke, Doris and Martin R. Schneider (2011), ‘Expatriate compensation packages: What do employees prefer?’, Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, 18 (2), 236–56.

168  Handbook on transnationalism

Zach, Danielle A. (2020), ‘Conflict and peacebuilding’, in Dennis Dijkzeul and Margit Fauser (eds), Diaspora Organizations in International Affairs, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 150–175.

11. The politics of transnational activism Michele Ford

Transnational activism is not new, as the global labour, women’s and peace movements attest. However, following the end of the Cold War, we have seen a growing focus on issues that transcend national polities. In part, this interest is a result of the international expansion of economic infrastructure, which has encouraged a shift towards governance struggles that transcend national boundaries (della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Tarrow and della Porta 2005). An iconic marker in the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement was the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’, when some 40,000 protesters participated in the largest anti-globalisation protest ever held in the United States of America. This protest has been held up not only as a symbol of the struggle against neoliberalism (Guigni and Grasso 2020), but also the beginning of a new era in which ‘the world’s social movements began carving out their own global political space – autonomous from the agendas, priorities, and epistemologies of the inter-state order – where they could envision a different world and develop strategies for building it’ (Smith 2020, p. 116). The current wave of cross-border activism also responds to other issues that confront us collectively, and even as a species in some cases. It is no accident that two decades after the Battle of Seattle the streets of cities around the globe were filled with millions of protesters, many of them school children inspired by the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, taking part in a series of climate strikes (de Moor et al. 2019; Wahlstrom et al. 2019). Are these current forms of transnational activism just more of the same? Or are they qualitatively different by virtue of their focus, the actors involved, or their modes of engagement? Many of the issues raised are not new, and many of the tools and tactics employed by transnational activists have long been in use, from street-based protest to engagement with governments. At the same time, there is no doubt that activists’ cross-border interactions have become more frequent and more intense, fuelled by cheaper and faster travel and the advent of the internet, which has not only provided opportunities for instantaneous communication but also reduced the role of social movement gatekeepers and augmented the repertoires of action available to activists in virtually all parts of the globe. It is easy to romanticise these developments, which have allowed so many activists to transcend borders in so many ways. Yet transnational activism brings with it many challenges, not least the fact that the activists and organisations that constitute them are inherently grounded in nation-states (Pries and Bohlen, Chapter 10 in this volume). Equally, it raises questions about the kinds of actors that participate – formal organisations, loose coalitions, or even individuals – and the level of diffuseness that characterises most transnational campaigns. A third key consideration is the nature of the relationship among those actors, and between 169

170  Handbook on transnationalism

those actors and other parties, be they campaign targets or individuals or communities that a particular campaign is seeking to help. All three of these features of transnational activism are inherently political – as, of course, is its ultimate aim, namely, to achieve change. Nation-states can facilitate activism, but they can also block it through a variety of means, both in real life and increasingly through the very online platforms that have for past decades allowed activists to circumvent government censorship and control. Different kinds of actors have different levels of capacity when it comes to engaging across borders. While, in theory, anyone can start a social media campaign, they take a great deal of time and effort to run well. In addition, relationships among campaign participants can be highly unequal, even neo-colonial, in nature. For example, there are many instances in which well-meaning activists have acted on behalf of a disadvantaged community without first seeking their permission to do so or finding out what they want (Bridger 2015; Foerster 2009; Schomerus 2015). This chapter reflects on the politics of transnational activism. It begins with some definitions that help tighten our conception of what transnational activism is and does. It then focuses on the ways in which opportunity structures and actors interact to produce different forms of transnational activism, and the effect this interaction has on the processes, tools and tactics these actors employ – and, thus, ultimately, the outcomes of their activities and campaigns. Finally, it outlines some of the key internal challenges associated with transnational activist endeavours, as their constituents struggle to position themselves in relation to each other. The chapter concludes that, internal and external challenges notwithstanding, transnational activist networks, coalitions and movements provide structures and processes through which activists can seek to effect change within their own national contexts and beyond. These structures and processes not only provide alternative pathways for activists struggling to gain traction in their own countries, but also contribute to the construction of an informal regime (cf. Ford and Piper 2007) that plays an important part in defining the contours of our modern world.

DEFINITIONS The question of scale is key when it comes to differentiating between transnational and other forms of collective social activism. By definition, transnational activism involves actors, often located in different countries, working to promote or oppose some form of change internationally or across borders.1 But what does this actually mean? Khagram et al. (2002, p. 10) identify a number of potential transnational dimensions of activist campaigns, namely transnational sources of problems, transnational outcomes, and transnational processes of collective action. A classic example of the former is the increasing presence of global supply chains, through which branded garments and footwear sold in the Global North are produced in the Global South. It is conceivable that activism promoting better working conditions in those factories

The politics of transnational activism  171

could take place primarily in a different country, where those goods are consumed. Such activism, moreover, could have a transnational outcome by forcing brands to improve working conditions in countries where the goods were made. In terms of process, the campaign could, for example, involve activists in several countries – whether they be countries in which those goods were also consumed, or countries in which they were produced – who came together in an attempt to raise awareness of international labour standards. According to Khagram et al. (2002, p. 10), just one of these elements is required to make activism transnational. If we accept this argument, it follows that the activists involved in a transnational campaign at least feel they are operating as part of an endeavour that crosses borders, even if they do not have direct working relationships with activists pursuing similar goals at different scales or in different national settings.2 As this discussion suggests, the ways in which transnational campaigns cross borders can be quite distinct. Perhaps the most influential model in the literature remains the ‘boomerang pattern’ identified by Keck and Sikkink (1998), whereby domestic activist groups reach out to their international allies in an attempt to generate sufficient pressure to compensate for their inability to influence their own governments. In such cases, it is precisely because they operate at and across different scales that transnational networks, coalitions and movements can draw international attention to rights-violating behaviour and empower the local activists who initiated the campaign (Ford 2013).3 It is important to differentiate between campaigns that comply with this boomerang pattern and campaigns conducted on behalf of a group located in a different country. Such campaigns may still be transnational, in the sense that participating activists are geographically dispersed, but they may not involve domestic activists from that ‘target’ country in the way that a boomerang pattern campaign would. Casting back to the example provided above, this was arguably the case with some anti-sweatshop campaigns in the 1990s, which focused primarily on attempts to mobilise consumers in the United States and Europe rather than on building cross-border linkages with activists in the garment-producing countries themselves. It is also important to differentiate between campaigns that comply with this boomerang pattern and more universalist campaigns on issues like the environment, which affect all campaign actors in ways that a boomerang campaign does not. There are also scalar differences between the various targets of transnational activist campaigns. At one end of the spectrum, transnational activism may seek to change the international rules of the game, for example, by lobbying for the insertion of clauses requiring socially and environmentally responsible practices into multilateral trade agreements (O’Brien et al. 2000). At the other end of the spectrum, they may focus on the failure of a single government or corporation to desist from some form of unethical behaviour as, for example, in the polycentric transnational campaign that brings together activists from the Uyghur diaspora and others who are concerned with China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority (Trailovic 2019). Quite often, however, transnational activist campaigns exist somewhere in the middle, targeting multiple entities at different scales either simultaneously or over time (Zajak 2017b).

172  Handbook on transnationalism

Finally, it is important to parse the level of involvement of different actors in different locations and at different scales. For example, in the 1990s and 2000s, pro-democracy activists located outside Myanmar were very effective in galvanising international sentiment against the military junta, leading to both international condemnation and crippling bilateral sanctions that eventually forced the regime to relax its control (Hlaing 2007). However, activists within the country were in many ways divorced from these efforts, in part because of the severity of the circumstances with which they had to contend, and in part because they did not attract much financial support before the Saffron Revolution of 2007 (Beatty 2010). As this example confirms, the opportunity structures available to activists in different national contexts have a great deal of influence on the contours of activism not only within those national contexts, but transnationally.

OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES First and foremost, transnational activist endeavours ‘are shaped by states’ domestic structures and by the international institutions that they have created’ (Tarrow 2005, p. xiii). Regardless of the geographical scale or focus of a campaign, activists and activist organisations necessarily exist and operate within the physical, legal and social boundaries of particular states. This reality is recognised by scholars of transnational activism – although, as Caraway (2006, pp. 278–9) has noted, they tend to ‘either focus on how domestic factors affect the success of particular transnational efforts or on how transnational modes of political action alter outcomes at the national level’, with ‘startlingly little systematic consideration’ of the impact of domestic political environments on transnational activism itself (see also Zajak 2017a).4 It is difficult to pin down the precise impact of this ‘embeddedness in national politics’ on transnational activism (Grugel 2004, p. 37). What is clear is that, because activists are ‘rooted in the national arena’, they respond to domestic agendas even when participating in an international campaign (Silva 2013, p. 2; see also Caouette and Tadem 2013).5 For example, increasing refugee flows into Europe have influenced not only European governments’ attitudes towards border protection, but also activist agendas (El-Shaarawi and Razsa 2019; Pries 2018). Similarly, activists’ lived experience of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in the countries most exposed to international financial markets influenced their approach to anti-globalisation campaigns in the decade that followed (Fominaya and Hayes 2018). It is self-evident, also, that it is easier for activists – transnationally focused or otherwise – to operate in a robust democracy, with its provisions for freedom of expression and collective action, than in an authoritarian state (Piper and Uhlin 2004). At the same time, it has been widely observed that activists in less democratic societies have additional incentives to develop transnational alliances as a means of generating additional resources and momentum for their struggles (Caraway 2006). This mechanism is effective because all but a small handful of pariah states participate in the global system to some extent.

The politics of transnational activism  173

In order to secure international recognition, even authoritarian regimes are often willing to comply with international standards in relation to less politicised matters while simultaneously maintaining an iron grip in more controversial domains (Ford 2011). Opportunity structures are also influenced by myriad other factors that have their genesis in national politics. One of the more important of these involves shifts in the agendas of the governments of wealthy countries, which affect the flows of development aid that funds many civil society organisations in poorer countries, but also the international organisations that support them (Ford and Dibley 2011; Ford 2019). For example, the United States stopped funding for programmes promoting safe sex within brothels and required non-governmental organisations (NGOs) accessing anti-trafficking support to declare their opposition to sex work in the early 2000s. This decision had an immediate flow-on effect in countries like Indonesia, where activists pivoted to anti-trafficking in ways that had a dramatic impact on their activities, which shifted from programmes that educated sex workers to programmes designed to ‘save’ them (Lyons and Ford 2010). Similarly, the increasing concern of governments in the United States and Europe about refugees and irregular migration flows are reflected in the programmes they fund on migration. In less democratic contexts, meanwhile, activists face very real threats to their physical safety and broader well-being should they choose to challenge the status quo. The stark consequences of doing so are exemplified by the experiences of LGBT activists in countries where sexuality is actively policed by the state, including much of the Muslim world (Needham 2013). Their experiences in other countries, like Russia – where homosexuality has been decriminalised but social stigma remains strong – reminds us that an absence of formal protection for the rights of minority groups can also have a significant impact on the opportunity structures available to activists (Soboleva and Bakhmetjev 2015). Even where the political is not so personal, activists of all kinds face different levels of risk depending on the country in which they live. The position they occupy on the socio-economic spectrum and other axes of privilege also hold different meanings in different contexts. While childcare workers in Australia are poorly paid and may well be in precarious employment, the consequences of a decision to advocate for better pay and conditions – while real – are mediated by that country’s relatively low levels of unemployment and relatively intact social safety net in ways that they are not for a childcare worker in, say, India or Bangladesh (Hill et al. 2017). At the same time that activism remains inherently local, there is no doubt that the locus of political power has shifted some way towards regional and supranational structures like the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, but also towards private sector entities that operate across borders, most notably multinational enterprises (della Porta and Tarrow 2005, pp. 1–2). There is an inexorable logic underpinning the rise of transnational activist campaigns at a time when these international institutions, both private and public, are so instrumental in shaping our world. It is also no surprise that horizontal transnational networks of activists have formed around them (della Porta and Tarrow

174  Handbook on transnationalism

2005, p. 9). Yet, ultimately, even the organisations that engage exclusively at the international level are inherently local, and the context-induced differences between them necessarily play out in highly political ways.

ACTORS Opportunity structures are an undoubtedly important determinant of the contours of transnational activism. Yet, as Tarrow (2011, p. 12) reminds us, it is necessary also to acknowledge and consider its agential drivers. As he notes: ‘objective’ opportunities [do not] automatically trigger episodes of contentious politics or social movements, regardless of what people think or feel. Individuals need to perceive political opportunities and to be emotionally engaged by their claims if they are to be induced to participate in possibly risky and certainly costly collective actions; and they need to perceive constraints if they are to hesitate to take such actions.

But how do transnational networks or coalitions come together, and how do they work? Khagram et al. (2002) identify three distinct forms of transnational collective action, namely transnational advocacy networks, transnational coalitions, and transnational social movements. The three are distinguished by the intensity of interactions between their constituent parts. Transnational advocacy networks are loose groupings of actors brought together by their shared values, who exchange information and services but do not coordinate their tactics in a sustained way. The members of transnational coalitions engage more intensively, coordinating on strategies and tactics, often in the context of a transnational campaign. The most resource-intensive and difficult form of cross-border collaboration involves transnational social movements, the members of which have the capacity to mobilise in more than one country in a coordinated and sustained fashion. Keck and Sikkink (1998, p. 2) define transnational advocacy networks (TANs) as networks that include ‘relevant actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services’. In this model, actors may include intergovernmental institutions, such as UN Women, and even some government bodies, but they are driven primarily by NGOs. It is important to note that there has been significant debate about what kinds of organisations should be considered in analyses of transnational activism. Some scholars exclude government and intergovernmental institutions from their analyses, even in cases where they clearly contribute to a transnational network, coalition or movement. Others would go even further, for example, excluding trade unions despite the fact that they act like other institutionalised social movement organisations, both in terms of their participation in routine politics, and their deployment of commonly used tools of protest and mobilisation (Silva 2013, pp. 14–15).

The politics of transnational activism  175

According to Reitan (2007, p. 19), the ways in which different actors come together in these transnational activist endeavours are driven by one or more of three types of attribution. The first of these is worthiness, which generally comes into play when an NGO from the Global North identifies an NGO in the Global South as a potential partner. The second is interconnectedness, where different groups recognise that they are participating in a related struggle. The third is similarity, whereby activists in different geographical locations share a common identity, for example as young people, or peasant farmers, or workers. It is these different types of attribution, Reitan argues, that produce solidarity, and which lay the groundwork for transnational collective action. Importantly, also, actors may engage simultaneously in different kinds of transnational activism. For example, trade unions have long engaged in bilateral solidarity actions, but also participate in campaigns to expand the space for debates around international labour standards, such as by urging the International Labour Organization to issue new conventions. They also belong to international groupings including the International Trade Union Confederation, which acts as an umbrella group for national labour centres, and the Global Union Federations, which represent unions in specific sectors. These groupings and their precursors have increasingly focused on transnational campaigns in recent decades (Ford and Gillan 2015). Examples of this include the decades-long campaign by the Building and Wood Workers’ International for migrant worker rights in the construction of venues for use in large-scale sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup or the anti-privatisation campaign mounted by Public Services International (Ford 2019). These different campaigns are characterised by different configurations of processes, tools and tactics, which are brought together in different repertoires of action.

PROCESSES, TOOLS AND TACTICS There are many categorisations of the different kinds of processes that are embedded within different kinds of transnational campaigns (Olesen 2011; Reitan 2007; Silva 2013). Tarrow (2011, p. 235) identifies five that are commonly embedded in various examples of transnational activism. The first of these is domestication, or exertion of pressure on national governments to defend a country’s citizens from external threats. A second is the use of global frames to broaden the appeal of domestic issues, a tactic often used in boomerang-style campaigns. The third is transnational diffusion, whereby similar actions making similar claims are staged in different countries, as occurred during the climate protests of 2019. The fourth is externalisation, or the targeting of external actors by domestic actors, as in the case of campaigns against environmental degradation caused by multinational enterprises. The fifth involves transnational coalition formation, or the creation of transnational networks to support cooperation across borders as, for example, in the case of the World Social Forum. Embedded in these processes are a range of tactics. Keck and Sikkink (1998) distinguish between four kinds of tactics employed in transnational activist cam-

176  Handbook on transnationalism

paigns, all of which are by definition political. These are information politics, which entails generating politically useful information and disseminating it where it will have greatest effect; symbolic politics, which involves making sense of a situation for a far-removed audience; leverage politics, which is the capacity to mobilise powerful actors to intervene; and accountability politics, which involves measuring the actions of powerful actors against previously articulated policies or principles. These different tactics are characterised by different levels of intensity, ranging from relatively light-touch commitment to exchange information between actors in different countries to the much more intensive, and often more contentious, forms of joint mobilisation that characterise transnational social movements (Khagram et al. 2002, pp. 6–7). Different tools are operationalised and combined in different ways in the deployment of these various tactics. The tools available to transnational activists include everything from engagement and lobbying to street-based protest to awareness-raising and calls to action via social media. Some of these tools are necessarily present. For example, transnational campaigns always rely on some form of norms entrepreneurship, whereby they seek to change or enforce particular norms (Sustein 1996). Within campaigns that engage with the international system, this can involve articulating and advancing global norms; identifying normative contradictions in international institutions and pressing them to change; or encouraging states to comply with international laws and standards (Smith 2012, p. 9). Others may be selected for their utility, or simply because the activists involved are familiar with them. Importantly, the availability and ease of use of a particular tool can push actors to shift their focus from one process to another. For example, Tarrow and della Porta (2005, pp. 229–30) observe that the emergence of new electronic technologies, most notably the internet, prompted a shift from domestication to greater externalisation and the formation of transnational campaigns and coalitions.

CHALLENGES It is easy to gloss over the challenges that transnational activists face, particularly if they seek to move beyond, say, a virtual campaign to one that involves coordinated street-based protest in multiple locations. As discussed above, many of these challenges are related to the inherent embeddedness of activists and their organisations in specific national contexts or to other aspects of the opportunity structures in which they operate. Others are relational, in the sense of how the individuals and organisations involved connect to each other within a transnational network, coalition or movement. It is common to assume that norms, but also resources, travel from the Global North to the Global South, with little sense that social movement actors in the Global South are anything more than passive recipients (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002). What is more, the activists ‘who are better endowed with material resources and/or political capital’ tend to ‘assume that they can set the normative agenda of a given

The politics of transnational activism  177

advocacy campaign’ (Hertel 2018, p. 5). There is some evidence that the inequality between North–South participation in transnational social movements is lessening. Since 1988, the number of transnational social movement organisations with headquarters in the Global South has increased, and the membership of Southern organisations has also grown (Smith 2012). At the same time, however, it is easy to gloss over the extent to which social movement organisations and NGOs in the Global South continue to rely on external resources, the bulk of which come from the Global North (Ford 2006). This flow of resources necessarily influences activists’ agendas, but also their choice of processes, tools and tactics. For example, prior to the 1999 referendum in Timor-Leste, local activists set their own priorities and goals. But when the United Nations, aid agencies and international NGOs arrived, bringing with them funding and other resources, those local activists became increasingly focused on activities that supported the agendas of those external organisations (Dibley 2013). Resource flows also prop up undemocratic practices within transnational activist networks, which can influence outcomes when there are competing agendas within a network or coalition. At the same time, recipients do not necessarily comply with the demands of their donors or allies. As Hertel (2018, p. 7) explains, in addition to choosing not to engage at all, they can work to ‘block’ (halt or significantly stall) a campaign, or engage in ‘backdoor moves’ to ‘augment’ its normative frame. Power relations are also informed by other factors – including ethnicity, class and gender – that do not necessarily fall along North–South axes (Piper and Uhlin 2004). Equally, they may come down to organisational or individual personalities, which can be surprisingly influential even in large and diffuse collectives and may not conform to the prevailing contours of power. Of course, these kinds of factors are present in activist circles that do not extend beyond national boundaries, but the rhythm and impact of the contestation they produce is perhaps a little different. Physical distance and diffuse support bases may mean that it is easier to lessen engagement without withdrawing completely, allowing individual activists or organisations to remain part of a network, coalition or movement but interact in less intense ways. The polycentric nature of most transnational activist endeavours may also create room for activists in different locations, or of different kinds or persuasions, to find a way of contributing to the broader whole while remain true to their values or core agenda. The risk is that, in accommodating all-comers, core messages may be diluted or the impact of a campaign reduced. Conversely, there is power in greater reach and numbers if internal differences can be accommodated without compromising outcomes. The fundamental question that remains is who gets to decide what those core messages are and what constitutes impact.

CONCLUSION Transnational activist networks, coalitions and movements provide the structures and means through which activists work in ways that transcend the boundaries of

178  Handbook on transnationalism

the nation-state to promote change in their own or another country, or within the architecture of the international system. Cross-border activism is not new, but its contemporary forms incorporate targets, actors and ways of engaging that draw on and reflect the densely networked nature of our global economy and society. The pursuit of change in this way is an inherently political project insofar that it seeks to disrupt the power relations that define the ways in which that world works. But it is also political in its execution. Transnational activism is necessarily grounded in the countries where the constituents of any given network, coalition or movement are based, and thus in the opportunity structures that exist in those countries. And although transnational approaches can help activists modify or redefine elements of those opportunity structures, they cannot eliminate them altogether. As discussed here, this fundamental constraint has implications not only for the ways in which activists choose to engage and the resources to which they have access, but also for the nature of the relationships between the members of any given transnational activist formation. Regardless of how shiny its veneer may be, every transnational activist initiative necessarily involves complex negotiations and power-plays surrounding not only its selection of specific targets and the crafting of its core messages, but also its processes, tactics and tools. In other-focused initiatives, these negotiations and power-plays – and the potential for exploitation inherent in them – extend to social movement actors’ relationships with the individuals or groups targeted by a particular activist initiative. Although these characteristics are not unique to activism that crosses borders, the additional level of diffuseness that characterises transnational forms of activism means that they are more difficult to navigate and control. This weakness is, however, also a strength: the world needs transnational responses to transnational problems, and transnational networks, coalitions and movements make a vital contribution to that endeavour.

NOTES 1. Transnational activism is not always progressive (Dibley and Ford 2019). As Adamson (2005, p. 37) notes, groups like Hamas and even al-Qaeda ‘fall somewhere on the continuum’ between ‘transnational social movements and networks of violence, terror and crime’. 2. The question of what constitutes transnational activism is contested. For example, Lyons (2009) distinguishes between cross-border organising (transnational activism) and local activists adopting a transnational frame, which might be a factor in determining the success of efforts to organise transnationally but which, she argues, is not in itself a form of transnational activism. 3. Much of the scholarship is underpinned by an implicit assumption that transnationalism is necessarily beneficial for local movements, and thus opportunities to ‘scale up’ should automatically be pursued. For an articulation of the counter argument, see Lyons (2009). 4. For a time, many believed that the emergence of the internet may go some way to neutralising these influences of place. But, with the advent of more sophisticated forms of digital

The politics of transnational activism  179

5.

tracking and censorship, it has become apparent that states continue to be important determinants of the opportunity structures available to activists, transnational or otherwise. Importantly, as Silva (2013, p. 2) notes, ‘what those effects might be when we move from the transnational to the national scale has yet to be systematically explored’.

REFERENCES Adamson, Fiona (2005), ‘Globalisation, transnational political mobilisation, and networks of violence’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 18 (1), 31–49. Beatty, Linea M. (2010), ‘Democracy activism and assistance in Burma: Sites of resistance’, International Journal, 65 (3), 619–36. Bridger, Emily (2015), ‘Functions and failures of transnational activism: Discourses of children’s resistance and repression in global anti-apartheid networks’, Journal of World History, 26 (4), 865–87. Caouette, Dominique and Teresa Encarnacion Tadem (2013), ‘The anti-globalization movement in the Philippines’, in Michele Ford (ed.), Social Activism in Southeast Asia, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 119–37. Caraway, Teri L. (2006), ‘Political openness and transnational activism: Comparative insights from labor activism’, Politics & Society, 34 (2), 277–304. Chabot, Sean and Jan Duyvendak (2002), ‘Globalization and transnational diffusion between social movements: Reconceptualizing the dissemination of the Gandhian repertoire and the “coming out” routine’, Theory and Society, 31 (6), 697–740. de Moor, Joost, Katrin Uba, Mattias Wahlstrom, Magnus Wennerhag and Michiel de Vydt (eds) (2019), Protest for a Future II: Composition, Mobilization and Motives of the Participants in Fridays for Future Climate Protests on 20–27 September, 2019, in 19 Cities around the World, accessed 29 April 2020 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.17605/​OSF​.IO/​ASRUW. della Porta, Donatella and Sidney Tarrow (2005), ‘Transnational processes and social activism: An introduction’, in Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow (eds), Transnational Protest & Global Activism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 1–20. Dibley, Thushara (2013), ‘Activism and aid: The peace movement in Timor-Leste’, in Michele Ford (ed.), Social Activism in Southeast Asia, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 138–53. Dibley, Thushara and Michele Ford (2019), ‘Introduction: Social movements and democratization in Indonesia’, in Thushara Dibley and Michele Ford (eds), Activists in Transition: Progressive Politics in Democratic Indonesia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–22. El-Shaarawi, Nadia and Maple Razsa (2019), ‘Movements upon movements: Refugee and activist struggles to open the Balkan route to Europe’, History and Anthropology, 30 (1), 91–112. Foerster, Amy (2009), ‘Contested bodies: Sex trafficking NGOs and transnational politics’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (2), 151–73. Fominaya, Cristina and Graeme Hayes (eds) (2018), Resisting Austerity: Collective Action in Europe in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis, Abingdon: Routledge. Ford, Michele (2006), ‘Emerging labour movements and the accountability dilemma: The case of Indonesia’, in Michael Dowdle (ed.), Public Accountability: Design and Experience, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 153–73. Ford, Michele (2011), ‘International networks and human rights in Indonesia’, in Thomas Davis and Brian Galligan (eds), Human Rights in Asia, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 38–55. Ford, Michele (2013), ‘Social activism in Southeast Asia: An introduction’, in Michele Ford (ed.), Social Activism in Southeast Asia, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–21.

180  Handbook on transnationalism

Ford, Michele (2019), From Migrant to Worker: Global Unions and Temporary Labor Migration in Asia, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Ford, Michele and Thushara Dibley (2011), ‘Developing a movement? Aid-based mediated diffusion as a strategy to promote labour activism in post-tsunami Aceh’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 39 (4), 469–88. Ford, Michele and Michael Gillan (2015), ‘The global union federations in international industrial relations: A critical review’, Journal of Industrial Relations, 57 (3), 456–75. Ford, Michele and Nicola Piper (2007), ‘Southern sites of female agency: Informal regimes and female migrant labour activism in East and Southeast Asia’, in John Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke (eds), Everyday Politics of the World Economy, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 63–80. Grugel, Jean (2004), ‘State power and transnational activism’, in Nicola Piper and Anders Uhlin (eds), Transnational Activism in Asia: Problems of Power and Democracy, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 26–42. Guigni, Marco and Maria Grasso (2020), ‘Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed: From labor movements to anti-austerity protests’, in Cristina Fominaya and Ramon Feenstra (eds), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements: Protest in Turbulent Times, London: Routledge, pp. 129–41. Hertel, Shareen (2018), Unexpected Power: Conflict and Change among Transnational Activists, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Hill, Elizabeth, Michele Ford and Marian Baird (2017), ‘Work/care regimes in the Asia-Pacific: A conceptual framework’, in Marian Baird, Michele Ford and Elizabeth Hill (eds), Women, Work and Care in the Asia-Pacific, London: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Hlaing, Kyaw Yin (2007), ‘The state of the pro-democracy movement in authoritarian Burma’, Washington, DC: East-West Center. Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink (1998), Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Khagram, Sanjeev, James Riker and Kathryn Sikkink (2002), ‘From Santiago to Seattle: Transnational advocacy groups restructuring world politics’, in Sanjeev Khagram, James Riker and Kathryn Sikkink (eds), Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–23. Lyons, Lenore (2009), ‘Transcending the border’, Critical Asian Studies, 41 (1), 89–112. Lyons, Lenore and Michele Ford (2010), ‘“Where are your victims?” How sexual health advocacy came to be counter-trafficking in Indonesia’s Riau Islands’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12 (2), 255–64. Needham, Jayesh (2013), ‘After the Arab Spring: A new opportunity for LGBT human rights advocacy?’, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, 20 (2), 287–323. O’Brien, Robert, Anne Goetz, Jan Scholte and Marc Williams (2000), Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olesen, Thomas (2011), ‘Introduction: Power and transnational activist framing’, in Thomas Olesen (ed.), Power and Transnational Activism, London: Routledge, pp. 1–20. Piper, Nicola and Anders Uhlin (2004), ‘New perspectives on transnational activism’, in Nicola Piper and Anders Uhlin (eds), Transnational Activism in Asia: Problems of Power and Democracy, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–25. Pries, Ludger (2018), Refugees, Civil Society and the State: European Experiences and Global Challenges, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Reitan, Ruth (2007), Global Activism, London: Routledge. Schomerus, Mareike (2015), ‘“Make him famous”: The single conflict narrative of Kony and Kony2012’, in Alex de Waal (ed.), Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism, London: Zed Books, pp. 142–63.

The politics of transnational activism  181

Silva, Eduardo (2013), ‘Transnational activism and national movements in Latin America: Concepts, theories, and expectations’, in Eduardo Silva (ed.), Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America: Bridging the Divide, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Smith, Jackie (2012), ‘Transnational activism and global social change’, in Heidi Moksnes and Mia Melin (eds), Global Civil Society: Shifting Powers in a Shifting World, Uppsala: Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development, pp. 9–26. Smith, Jackie (2020), ‘Making other worlds possible: The battle in Seattle in world-historical context’, Socialism and Democracy, 34 (1), 114–37. Soboleva, Irena and Yaroslav Bakhmetjev (2015), ‘Political awareness and self-blame in the explanatory narratives of LGBT people amid the anti-LGBT campaign in Russia’, Sexuality & Culture, 19, 275–96. Sustein, Cass (1996), ‘Social norms and social roles’, Columbia Law Review, 96, 903–68. Tarrow, Sidney (2005), The New Transnational Activism, New York: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, Sidney (2011), Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, Sidney and Donatella della Porta (2005), ‘Conclusion: “Globalization,” complex internationalism, and transnational contention’, in Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow (eds), Transnational Protest & Global Activism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 227–46. Trailovic, Dragan (2019), ‘Diaspora political mobilization: The cases of Albanian and Uyghur diaspora transnational activism’, The Review of International Affairs, 70 (1174), 36–51. Wahlstrom, Mattias, Piotr Kocyba, Michiel de Vydt, and Joost de Moor (eds) (2019), Protest for a Future: Composition, Mobilization and Motives of the Participants in Fridays for Future Climate Protests on 15 March, 2019 in 13 European Cities, accessed 20 February 2020 at: https://​protestinstitut​.eu/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​07/​20190709​_Protest​-for​-a​ -future​_GCS​-Descriptive​-Report​.pdf. Zajak, Sabrina (2017a), ‘Rethinking pathways of transnational activism’, Global Society, 31 (1), 125–43. Zajak, Sabrina (2017b), Transnational Activism, Global Labor Governance, and China, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

12. Transnational families in an age of migration Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam and Shirlena Huang

BEING ‘FAMILY’ IN THE CONTEXT OF TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION Migration flows of unprecedented volume and complexity have become one of the main drivers of contemporary social change. This is clearly visible when we examine the deep-rooted social institution of the ‘family’. With shifting global patterns of immigration and settlement – as well as the increasing prominence of more fluid migrations which take circular, temporary or multiplying forms – the geographically dispersed family has become increasingly common as a form of living arrangement. This can be seen across a wide spectrum of society, from the more privileged or middle-class families with split households in two or more countries to the left-behind families of migrant contract workers. Accordingly, transnational social networks, remittance flows and circuits of care and affection – often facilitated by rapidly changing communication technologies – have emerged to connect dispersed members. In a world of constant motion, migrants and their families live at ‘the intersections of different spaces … different times and different speeds’ (Abbas 1997, p. 4). Bryceson and Vuorela’s (2002) pioneering work on transnationally split families in the European context show that family members who ‘live some or most of the time separated from each other’ continue to maintain ‘a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely “familyhood”, even across national borders’. Transnational familyhood, as Bryceson and Vuorela (2002, p. 3) note, is sustained through two complementary strategies: ‘frontiering’, which ‘denotes the ways and means transnational family members use to create familial space and network ties in terrain where affinal connections are relatively sparse’ (p. 11); and ‘relativising’, which refers to ‘the ways individuals establish, maintain or curtail relational ties with specific family members’ (p. 14). The term ‘transnational family’, which gained academic currency through their work, usefully suggests that in the transnational migratory context, the sense of membership of a family unit can be a matter of choice and negotiation: members choose to maintain emotional and material attachments of varying degrees of intensity with certain kinspeople while opting out of transnational relationships with others. The ‘family’, as a scale of analysis in the burgeoning literature on globalisation and migration, had been neglected until the last two decades. This was due partly to the nature and scope of classical migration research which tends to focus on political 182

Transnational families in an age of migration  183

and economic conditions of particular regions or countries in influencing migration movements across borders, on one hand, and the implicit acceptance of the ‘family’ as the cornerstone of society, on the other. Yet, as some researchers began to note, gendered socio-political and patriarchal structures in both the origins and destinations of migrants affect family structures and practices as well as their connections with wider society. In turn, families and households absorb, process and act on opportunities or threats caused by major structural changes, thus acting as the all-important link between macro and micro factors of socio-economic and political change such as those implicated in the processes of migration. In other words, ‘migration’ and the ‘family’ in the age of globalisation have mutually constitutive effects because migration affects the family in ways that can be destabilising or affirming. At the same time, family norms, relations and dynamics also exert manifold influences on specific migration decisions and outcomes (Boyle et al. 2001). In order to make three interrelated arguments, this chapter draws predominantly on the efflorescence in empirically grounded scholarship on Asian transnational families. First, transnational families draw on ideologically laden imaginaries to give coherence to notions of belonging despite the physical dispersal of their members. Second, transnational families are also realised through lived experiences, where various degrees of intimacy are negotiated across transnational spaces in the context of the advent of new communication technologies and the time-structuring conditions of Asia’s prevailing migration regimes. Finally, families may assume transnational morphologies with the strategic intent of ensuring economic survival or maximising social mobility.

SHARED AND CONTESTED IMAGINARIES OF ‘BEING FAMILY’ ACROSS BORDERS The transnational family derives its lived reality from both material bonds of collective welfare among physically dispersed members and a shared imaginary of ‘belonging’ which transcends particular periods and places. Chamberlain and Leydesdorff (2004, pp. 227, 237) argue that transnational families remain ‘family’ despite time and distance apart through the construction of ‘coherent narratives of the self and kin’, drawing on memory to create the family’s ‘interior life’. While imagined dimensions are no doubt central to the narrative of ‘being family’ (and perhaps more durable than material ties), these notions are also ideologically inscribed, lending themselves to mobilisation by powerful others for purposes of their own. Indeed, for this reason Ong (1999, p. 71) observes that the family is ‘the primary unit of regulation and the vehicle of state power’. In many countries in Asia, state constructions of the ‘family’ are often based on a ‘nostalgic vision of femininity’ where decision-making is expected to be hierarchical (read ‘patriarchal’), and where individual desires are usurped by the greater good of the family (Stivens 1998, p. 17). Apart from the state, discursively constructed ideals of the family as a site of morality, purity and tradition may also be elaborated by social institutions and community networks. For example,

184  Handbook on transnationalism

Velayutham and Wise’s (2005) analysis of a translocal moral economy encompassing families based on arranged, cross-nationality, intra-caste marriages among migrants from a Tamil Nadu village who have settled in Singapore demonstrates how the transnational dynamics of obligation, guilt, shame and fear operate to reproduce ‘tradition’ and maintain community boundaries and family discipline. A major interest in Asia-based scholarship on the ties that bind transnational families has centred on the construction of gender ideologies and gender relations within the family, and the shifting gender subjectivities of migrants and those left behind (Mazzucato 2013). Normative gender ideologies, for example, are at work in the Indonesian state’s constructions of the family as the bulwark against the social costs of modernity, and of women as the lynchpin responsible for the fate of the family: migrant women who leave their families to work abroad are simultaneously exalted as ‘heroes of foreign exchange’ while seen as in need of ‘protection’ to preserve their sexual and moral purity for the sake of their families. At the same time, the continued overseas labour migration of low-income women is seen as necessary and inevitable in sustaining visions of the newly emerging bourgeois consumerist family (Silvey 2006). State-constructed gender ideologies, cultural expectations and filial obligations interact in shaping female marriage migrants from less developed parts of the region seeking foreign partners from more developed economies (see Zhang, Chapter 20 in this volume). For example, Jongwilaiwan and Thompson (2013, p. 377) advance the notion of a new transnational patriarchal bargain where ‘both economic forces and intimate emotions – shaped in important ways by cultural expectations – are at play’ across transnational space. In seeking foreign partners, Thai women, on the one hand, submit to a certain degree of disempowerment relative to the men, not just to pursue material gain and urban modernity but also to fulfil cultural expectations of filial duties to their natal families. On the other hand, working-class Singaporean men who desire to reproduce a patriarchal family based on Confucian values, but enjoy little success in the local marriage market, secure the attention of foreign brides on the basis of ‘their ability to parlay citizenship rights into patriarchal privileges within the conjugal relationship’ (Jongwilaiwan and Thompson 2013, p. 365). The durability of the gender-normative woman-carer model among transnational families in Southeast Asia is also a recurrent theme in current research on households that embark on transnational migration strategies as a means to socio-economic mobility, as demonstrated in the resilience of gender ideals surrounding motherhood among migrant mothers. Many of these migrant mothers – as recounted by themselves and their children – are redefining motherhood by pulling in ‘double shifts’ stretching across borders, performing breadwinning duties overseas whilst continuing to maintain a significant mothering presence at home even in their absence (Butt 2018; Constable 2018; Lam and Yeoh 2019a). At the same time, the ideology of Asian familialism as a measure to ‘manufacture consent and contain dissent’ (Stivens 1998, p. 17) is also challenged by the absence of Asian women – wives, mothers, daughters and sisters – from the home (and the home-nation) as a result of their increasing participation in transnational migratory

Transnational families in an age of migration  185

flows. The corresponding focus on the migrant’s gendered agencies and experiences in negotiating familial ties that bind has also generated a growing vein of work on women’s subjectivities as participants, collaborators, leaders and resistors. For example, Williams (2005, p. 404) shows how migrant women originating from East Nusa Tenggara in Indonesia draw on their ‘spatial entanglements’ in less familiar places to creatively develop more ‘mobile subjectivities’ to reposition themselves vis-à-vis their families and kin, and in the process loosen the control that male kin have on their bodies and sexuality. Ironically, for migrant women seeking employment as domestic workers in foreign homes, it is by ‘knowing one’s place’ and careful presentation of the self at the place of sojourn that they succeed in crafting a space of widening subject positions in order to distance themselves from the expectations of feminine docility and obedience at home. Familial politics may also become double-edged when they operate over transnational space. Understanding the experiences of transnational domestic workers in the context of the ‘family’, for example, takes on a double reading because they move in and out of at least two families/households – one anchored in the ‘homeland’ from which they are spatially removed, and the other belonging to their host-employer in which they are physically located. Alongside negotiating their often ambivalent positioning in the host family, where they constantly shift between debased servitude and being indispensable care substitutes for children and the elderly, they are also mindful of their multiple roles as nurturing mothers, dutiful daughters and sacrificial sisters in relation to their families at home (Yeoh and Huang 2010, 2012). To ensure their right to fulfil their individual migration aspirations, Indonesian and Filipino female migrants often reformulate their caregiving cum migratory breadwinning roles as gendered work that they, as supportive wives/mothers/daughters/sisters, ought to do to supplement the efforts of their husbands and/or other family members (Paul 2015; Khoo and Yeoh 2018). Indeed, for many migrant women, transnational migration creates an ideological terrain on which the ‘uneven and shifting mixtures of family loyalty and responsibility on the one hand, and autonomy and agency, on the other hand’ (Ryan 2004, p. 367) are continuously traced and retraced. In shifting the analytical lens to the dynamics in ‘care-drained’ left-behind families, existing research suggests that a web of surrogate carers comprising both female and male relatives often develop to fill the care vacuum resulting from the absence of migrant mothers (Lam and Yeoh 2018, 2019b). While most studies reveal a continued preference for keeping ‘the conventional gendered division of labour intact’ (Parreñas 2005a, p. 99) by delegating ‘the mother’s nurturing and caring tasks to other women family members’ (Hoang and Yeoh 2011, p. 722), a more complex picture of increasingly flexible gender practices of care in sending countries has since emerged. Hoang and Yeoh (2011, p. 734), for example, question ‘the commonly held view of the delinquent left-behind husband who is resistant to adjust his family duties in the woman’s absence’ within a strongly patriarchal Vietnamese context. Instead, they argue that Vietnamese men struggle to live up to highly moralistic masculine ideals of being both ‘good fathers’ and ‘independent breadwinners’ when their wives are working abroad by taking on at least some care functions that signify parental

186  Handbook on transnationalism

love and authority while holding on to paid work (even if monetary returns are low) for a semblance of economic autonomy. In a similar vein, Lam and Yeoh (2018, p. 113) argue that left-behind fathers in Indonesia and the Philippines, two countries with longstanding experiences of feminised labour migration, ‘create alternative versions of what constitutes “good fatherhood” and “good man” to counter hegemonic notions of masculinity that restrict men to breadwinning roles’. Accomplishing their caring duties well (personally or through substitute carers) is considered to be an achievement as long as the work invested in caring does not overwhelm their place (even if this ‘place’ is notional) as men who are actively generating an income and substantially contributing to the welfare of their families. In sum, adopting transnationalism as an optic in Migration Studies has contributed to opening up the ‘black box’ of the Asian ‘family’, and in the process paved the way for a more critical understanding of gender identities and relations. By giving more attention to power geometries and household politics, researchers went beyond the assumption that household decisions regarding migration were guided by ‘principles of consensus and altruism’ to take on the notion that they may ‘equally be informed by hierarchies of power along gender and generational lines’ (Mahler and Pessar 2006, p. 33). The emerging scholarship has also broadened our attention beyond exploring the impact of migration on women’s agencies and subjectivities to interrogate whether the rise of transnationally stretched families compels us to rethink gendered notions in the social provisioning of everyday and generational care.

NEGOTIATING EVERYDAY INTIMACIES AND THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES Inasmuch as the ‘transnational family’ is socially imagined and ideologically grounded within broadly patriarchal structures, it is also experienced on a daily basis through the negotiation of webs of relationships and developing intimacies in the context of the family’s transnational configuration. With the expansion of temporary labour migration in Asia, characterised by multiple sojourns on limited-term contracts, a range of work focusing on the lived experiences of being a transnational family has examined different ways family members maintain communication with one another to substitute for physical absence or negotiate the rearrangement of care work across day-to-day realities. Transnational communication may, however, be uneven: for example, when particular family members exert power from a distance or control relationships through silence or withdrawal. The changing technologies, economic costs and emotional pains and gains of ‘staying connected’ in order to ‘do family’ and perform care work across national borders are central concerns to understanding the inner workings of the transnational family (Asis et al. 2004; see also Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume; Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). In recent decades, everyday practices of communication over transnational space have evolved with rapid advancement and widening penetration of new communi-

Transnational families in an age of migration  187

cation technologies. Mobile phones, increasingly equipped with internet capabilities, have become more affordable for many (but not all) migrant contract workers in Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore and are strongly preferred as a means of communication with left-behind families as these devices afford real-time communication through mediated ‘on-line presence’. In many ways, advances in information and communication technology (ICT) created ‘new opportunities for transnational [migrants] to reframe, negotiate, and contest gendered parenting ideology’ (Peng and Wong 2013, p. 509). In this light, Parreñas (2005b) demonstrates the various ways intimacy is negotiated across transnational space in terms of the intergenerational relations between Filipino migrant women and their young adult children. By remitting funds through co-managed joint bank accounts, calling home on a routinised basis, and sending text messages (including daily doses of religious messages in some cases) and balikbayan boxes containing everyday necessities and gifts, mothers both economically provide and emotionally nurture from afar (Sobritchea 2007). Their actions are contrasted against fathers who are physically present in their children’s lives but often emotionally absent. Parreñas (2005b) further notes that transnational communication is neither seamless nor even, but embedded in unequal power-geometries (contingent on factors such as the migrant’s occupation, destination country, employment conditions and structural unevenness in rural–urban development) that render some families more able than others to develop family intimacy through transnational communication. Though increasingly ubiquitous, the use of new ICTs among migrants in building connected relationships with family members continues to be characterised by ‘asymmetries’ such as unevenness of access, competencies and purchasing power (Wilding 2006; Madianou and Miller 2012; Lim 2016). Such technologies are always ‘socially contingent’ and ‘enrolled in complex social and spatial power relations and struggles and the ways in which some groups, areas and interests may benefit from the effects of new technologies, while others actually lose out’ (Graham 1998, p. 176). Class positions are clearly significant, as seen in Parreñas’s (2005b) findings that middle-class Filipina migrants maintained closer contact with their children compared to Filipina domestic workers who faced greater restrictions in accessing technology. While ICTs allowed both rural and professional Indian migrants in Cambodia to continue ‘doing family’, discrepancies such as the greater access to more sophisticated technologies for the professional migrants on the one hand and lower ease of usage for the rural migrants on the other were evident in Kaur and Shruti’s (2016) study. With the increased possibilities of ‘online’ and even ‘always on’ communication, scholars have also observed that ‘the fact of communicating may be seen as just as important as its content’ that may be seemingly banal and predictable (Wilding 2006, p. 132). Yet prosaic exchanges between family members across physical distance serve as acts of recognition and affirmation, ‘generating a strong sense of shared space and time that overlooked – even if only temporarily – the realities of geographical distance and time’ (Wilding 2006, p. 133). At the same time, Madianou (2016, p. 185) cautions us not to ‘romanticize the role of communication technologies for

188  Handbook on transnationalism

“doing family” because, as with non-mediated practices, acts of mediated communication can have complex consequences, both positive and negative, depending on a number of factors, including the relationships themselves’. Mediated intimacy across distance is often a two-edged sword. The disjuncture between ‘imagined proximity and physical separation’ may catalyse new sources of conflict, such as the unfulfilled expectation to be ‘always present’ or the moralised subtext embedded in acts of disengagement or the creation of social distance (Wilding 2006, p. 133). Similarly, research on ‘ambient co-presence’ or ‘the peripheral, yet intense awareness of distant others made possible through the ubiquity and affordances of polymedia environments’ (Madianou 2016, p. 198) suggests that rich communicative environments can heighten interpersonal conflict within the family in cases where relationships are already weak and unstable because of the implications of shared social fields for increased surveillance, just as they can open up new ways of coming together as a family across distance in cases where members enjoy strong relationships with one another. In a similar vein, Wilding (2006, p. 134) observes that while new layers of ICTs have the potential of strengthening ‘connected presence’, each new ICT tends to be ‘incorporated into already existing expectations and practices of communication in very familiar [rather than transformative] ways’. The nature of intimate relationships constructed across distance has also been questioned. In writing against what she sees as ‘culturalist and classist assumptions’ about intimacy rooted in Western, middle-class norms, McKay (2007, pp. 179–80) argues that intimacy ‘does not preclude long-distance and technologically mediated forms of closeness’. Critical of what she sees as the care chains approach to treating intimacy as only ‘truly’ possible when there is physical presence, McKay (2007, p. 191) claims that ‘culturally inflected forms of economic exchange have always been fundamental to familial intimacies [across distance], with transfers of value enacting the practical love and care necessary to show and share feeling’. In her more recent work, Parreñas (2014, p. 426) engages with a similar debate by differentiating between what she calls ‘intimacy across distance [that] is constructed primarily via routine’ and ‘intimacy in proximity [that] is mainly premised on instantaneity’. The former is based on careful time management, while the latter depends on the privilege of immediate access. Arguing that instantaneity, or ‘absent presence’ (Pertierra 2006), as a feature of intimacy is a gendered expectation tied more to transnational mothering than transnational fathering, Parreñas (2014, p. 429) urges us to valorise different temporal modalities in performing intimate labour that goes into constructing and maintaining ‘routine rhythms of family life’ and hence avoid diminishing, or even demonising, the intimate work that migrant women do across distance.

FAMILY REMITTANCES, SOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND ASPIRATIONAL FUTURES While on the surface transnational families appear to be stitched together, or torn apart, by the messy realities of emotions, at their core, families assume transnational

Transnational families in an age of migration  189

morphologies as a strategy to pursue specific projects and aspire to better futures. Katigbak (2015, p. 521) argues that negotiating familyhood ‘requires not just feelings but also morally framed production and distribution of (scarce) resources … [which] in reality … are co-dependent, although not always in a harmonious fashion’. As Zelizer (2005) points out, intimate relations and economic transactions are connected rather than belonging to hostile worlds. Commenting particularly in the context of low-income transnational families, Schmalzbauer (2004, p. 1329) observes that transnational families ‘represent a new family form born out of the inequality in the global economy and reproduced by means of dependence on a transnational division of labour’. For these families, economic remittances – or what Singh et al. (2012, p. 478) call ‘a special kind of transnational family money’ – are critical to the well-being of the family and ‘are often at the centre of socio-economic mobility strategies’ (Carling et al. 2012, p. 202). According to Castles (1998, p. 221), migration decision-making in Asia is often based on the ‘micro-level rationality of family survival strategy’. Remittance-seeking behaviour as a family strategy may be manifested in different transnational configurations. In DeParle’s (2019) recounting of a three-generation Filipino migrant family, the belief that ‘a good provider is one who leaves’ is embraced by numerous Filipinos who consider migration a necessary solution to provide for their families. In Nepal, in order to pursue economic survival under conditions of uneven development, subsistence farming households demonstrate flexibility and resourcefulness in their use of family diversification strategies. Shifting from an earlier phase of the split-household phenomenon where male breadwinners migrate abroad for work (moving from being ‘global warriors’ in the foreign military service to becoming ‘global workers’ seeking post-military overseas employment) while leaving behind their wives and children, they have moved to more recent patterns of husband-and-wife migration where children are left in the care of relatives (Yamanaka 2005). The emergence of the Nepali dual-wage earner family, where both husband and wife engage in paid employment in high-wage countries (such as Japan), results in a doubling of remittances while saving on household expenses, and is becoming an increasingly common strategy for Nepali families desiring to take advantage of new economic opportunities abroad. The pursuit of remittances by strategically dispersing the family is not necessarily a coherent project, but subject to gender and generational politics of reciprocity and obligation within the moral framework of the family. As Katigbak (2015, p. 533) shows in the case of ‘Little Italy’ (a village in the Philippines known for sending domestic workers to Italy), transnational family members as senders or receivers of remittances simultaneously feel conflicting emotions of guilt and gratitude; in the process, remittance behaviour takes on moral dimensions, where ‘faithful subscribers [to the moral economy of remittances] are held in high regard while those who violate the framework are frowned on or even disciplined with a social boycott’ (see also Wilding and Baldassar, Chapter 6 in this volume). Given the heightened attention (particularly among international organisations) directed at migration as a strategy for development in the last two decades, the question of incorporating transnational family effects in the migration–development nexus

190  Handbook on transnationalism

has a prominent place on the research agenda (Mazzucato and Schans 2011). Much has been written on the significance of remittances sent by labour migrants as they are ‘a more reliable source of income than other capital flows to developing countries’ in view of its ‘less volatile, less pro-cyclical’ nature (de Haas 2005, p. 1277). At the same time, migrant remittances are predominantly private transfers sent to family members for household upkeep to cover subsistence, education and health, and are not immediately scalable as indicators of developmental gains. Leaving aside the broader migration/remittances/development conundrum, the effects of remittances on family well-being are also debatable. At the risk of over-simplification, two strands of thought may be distilled from the literature: a developmentalist belief that migrant remittances contribute to a higher standard of living for the left-behind, raising household income and improving investment in education of children; and a more pessimistic viewpoint whereby migration drains the productive workforce from the sending communities, leaving behind passive members who grow increasingly reliant on remittances (Bracking 2003; de Haas 2005). Remittances are also perceived to be a source of income that reinforces pre-existing class hierarchies (as it is often not the poorest who migrate), further exacerbating the inequalities between the left-behind family members of migrant workers and non-migrant households (Bracking 2003). Some studies have also argued that using family remittances to meet daily necessities rather than on productive investments reduces the potential developmental impact of remittances. However, evidence also shows that the availability of remittances has helped investments in small businesses and increased self-employment as well as contributing to safeguarding the welfare of the family, hence negating the perception that remittances are squandered on frivolous consumption (Rapoport and Docquier 2005; Gamlen 2010). Given the feminisation of migration in Asia, the effects of remittances on the gendered dynamics of the translocal household have also been discussed widely. Migration as a household livelihood strategy trains the spotlight on the ‘household’ as a site of cooperation and conflict over the management of resources, thereby raising important questions concerning the way gender and inter-generational relations in the family/household mediate the use and distribution of remittances. Research on cultural expectations in relation to remittance-sending suggests that these familial obligations may serve to entrap women migrants more than men. Basa et al. (2011, p. 12) document the experiences of Filipino migrant domestic workers in Italy and ‘how the pressure to provide remittances is locking women even further into the global care chain, with not only economic, but social and cultural consequences’. Other studies of household dynamics in labour-sending countries in Asia show that remittances are often under the control of women – the wife when the migrant is a married man or the grandmother or eldest daughter when the migrant is a married woman (Rahman and Lian 2009; Bester et al. 2017). Apart from often stigmatising men as bad money managers, the general preference for women to manage remittances also derives from the widespread perception of them as more altruistic spenders whose control of family resources is more likely to be associated with the enhancement of collective

Transnational families in an age of migration  191

well-being (Fleury 2016). In some contexts, the deployment of remittances tends to run along gender lines (i.e., sons to fathers and daughters to mothers) rather than being strictly a female activity. Yet in other cases, remittances from female migrants may be channelled to the male members of the family, such as sponsoring a brother’s education or marriage, or facilitating their migration projects (Asis 2000). The question of whether remittances have the effect of transforming or further entrenching gender ideologies and relations across transnational space remains open (Rahman 2011; Fleury 2016). Control over remittances can also present a source of intra-family conflict, driving a wedge between husbands and wives, parents and children, nuclear families and more distant relatives. The conflict may extend to wider familial networks when migrants and their spouses are reluctant to share the economic benefits of migration outside their nuclear unit, thereby rejecting relatives’ claims for mutual access to assets and undermining deeply held patterns of family, kinship and caste associations in these Asian societies (Gamburd 2000; Rashid and Sikder 2017). The remittance debate as outlined above takes on a different inflection in the case of professional, middle-income families that have adopted transnational morphologies. Here, transnationalising the family is often a strategic move undertaken to accomplish specific projects intended to enhance the overall well-being or status of the family in response to changing circumstances. In these cases, remittance monies as a ‘currency of care’ may matter as part of the ‘tensions that result from pitting money as a medium of care against the physical caregiving by others in the home country, usually siblings’, but are usually not integral to the family’s economic survival (Singh et al. 2012, p. 484). Rather, regular or occasional monetary remittances, as well as gifts, are sent home to parents as an expression of filial duty, care provision and a sense of belonging in the family – although ‘physical presence [is] often valued over the remittances as “care-at-a-distance”’, as seen in Singh et al.’s (2012, p. 487) study of Indian professional migrants in Australia. While ‘transnational mothering’ has been the key focus for much of the work on low-income families, the transnational families of skilled migrants tend to feature other permutations of circulating care, including ‘flying grandmothers’ – as Baldassar and Wilding (2014, pp. 241–2) termed them – who use temporary visas to shuttle between the households of their children in different countries to provide care for their grandchildren. In the reverse direction, migrant adult children may maintain regular or sporadic contact with elderly parents who have remained in the homeland, providing both financial support and physical care, often along gendered lines (Horn, Chapter 5 in this volume). For example, Lam et al. (2002) found that among Chinese-Malaysian professionals working in Singapore, sons tended to remit money, while daughters(-in-law) were the ones shuttling between Malaysia and Singapore to fulfil care obligations to parents(-in-law) in one country and children in another (see also Lam et al. 2006). A commonly envisaged goal of transnational strategies especially among East Asian families in the middle- or upper-income strata is the enhancement of social, cultural and symbolic capital as a means of social reproduction and upward social

192  Handbook on transnationalism

mobility (rather than generating remittances for economic survival). Central to the strategy of securing a better future is the ‘project’ of educating children abroad. Indeed, the educational advancement of the children is often cited as the raison d’être behind the formation of astronaut families and parachute kids. These studies often assume an immigration agenda as the end-goal of these families, and are primarily focused on the transnational lives of the children as immigrants, issues of acculturation/biculturalism, assimilation and integration of the students as the ‘1.5’ or second generation (Bartley and Spoonley 2008; Ip and Hsu 2006; Levitt and Waters 2002) or of ‘lone mothers’ (rarely fathers) in the destination country (Waters 2002; see also Chee 2003). Focusing on the Hong Kong Chinese middle class, Waters (2005) argues that an overseas education for children represents a ‘class’ move – as well as the enactment of a familial rather than an individual tactic – to acquire symbolic capital with international value (see also Mazzucato and van Geel, Chapter 13 in this volume). Children are thus enabled to develop cosmopolitan competencies valued in contemporary business and professional spheres, and ultimately position the family well for an upward momentum in social status and economic standing. Transforming the family unit into a transnational one is key to a ‘child-centred familial strategy of capital accumulation’ (Waters 2005, p. 360; see also Igarashi and Saito 2014 for Japan). Yet another variant of the transnational family educational strategy is that of mothers who obtain a long-term social visit pass to accompany children while the latter study in the destination country. For example, Huang and Yeoh’s (2005) research on China’s ‘study mothers’, who have inserted themselves and their children into Singapore’s educational landscape against major odds, emphasises the strategic importance of transnationalising the family in order to invest heavily in children’s education as the main route towards international social mobility and prestige.

CONCLUSION Before the 1990s, it would be fair to say that conceptualisations of the ‘nation-state’ and the ‘family-household’ in migration scholarship in Asia tended to adhere to the view that these are de facto social formations with unambiguously defined membership and clearly demarcated boundaries. Often perceived as ‘the building block of the nation’ in the Asian context, the family – as a component partially folded into the nation-state – is seen as a prime site for social policy intervention precisely because of its foundational relationship to the nation-state. This was to change significantly, initially with the advent of the transnationalism optic from the 1990s and more recently as the mobilities paradigm gained traction. In the span of a quarter of a century, the notion of the ‘transnational family’ is no longer seen to be oxymoronic; in fact, the scalar relationship between ‘family’ and ‘nation-state’ can now be reversed as ‘nations’ can now be folded into the ‘family’, while ‘family’ can now be stretched across national borders. While transnational families were foreshadowed by migrants living apart from their families in the context of ‘coerced’, ‘indentured’ and contract labour migrations

Transnational families in an age of migration  193

in the colonial and pre-colonial eras, it can be said that the ‘doing’ of family across borders is more viable today with emerging forms of information communication technologies such as mobile phones, instant messaging and other social networking portals (Wilding 2006). ‘Family visiting’ across distance as part of the routines and practices that go into sustaining cross-border familial ties has also been made easier with the increased range of transportation options as well as greater affordability of travel. As the degrees of freedom widen, frameworks highlighting the mutual effects of the ‘family’ as a durable social institution and ‘transnationalism’ as a growing phenomenon need to be rethought with more provisionality and flexibility to families-in-motion, as well as the ways in which intimate relations are conducted and maintained between family members kept apart by borders. By opening up the Asian ‘family’ to academic study as a material and ideological construct, transnational migration studies have paved the way for a more critical understanding of gender and generational relations, identities and politics within families.1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to acknowledge funding support from Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (Grant number MOE 2015-T2-1-008, PI: Brenda Yeoh) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant (File No: 895-2012-1021, PI: Ito Peng) for supporting the work behind the publication of this chapter.

NOTE 1. This chapter is an updated and revised version of Yeoh, B.S.A., S. Huang and T. Lam (2018) ‘Transnational family dynamics in Asia’. In Handbook on Migration and Globalisation, edited by A. Triandafyllidou, pp. 413–30. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

REFERENCES Abbas, Ackbar (1997), Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Asis, Maruja M.B. (2000), ‘Imagining the future of migration and families in Asia’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 9 (3), 255–72. Asis, Maruja M.B., Shirlena Huang and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2004), ‘When the light of the home is abroad: Unskilled female migration and the Filipino family’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 25 (2), 198–215. Baldassar, Loretta and Ralene Wilding (2014), ‘Middle-class transnational caregiving: The circulation of care between family and extended kin networks in the global north’, in Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla (eds), Transnational Families, Migration and the

194  Handbook on transnationalism

Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge, pp. 235–51. Bartley, Allen and Paul Spoonley (2008), ‘Intergenerational transnationalism: 1.5 generation Asian migrants in New Zealand’, International Migration, 46 (4), 63–84. Basa, Charito, Wendy Harcourt and Angela Zarro (2011), ‘Remittance and transnational families in Italy and the Philippines: Breaking the global care chain’, Gender and Development, 19 (1), 11–22. Bester, Hennie, Jeremy Gray, David Saunders and Christine Hougaard (2017), Women on the Move: Harnessing the Economic Force of Cross-Border Mobility in ASEAN, New York: UNCDF and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Boyle, Paul, Thomas Cooke, Keith Halfacree and Darren Smith (2001), ‘A cross-national comparison of the impact of family migration on women’s employment status’, Demography, 38 (2), 201–13. Bracking, Sarah (2003), ‘Sending money home: Are remittances always beneficial for those who stay behind?’, Journal of International Development, 15 (5), 633–44. Bryceson, Deborah F. and Ulla Vuorela (2002), ‘Transnational families in the twenty-first century’, in Deborah F. Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela (eds), The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks, Oxford: Berg, pp. 3–30. Butt, Leslie (2018), ‘Affects of unease: Mother-infant separation among professional Indonesian women working in Singapore’, Global Networks, 18 (1), 151–67. Carling, Jørgen, Cecilia Menjívar and Leah Schmalzbauer (2012), ‘Central themes in the study of transnational parenthood’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (2), 191–217. Castles, Stephen (1998), ‘New migrations in the Asia-Pacific region: A force for social and political change’, International Social Science Journal, 50 (156), 215–27. Chamberlain, Mary and Selma Leydesdorff (2004), ‘Transnational families: Memories and narratives’, Global Networks, 4 (3), 227–41. Chee, Maria W.L. (2003), ‘Migrating for the children: Taiwanese American women in transnational families’, in Nicola Piper and Mina Roces (eds), Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 137–56. Constable, Nicole (2018), ‘Assemblages and affect: Migrant mothers and the varieties of absent children’, Global Networks, 18 (1), 168–85. de Haas, Hein (2005), ‘International migration, remittances and development: Myths and facts’, Third World Quarterly, 26 (8), 1269–84. DeParle, Jason (2019), A Good Provider is One who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century, New York: Viking. Fleury, Anjali (2016), ‘Understanding women and migration: A literature review’, KNOMAD Working Paper 8, Washington, DC: KNOMAD. Gamburd, Michele R. (2000), Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids: The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gamlen, Alan (2010), People on the Move: Managing Migration in Today’s Commonwealth, London: The Ramphal Centre. Graham, Stephen (1998), ‘The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology’, Progress in Human Geography, 22 (2), 165–85. Hoang, Lan A. and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2011), ‘Breadwinning wives and “left-behind” husbands: Men and masculinities in the Vietnamese transnational family’, Gender and Society, 25 (6), 717–39. Huang, Shirlena and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2005), ‘Transnational families and their children’s education: China’s “study mothers” in Singapore’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 379–400. Igarashi, Hiroki and Hiro Saito (2014), ‘Cosmopolitanism as cultural capital: Exploring the intersection of globalization, education and stratification’, Cultural Sociology, 8 (3), 222–39.

Transnational families in an age of migration  195

Ip, David and Richard J.C. Hsu (2006), ‘Transnationalism and gendered identity: The case of the “one and a half generation” Taiwanese migrants’, Asian Studies Review, 30 (3), 273–88. Jongwilaiwan, Rattana and Eric C. Thompson (2013), ‘Thai wives in Singapore and transnational patriarchy’, Gender, Place and Culture, 20 (3), 363–81. Katigbak, Evangeline O. (2015), ‘Moralizing emotional remittances: Transnational familyhood and translocal moral economy in the Philippines’ “Little Italy”’, Global Networks, 15 (4), 519–35. Kaur, Ravinder and Ishita Shruti (2016), ‘Mobile technology and “doing family” in a global world: Indian migrants in Cambodia’, in Sun Sun Lim (ed.), Mobile Communication and the Family: Asian Experiences in Technology Domestication, New York: Springer, pp. 73–91. Khoo, Choon Yen and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2018), ‘The entanglements of migration and marriage: Negotiating mobility projects among young Indonesian women from migrant-sending villages’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 39 (6), 704–21. Lam, Theodora and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2018), ‘Migrant mothers, left-behind fathers: The negotiation of gender subjectivities in Indonesia and the Philippines’, Gender, Place and Culture, 25 (1), 104–17. Lam, Theodora and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2019a), ‘Under one roof? Left-behind children’s perspectives in negotiating relationships with absent and return-migrant parents’, Population, Space and Place, 25 (3), 1–10. Lam, Theodora and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2019b), ‘Parental migration and disruptions in everyday life: Reactions of left-behind children in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (16), 3085–104. Lam, Theodora, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang (2006), ‘“Global householding” in a city state: Emerging trends from Singapore’, International Development Planning Review, 28 (4), 475–97. Lam, Theodora, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Lisa Law (2002), ‘Sustaining families transnationally: Chinese-Malaysians in Singapore’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 11 (1), 117–44. Levitt, Peggy and Mary C. Waters (eds) (2002), The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lim, Sun Sun (2016), ‘Asymmetries in Asian families’ domestication of mobile communication’, in Sun Sun Lim (ed.), Mobile Communication and the Family: Asian Experiences in Technology Domestication, New York: Springer, pp. 1–19. Madianou, Mirca (2016), ‘Ambient co-presence: Transnational family practices in polymedia environments’, Global Networks, 16 (2), 183–201. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller (2012), Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, London: Routledge. Mahler, Sarah J. and Patricia R. Pessar (2006), ‘Gender matters: Ethnographers bring gender from the periphery toward the core of migration studies’, International Migration Review, 40 (1), 27–63. Mazzucato, Valentina (2013), ‘Transnational families, research and scholarship’, in Immanuel Ness (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Mazzucato, Valentina and Djamila Schans (2011), ‘Transnational families and the well-being of children: Conceptual and methodological challenges’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 73 (4), 704–12. McKay, Deirdre (2007), ‘“Sending dollars shows feeling”: Emotions and economies in Filipino migration’, Mobilities, 2 (2), 175–94. Ong, Aiwha (1999), Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2005a), Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

196  Handbook on transnationalism

Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2005b), ‘Long distance intimacy: Class, gender and intergenerational relations between mothers and children in Filipino transnational families’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 317–36. Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2014), ‘The intimate labour of transnational communication’, Families, Relationships and Societies, 3 (3), 425–42. Paul, Anju M. (2015), ‘Negotiating migration, performing gender’, Social Forces, 94 (1), 1–23. Peng, Yinni and Odalia M.H. Wong (2013), ‘Diversified transnational mothering via telecommunication: Intensive, collaborative, and passive’, Gender & Society, 27 (4), 491–513. Pertierra, Raul (2006), Transforming Technologies: Altered Selves, Manila: DLSU Press. Rahman, Mizanur Md (2011), Gender Dimensions of Remittances: A Study of Indonesian Domestic Workers in East and Southeast Asia, Bangkok: UNIFEM. Rahman, Mizanur Md and Kwen Fee Lian (2009), ‘Gender and the remittance process: Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia’, Asian Population Studies, 5 (2), 103–27. Rapoport, Hillel and Frédéric Docquier (2005), The Economics of Migrants’ Remittances, Bonn: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Rashid, Syeda R. and Mohammad J.U. Sikder (2017), ‘Intra-household dynamics of remittance practices: A case study of Bangladesh’, in S. Irudaya Rajan (ed.), South Asia Migration Report 2017: Recruitment, Remittances and Reintegration, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 209–29. Ryan, Louise (2004), ‘Family matters: (E)migration, familial networks and Irish women in Britain’, Sociological Review, 52 (3), 351–70. Schmalzbauer, Leah (2004), ‘Searching for wages and mothering from afar: The case of Honduran transnational families’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 66 (5), 1317–31. Silvey, Rachel (2006), ‘Consuming the transnational family: Indonesian migrant domestic workers to Saudi Arabia’, Global Networks, 6 (1), 23–40. Singh, Supriya, Shanthi Robertson and Anuja Cabraal (2012), ‘Transnational family money: Remittances, gifts and inheritance’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33 (5), 475–92. Sobritchea, Carolyn I. (2007), ‘Constructions of mothering: Female Filipino overseas workers’, in Theresa W. Devasahayam and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds), Working and Mothering in Asia: Images, Ideologies and Identities, Singapore: NUS Press, pp. 173–92. Stivens, Maila (1998), ‘Theorising gender, power and modernity in affluent Asia’, in Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens (eds), Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, London: Routledge, pp. 1–34. Velayutham, Selvaraj and Amanda Wise (2005), ‘Moral economies of a translocal village: Obligation and shame among South Indian transnational migrants’, Global Networks, 5 (1), 27–47. Waters, Johanna L. (2002), ‘Flexible families? “Astronaut” households and the experiences of lone mothers in Vancouver, British Columbia’, Social and Cultural Geography, 3 (2), 117–34. Waters, Johanna L. (2005), ‘Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 359–77. Wilding, Ralene (2006), ‘“Virtual” intimacies? Families communicating across transnational contexts’, Global Networks, 6 (2), 125–42. Williams, Catharina P. (2005), ‘“Knowing one’s place”: Gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 401–17. Yamanaka, Keiko (2005), ‘Changing family structures of Nepalese transmigrants in Japan: Split-households and dual-wage earners’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 337–58. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Shirlena Huang (2010), ‘Transnational domestic workers and the negotiation of mobility and work practices in Singapore’s home-spaces’, Mobilities, 5 (2), 219–36.

Transnational families in an age of migration  197

Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Shirlena Huang (2012), ‘Home: Paid domestic labour’, in Susan J. Smith, Marja Elsinga, Lorna F. O’Mahony, Seow Eng Ong, Susan Wachter and Robyn Dowling (eds), International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, Oxford: Elsevier. Zelizer, Viviana A. (2005), The Purchase of Intimacy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

13. Transnational young people: growing up and being active in a transnational social field Valentina Mazzucato and Joan van Geel

INTRODUCTION: TRANSNATIONAL ENGAGEMENTS OF YOUNG PEOPLE OF MIGRANT BACKGROUND Young people of migrant background can be affected by migration in many ways. As the number of international migrants increases worldwide, so too does the number of young people on the move. These young people include children who migrate on their own, with their families, or who reunify with parents already overseas. While numbers are difficult to estimate, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs data show that, in 2019, child migrants (aged 19 years or below) accounted for almost 6 per cent and young migrants (aged 15 to 24) for over 11 per cent of the total migrant population worldwide (UN DESA, 2019). The conditions of these young people’s migration affect their integration into the new country. The second generation of migrants who did not migrate themselves but whose parents did are also affected by their parents’ migration in a multitude of ways, ranging from the impact on their identities and sense of belonging, to their schooling results or health outcomes. And finally, migration affects young people who remain in origin countries, but whose parents migrate. Here, too, exact figures do not exist, but country reports indicate that as many as one-quarter of all children in countries like Moldova and Ghana had at least one parent living overseas in the mid-2010s. Although they stay at home, their well-being is affected by their parents’ being abroad. Thus, how migration affects children and young people is an empirically important question. In this chapter we define transnational young people as comprising all three types described above as they are all multiply and simultaneously engaged with their or their parents’ home country and their or their parents’ new country of residence, be it through material or immaterial flows of people, money, ideas and goods. As such they are engaged in a transnational social field (Levitt 2009). Their engagement can take various forms. For example, the daily lives of young people who remain in their home country can be impacted by receiving remittances sent by their parents. Young people who live in a country different from where they or their parents were born construct identities and a sense of belonging that are connected to multiple places simultaneously. This chapter reviews studies of transnational young people, that is, studies that focus on how young people are multiply engaged with people, places and 198

Transnational young people  199

ideas that link them in profound ways to more than one nation-state and explores how their lives are shaped by these engagements. The number of studies applying a transnational perspective to children and young people of migrant background is steadily growing. More scholars acknowledge that children and young people have distinct views and experiences with respect to adults; they engage in their own transnational activities and shape their own transnational realities. In this chapter we investigate recent scholarship that focuses on the questions ‘in what ways are young people of migrant background transnational?’ and ‘how does being transnationally engaged shape their lives?’ We identify three broad strands of literature: that which focuses on second generation migrants living in migrant receiving countries; that which focuses on children who stay behind in the origin country while their parents migrate; and a third, more recent, strand that focuses on the ongoing transnational mobility of young people of migrant background between their country of residence and their or their parents’ ‘home’ country. These literatures are discussed successively in the sections that follow. Before proceeding with the chapter, there are a few notes on terminology and focus. The term ‘young people’ is used to refer to those who are transitioning from childhood to adulthood. ‘Children’ and ‘adults’ are socially and culturally constructed notions (Bluebond-Langner and Korbin 2007). If and when a person is socially accepted as an adult varies across cultures. There are studies that define young people as those below the age of 18 but others that draw the upper limit as high as 35 to 40 years of age (Huijsmans 2017). We therefore refrain from deploying a cut-off age of 18, which is widely used in policy and legal documents, and include studies that employ different age ranges, as long as they define their study as one on children or young people from a transnational perspective. We use ‘children’ and ‘young people’ interchangeably. While much migration takes place within countries and regions, we focus on international migration. Internal migration may entail significant change for young people as well. For example, in countries like China, it may mean moving over great distances and crossing multiple linguistic, legal and cultural borders. Yet, by focusing on transnational aspects of young people’s lives, we refer here exclusively to young people who crossed nation-state borders themselves or whose parents did. Finally, there are literatures that address young people who move between various countries, not just their origin country, and especially for educational purposes, such as ‘third-culture kids’ or ‘astronaut families’. These are not included in this overview as we deemed these literatures not to focus particularly on young people’s relationship with their home country. There is also a body of literature on international student mobilities, working holidays, and other kinds of work-leisure-lifestyle movements and digital nomadism (Stone and Petrick 2013; Tran 2016; Waters 2006). While some of this literature draws on a transnational lens, we do not cover it in this chapter as the kinds of movements authors are concerned with are different in nature from ours: they do not necessarily involve young people of migrant background, nor do they always investigate the relationships that young people have with their or their parents’ country of origin. There are separate chapters in this volume on

200  Handbook on transnationalism

international student mobilities (Liu-Farrer, Chapter 19 in this volume; Waters and Leung, Chapter 15 in this volume).

MIGRANT RECEIVING COUNTRIES: THE ‘SECOND GENERATION’ A body of literature has emerged since the 1990s investigating how young people of second generation migrant background are engaged transnationally, acknowledging that young people’s transnational activities and experiences are distinctive from those of their parents who were born and raised in countries other than their offspring’s. Much of this literature uses qualitative research designs and focuses on identities and how these are shaped by immaterial flows of images, practices, stories and ideas that the second generation grows up with. Because young people are raised in households and engage in peer networks that are regularly influenced by people, objects, practices, ideas and know-how from their parents’ countries of origin, their lives take place in a transnational social field (Levitt 2009). Within this transnational social field, young people actively seek meaningful exchanges within and across ethnic, racial and religious peer groups (Reynolds and Zontini 2016). Migrant parents may help them with these identity-shaping mechanisms by actively stimulating pride in a culture of origin (Fernández-Kelly 2008; Franceschelli et al. 2017). Many of the transnational activities that young people engage in relate to the cultural realm and happen beyond adult spaces and influence. For example, young Moroccans in Germany, Belgium, France and Denmark have been found to use digital media to shape and draw on a ‘transnational habitus’ that includes transnational as well as local orientations (Leurs 2015). Levitt (2009) showed how second generation youth engage in religious practices and define their identities in relation to their parents’ home countries, to which they draw their roots. These practices help young people to situate themselves in the country where they are growing up, but where their parents were not born. Sommerville (2008) argues that the transnational positioning of second generation youth of Indian background living in Canada helps them to develop fluid identities due to their hyphenated nationality. As such, young people create new identities transnationally. Another example is the ‘Azonto-dance’ that gained worldwide fame in 2011. The dance embodied what it means to be Ghanaian in a digital, mobile world and linked young Ghanaians from Accra to New York, helping them create a transnational identity (Waever Shipley 2013). Similarly, in the Netherlands, a new identity category has emerged amongst young people of Afro-Caribbean background: ‘Afro-Dutch’. This new category is constructed along the lines of ‘shared heritage’, ‘blackness’ and ‘Afro-cool’ (de Witte 2014). Not only are identities shaped by transnational activities, but so are young people’s political engagements and social networks (Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001; Levitt 2009). Although studies on the second generation acknowledge the need for a transnational lens, most studies collect data within one nation-state, the migrant receiving country, and do not conceive of the second generation as physically mobile. The

Transnational young people  201

focus of inquiry is on how young people’s transnational identities, sense of belonging or practices influence their lives in the migrant receiving country. As such, scholars do not ask research questions or employ methodologies that allow them to investigate young migrants’ physical mobility and how it may contribute to or affect their transnational experiences.

MIGRANT ORIGIN COUNTRIES: THE ‘LEFT BEHIND’ A second and separate strand of literature, conducted in migrant origin countries, focuses on young people who did not migrate but whose parents did. These children are often referred to as the ‘left behind’ or ‘stay behind’. They grow up transnationally because they remain engaged with their parents who migrated abroad. Transnational family scholars have investigated the role of these children in transnational families, how their care is arranged, and how their well-being is affected by parental migration (for overviews, see Glick 2010; Mazzucato and Schans 2011; Mazzucato 2015; Mazzucato and Dito 2018; Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). As mentioned in the introduction, many children in different parts of the world experience having one or both parents abroad due to migration. The first studies of transnational families and the children ‘left behind’ were conducted by anthropologists and qualitative sociologists who were interested in investigating how children participate in transnational family-making and the effects of that on children’s social positioning in the home society (Olwig 2012). For example, Mexican children were found to deploy strategies of ignoring and rebelling against their parents to influence decision-making regarding their parents’ mobility and to negotiate their own position in the family (Dreby 2007; Orellana et al. 2001). In the Philippines, children of migrants are seen by their peers as possessing the latest gadgets and clothes as a consequence of the remittances and gifts they receive from their parents abroad (Parreñas 2005). Other scholars have investigated how parental migration impacts the worldviews and aspirations of the children who stay behind. In many migrant origin countries, ‘cultures of migration’ are prevalent (Kandel and Massey 2002). Regions such as northern Mexico have a long history of parents migrating and children staying behind. Migration then becomes a norm embedded in cultural notions of maturing and becoming a socially accepted and successful adult. Kandel and Massey (2002) found that young people who are socialised into such a ‘culture of migration’ are likely to aspire to live and work abroad. Likewise, children in transnational Ghanaian families appear to have migratory ambitions from a very early age (Coe 2012). But while being part of a household with members who successfully migrated abroad can stimulate children’s aspirations to migrate themselves, experiencing migration from close by has also been found to have the opposite effect in other contexts. Young Hondurans are aware of the struggles their parents face abroad and of the benefits they reap from their parents’ overseas endeavours (Schmalzbauer 2008). They are not interested in following in their parents’ footsteps when life abroad is so hard and

202  Handbook on transnationalism

they are comfortable with the relative luxuries and benefits they experience through parental remittances. All of these above-mentioned studies explain how children and young people’s materiality, social positioning, aspirations and worldviews are influenced through their interactions with their migrant parents or a general culture of migration. How children experience and navigate the relationship with their overseas parents is another large area of inquiry. Schmalzbauer’s (2008) study of Honduran transnational families and Dankyi and her colleagues’ (2016) study of Ghanaian ‘left behind’ families both identify the important role played by the caregiver in the country of origin as mediator of parent–child relationships. Grandmothers were found to explain to ‘left behind’ children the reasons for their parents’ migration, namely, wanting to improve their children’s lives. This helped children to feel loved and cope with parental absence. Various studies discuss the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in parent–child relationships (for a general overview on the impact of ICTs on transnational networks see Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). Madianou and Miller (2011) discuss Filipino parents’ use of videoconferencing technologies for creating what they term ‘ambient co-presence’, or that feeling of being ever-present through constant connectivity practices. At the same time, Madianou (2012) notes children’s ambivalent feelings with regards to their parents’ continual monitoring of them over the internet. This literature, although focusing on parent–child relationships, has tended to rely mainly on adult assessments, although there are some exceptions (Graham et al. 2012; Lam and Yeoh 2019; Poeze and Mazzucato 2014; Poeze et al. 2016). More recently, the topic of left behind children has been taken up by quantitative scholars in the fields of sociology and psychology. Since the 2010s, scholars have been particularly interested in how parental migration affects the psychological well-being and health outcomes of the children they leave behind (Cebotari et al. 2017). Here we discuss the literature that explicitly takes into consideration how transnational elements influence these outcomes (for a full review of well-being outcomes for children in transnational families, see Mazzucato 2015). Transnational upbringing can cause difficulties for parents and children when undesired separations are prolonged, for example when parents are undocumented and cannot travel, which negatively impacts the parent–child relationship (Dito et al. 2016; Haagsman and Mazzucato 2014). But children and young people do not necessarily suffer from parental migration. Their well-being depends strongly on the conditions of transnational caregiving arrangements. Studies that have looked specifically at the composition of transnational families in various African countries found that caregiver stability, that is when children stay with one caregiver rather than moving from caregiver to caregiver, was the single-most important factor associated with the psychological well-being of children in transnational families (Mazzucato et al. 2015). Furthermore, the gender of the migrant parent seems to matter (Graham et al. 2012). Mazzucato and Cebotari (2016) found that Ghanaian children whose fathers are abroad are less negatively affected than when their mothers are abroad. The authors argue against the often-assumed importance of the biological bond between

Transnational young people  203

mother and child, but rather find that women migrants seem to have less stable caregiver arrangements than male migrants. This indicates that migrant women’s social networks may be weaker, hampering their ability to ensure the one condition that was found to most impact children’s well-being (Caarls et al. 2018). And although, in this literature, most studies focus on children and young people as recipients of care, young people can also become active givers of care, thereby ensuring the proper functioning of transnational families over great distances (Pantea 2012; Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume).

TRANSNATIONALLY MOBILE YOUNG PEOPLE Both of the strands of literature discussed above, on the ‘second generation’ in migrant receiving countries and the ‘left behinds’ in migrant origin countries, have in common that they simplify young people’s geographical mobility. Both categories of young people are defined by their parents’ migration, and young people themselves are assumed to be immobile. Yet, ‘left behind’ children may experience mobility at some point in their lives, either because they visit their parents abroad, or because they themselves migrate internally and possibly internationally. Likewise, second generation young people, who have primarily been studied in the country of their birth, may also engage in visits back and forth to their parents’ countries of origin. A recent study revealed that nearly half of secondary school children of migrants surveyed in four European countries visited their or their parents’ home country at least once a year (Schimmer and van Tubergen 2014). But until recently only a few studies have expressly focused on the diverse geographical mobilities of children and young people of migrant background. While acknowledging that transnationalism does not necessarily entail bodily movement (Levitt 2009; Mahler 1998), we focus in this section on a more recent strand of literature that looks at young people’s own mobility, primarily inspired by the ‘mobilities turn’ in social scientific research. Young people with a migration background, and irrespective of whether they are first or second generation or ‘left behind’, may engage in all sorts of mobilities, including family visits to roots tourism, starting a business in their parents’ home country, and being sent back for educational purposes (Bledsoe and Sow 2011; King et al. 2011). Children and young people may accompany their parents when they migrate or move independently in search of work, educational opportunities or safety (Huijsmans and Baker 2012). Moving with entire (extended) families is rare, especially for young people from the Global South moving to the Global North, due to strict migration laws in the countries of the latter. Consequently, when young people move, they almost always leave behind family members, such as aunts, uncles and grandparents, friends and significant others. To maintain relationships with those they leave behind, young people engage in transnational activities. Authors have focused on activities such as letter-writing, everyday virtual contact, text-messaging and gift-sending (Caneva 2017; Punch 2012). Here,

204  Handbook on transnationalism

we focus on literature that highlights the mobility of all these types of young people: the first and second generations and the stay behinds. Literature on ‘second generation returns’ focuses on young people who return to their parents’ country of origin (Binaisa 2011; Christou 2006; Jain 2013; Potter 2005). Many such studies focus on young people’s motivations for returning and their experiences upon return, highlighting the disorientation felt by young people when images of their homeland prior to migrating do not coincide with their actual experiences once they return. Wessendorf (2007), for example, finds that nostalgia and notions of roots can motivate young second generation Italians living in Switzerland to move to Italy, yet this movement is accompanied by a sense of a loss when they fail to feel part of the home society. Similarly, young second generation Greeks living in Germany and the United States move back to Greece for idealistic and lifestyle reasons, but are challenged by the reality of Greek life and start to develop hyphenated identities as Greek-Americans or Greek-Germans which provoke reverse transnational linkages back to their birth country (King and Christou 2014). Although some studies do address the diversity of mobility that young people of migrant background engage in (Lee 2011; King et al. 2011), this literature mainly focuses on permanent returns and not on patterns of mobility. The ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences has led scholars to theorise how spatial mobility is part of everyday lives (Sheller and Urry 2006). Mobility scholars concentrate on all forms of movement, including movement by things. They do not only concentrate on migrants, because not everyone who is mobile is a migrant. Yet recently, scholars have begun to combine transnational migration scholarship and mobility studies to explore the mobility patterns of young people of migrant background. In all the studies reviewed above, the main focus is on a single move: either a young person’s international move, or that of their parents, or young people’s ‘returns’. Yet, young people of migrant background take part in a diversity of mobilities. A newly proposed concept, ‘youth mobility trajectories’, which van Geel and Mazzucato define as ‘the moves young people make over time and across geographically distinct localities and the changing family constellations that this entails’ (2018, p. 2145), enables investigation of young people’s mobility prior to and beyond the first international move. Van Geel and Mazzucato criticise the general conceptual and methodological tendency to approach young people of migrant background as though they were a clean slate upon arrival in a new country. Through a visual mapping technique, they document the moves that young people engage in throughout their life course. They identify at least four different mobility patterns amongst young Ghanaians living in the Netherlands, irrespective of whether they are first or second generation. These mobility patterns are defined by the frequency and timing of moves that young people engage in both before and after their first international move. Van Geel and Mazzucato highlight that for some young people, their first international move is preceded by internal moves. These moves are significant in the lives of young people but are not taken into consideration by the ‘clean slate’ conceptualisation used in much migrant youth literature. Recent studies have set out

Transnational young people  205

research agendas to investigate the diversity of young people’s mobilities (Robertson et al. 2018; van Geel and Mazzucato 2018). Youth mobility may consist of shorter visits to countries of origin or longer stays. Both kinds of trip have been found to be important in helping young people to access more resources than they have at their disposal in only one country. That is, mobility enables young people to widen their resource environments. Their trips allow them to maintain transnational relationships with family and friends, gain motivation, build resilience, or acquire educational experiences. With regards to shorter visits, young people may engage in frequent mobility for family visits or ‘diasporic home visits’ (Wagner 2008). During such visits, young people rekindle ties with former caregivers and significant others, regain motivation to do their best in school, and undertake excursions to historical sites that instil pride in their heritage (van Geel and Mazzucato 2021). Even when trips are short, mobility can be meaningful as young people negotiate complex transnational identities and roles, and engage actively in home- and place-making activities (Gardner and Mand 2012). Mobility may also shape young people’s educational resilience in the country where they reside (van Geel and Mazzucato 2021). Especially when young people are experiencing difficulties in school, family ‘back home’ may play a motivational role in their lives. Mobility is a way for young people to access this source of motivation. Some young people engage in longer trips for the purpose of (in)formal (Kea and Maier 2017), religious (Erdal et al. 2016) or cultural (Whitehouse 2009) education. Others are ‘sent back’ when they misbehave or when parents can no longer balance occupational and caregiving responsibilities in the host country (Bledsoe and Sow 2011; Kea and Maier 2017). Other young people ‘return’ to their or their parents’ country of origin for identity reasons (Potter 2005; Reynolds 2010). Although these mobilities differ in length, purpose and duration, they shape transnational lives whereby young people have to negotiate socio-cultural and religious expectations and identities. For this, they need a specific set of skills and to be acquainted with a ‘transnational family habitus’ (Zontini and Reynolds 2018, pp. 418–19). Combining the mobility turn and insights from transnational family studies helps researchers to consider the totality of individual mobility patterns undertaken by young people, be they ‘second generation’, ‘left behind’ or young migrants. Such a perspective enables scholars to move beyond categorising young people of migrant background in terms of their parents’ moves, to include young people’s own voices in research, and to explore the role of mobility in enabling young people to live transnational lives.

CONCLUSIONS In this chapter, we identified three strands of literature investigating transnational young people. These strands of literature focus on the ways in which young people of migrant background are transnational and how this affects their lives. The first strand, usually conducted in migrant receiving countries, focuses on transnational

206  Handbook on transnationalism

young people of the second generation. These studies have showed that young people form transnational identities even when they do not migrate themselves. The second strand of literature focuses on the children of migrants who stay in the country of origin while their parents migrate abroad but who grow up transnationally. The last and most recent strand of literature focuses on the actual mobilities of young people themselves and how mobility shapes their transnational practices, identities and relationships. We suggest some new avenues for research relating to this last strand of literature, because little is yet known about the mobility of young people of migrant background and the effects this has on their lives. More studies are needed investigating the mobility trajectories of transnational young people, which include a diversity of moves throughout their lives. Young people are increasingly mobile, and their mobility is independent of that of their parents. In the past few decades, means of travel have become ever more accessible for young people and their families, making it relatively easy to maintain a transnational life. Going on holiday to one’s country of origin, visiting kin or moving for work or study are far more common these days and not only the preserve of the elite. A recent study on Ghanaian youth indicates that mobility is part of young people’s biographies irrespective of their family’s socio-economic background (van Geel and Mazzucato 2021). At the same time, global climate change and pandemics (this chapter was written during the COVID-19 lockdown) may change these conditions drastically. Understanding how these new conditions affect young people’s mobility and with what consequences, is an important and yet unexplored future research area. A second element for future research to consider concerns methodology. Young people’s mobility is different from that of their parents, and they do not necessarily share the same views about their mobility as adults or institutional actors such as education professionals. Van Geel (2019) compared young Ghanaians’ perceptions of their mobility with that of Dutch education professionals and found that while young people speak positively of their mobility, educationalists tend to problematise the mobility of young people of migrant background, considering it a threat to their educational progress. It is therefore important to investigate young people’s views, perspectives and experiences of mobility and to do so through youth-centred methodologies (Gardner 2012). Given the distinct life worlds of children and adults, and given the unequal power relations between the two, it is important to involve young people in research on their lives. Finally, investigating young people’s transnationality through their mobility moves research beyond the ‘ethnic’ lens that is common in migration studies (Dahinden 2016; Glick Schiller et al. 2005). Mobility offers researchers a new way of looking at the lives of youth with a migration background without reducing their experiences of mobility to one international move, as do the categories most commonly used: firstand second generation migrants. These categories presume that the only significant move for understanding how mobility affects young people’s lives is the first international move a young person makes (for the first generation) or that their parents made (for the second generation). This has the effect of ignoring all kinds of moves

Transnational young people  207

that young people engage in and that shape their lives. Most importantly, focusing on young people’s mobility helps reorient attention to characteristics that affect young lives other than migrant or ethnic origins. More research is thus needed on the different kinds of moves that young people engage in, what transpires during these moves, and how this shapes their transnational lives. As such, mobilities research can help bridge similar yet heretofore separate bodies of literature: the studies reviewed here that look at the mobility of young people of migrant background and the literature on elite kinds of mobility fostered through student exchange programmes, travel abroad programmes and the like. Multi-sited and youth-centric research designs can best help to address these gaps.

REFERENCES Binaisa, Naluwembe (2011), ‘Negotiating “belonging” to the ancestral “homeland”: Ugandan refugee descendents “return”’, Mobilities, 6 (4), 519–34. Bledsoe, Caroline H. and Papa Sow (2011), ‘Back to Africa: Second chances for the children of West African immigrants’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 73 (4), 747–62. Bluebond-Langner, Myra and Jill E. Korbin (2007), ‘Challenges and opportunities in the anthropology of childhoods: An introduction to “children, childhoods, and childhood studies”’, American Anthropologist, 109 (2), 241–6. Caarls, Kim, Karljin Haagsman, Elisabeth K. Kraus and Valentina Mazzucato (2018), ‘African transnational families: Cross-country and gendered comparisons’, Population, Space and Place, 24 (7), 1–16. Caneva, Elena (2017), ‘Identity processes in the global era: The case of young immigrants living in Italy’, Journal of Youth Studies, 20 (1), 79–93. Cebotari, Victor, Valentina Mazzucato and Melissa Siegel (2017), ‘Child development and migrant transnationalism: The health of children who stay behind in Ghana and Nigeria’, Journal of Development Studies, 53 (3), 444–59. Christou, Anastasia (2006), ‘Deciphering diaspora–translating transnationalism: Family dynamics, identity constructions and the legacy of “home” in second-generation Greek-American return migration’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29 (6), 1040–1056. Coe, Cati (2012), ‘Growing up and going abroad: How Ghanaian children imagine transnational migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6), 913–31. Dahinden, Janine (2016), ‘A plea for the “de-migranticization” of research on migration and integration’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 (13), 2207–25. Dankyi, Ernestina, Valentina Mazzucato and Takyiwaa Manuh (2016), ‘Reciprocity in global social protection: Providing care for migrants’ children’, Oxford Development Studies, 45 (1), 80–95. De Witte, Marleen (2014), ‘Heritage, blackness and Afro-cool’, African Diaspora, 7 (2), 260–289. Dito, Bilisuma B., Valentina Mazzucato and Djamila Schans (2016), ‘The effects of transnational parenting on the subjective health and wellbeing of Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands’, Population, Space and Place, 23 (3), e2006. Dreby, Joanna (2007), ‘Children and power in Mexican transnational families’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 69 (4), 1050–1064. Erdal, Marta Bivand, Anum Amjad, Qamar Z. Bodla and Asma Rubab (2016), ‘Going back to Pakistan for education? The interplay of return mobilities, education, and transnational living’, Population, Space and Place, 22 (8), 836–48.

208  Handbook on transnationalism

Fernández-Kelly, Patricia (2008), ‘The back pocket map: Social class and cultural capital as transferable assets in the advancement of second-generation immigrants’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 620 (1), 116–37. Fouron, Georges E. and Nina Glick Schiller (2001), ‘The generation of identity: Redefining the second generation within a transnational social field’, in Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán, Robert C. Smith and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds), Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 58–86. Franceschelli, Michela, Ingrid Schoon and Karen Evans (2017), ‘“Your past makes you who you are”: Retrospective parenting and relational resilience among black Caribbean British young people’, Sociological Research Online, 22 (4), 48–65. Gardner, Katy (2012), ‘Transnational migration and the study of children: An introduction’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6), 889–912. Gardner, Katy and Kanwal Mand (2012), ‘“My away is here”: Place, emplacement and mobility amongst British Bengali children’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6), 969–86. Glick, Jennifer E. (2010), ‘Connecting complex processes: A decade of research on immigrant families’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 72 (3), 498–515. Glick Schiller, Nina, Ayşe Çaglar and Thaddeus C. Guldbradsen (2005), ‘Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation’, American Ethnologist, 33 (4), 612–33. Graham, Elspeth, Lucy P. Jordan, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, Maruja Asis and Su-Kamdi (2012), ‘Transnational families and the family nexus: Perspectives of Indonesian and Filipino children left behind by migrant parents’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44 (4), 1–27. Haagsman, Karlijn and Valentina Mazzucato (2014), ‘The quality of parent–child relationships in transnational families: Angolan and Nigerian migrant parents in the Netherlands’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40 (11), 1677–96. Huijsmans, Roy (2017), ‘Children and young people in migration: A relational approach’, in Catherina Ní Laoire, Allen White and Tracey Skelton (eds), Movement, Mobilities, and Journeys: Geographies of Children and Young People 6, Singapore: Springer, pp. 45–66. Huijsmans, Roy and Simon Baker (2012), ‘Child trafficking: “Worst form” of child labour, or worst approach to young migrants?’, Development and Change, 43 (4), 919–46. Jain, Sonali (2013), ‘For love and money: Second-generation Indian-Americans “return” to India’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (5), 896–914. Kandel, William and Douglas S. Massey (2002), ‘The culture of Mexican migration: A theoretical and empirical analysis’, Social Forces, 80 (3), 981–1004. Kea, Pamela and Katrin Maier (2017), ‘Challenging global geographies of power: Sending children back to Nigeria from the United Kingdom for education’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59 (4), 818–45. King, Russell and Anastasia Christou (2014), ‘Second‐generation “return” to Greece: New dynamics of transnationalism and integration’, International Migration, 52 (6), 85–99. King, Russell, Anastasia Christou and Jill Ahrens (2011), ‘Diverse mobilities: Second-generation Greek-Germans engage with the homeland as children and as adults’, Mobilities, 6 (4), 483–501. Lam, Theodora and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2019), ‘Parental migration and disruptions in everyday life: Reactions of left-behind children in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (16), 3085–104. Lee, Helen (2011), ‘Rethinking transnationalism through the second generation’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 22 (3), 295–313. Leurs, Koen (2015), Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Transnational young people  209

Levitt, Peggy (2009), ‘Roots and routes: Understanding the lives of the second generation transnationally’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35 (7), 1225–42. Madianou, Mirca (2012), ‘Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood: The role of ICTs in Filipino transnational families’, Global Networks, 12 (3), 277–95. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller (2011), ‘Mobile phone parenting: Reconfiguring relationships between Filipina migrant mothers and their left-behind children’, New Media & Society, 13 (3), 457–70. Mahler, Sarah J. (1998), ‘Theoretical and empirical contributions toward a research agenda for transnationalism’, in Michael P. Smith and Luis Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below: Urban Comparative and Community Research, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, pp. 64–100. Mazzucato, Valentina (2015), ‘Transnational families and the well-being of children and caregivers who stay in origin countries’, Social Science and Medicine, 132, 208–14. Mazzucato, Valentina and Victor Cebotari (2016), ‘Psychological wellbeing of Ghanaian children in transnational families’, Population, Space and Place, 23 (3), e2004. Mazzucato, Valentina, Victor Cebotari, Angela Veale, Allen White, Marzia Grassi and Jeanne Vivet (2015), ‘International parental migration and the psychological well-being of children in Ghana, Nigeria, and Angola’, Social Science and Medicine, 132, 215–24. Mazzucato, Valentina and Bilisuma Dito (2018), ‘Transnational families: Cross-country comparative perspectives’, Population, Space and Place, 24 (7), e2165. Mazzucato, Valentina and Djamila Schans (2011), ‘Transnational families and the well-being of children: Conceptual and methodological challenges’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 73 (4), 704–12. Olwig, Karen F. (2012), ‘The care chain, children’s mobility and the Caribbean migration tradition’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6), 933–52. Orellana, Marjorie F., Barrie Thorne, Anna Chee and Wan Shun Eva Lam (2001), ‘Transnational childhoods: The participation of children in processes of family migration, Social Problems, 48 (4), 572–91. Pantea, Maria-Carmen (2012), ‘“I have a child and a garden”: Young people’s experiences of care giving in transnational families’, Journal of Youth Studies, 15 (2), 241–56. Parreñas, Rhacel (2005), ‘Long distance intimacy: Class, gender and the intergenerational relations between mothers and children in Filipino transnational families’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 317–36. Poeze, Miranda, Ernestina Dankyi and Valentina Mazzucato (2016), ‘Navigating transnational childcare relationships: Migrant parents and their children’s caregivers in the origin country’, Global Networks, 17 (1), 111–29. Poeze, Miranda and Valentina Mazzucato (2014), ‘Ghanaian children in transnational families: Understanding the experiences of left-behind children through local parenting norms’, in Lorretta Baldassar and Laura Merla (eds), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care, London: Routledge, pp. 149–69. Potter, Robert B. (2005), ‘“Young, gifted and back”: Second generation transnational return migrants to the Caribbean’, Progress in Development Studies, 5 (3), 213–36. Punch, Samantha (2012), ‘Studying transnational children: A multi-sited, longitudinal, ethnographic approach’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6), 1007–23. Reynolds, Tracey (2010), ‘Transnational family relationships, social networks, and return migration among British-Caribbean young people’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33 (5), 797–815. Reynolds, Tracey and Elisabetta Zontini (2016), ‘Transnational and diasporic youth identities: Exploring conceptual themes and future research agendas’, Identities, 23 (4), 379–91. Robertson, Shanthi, Anita Harris and Loretta Baldassar (2018), ‘Mobile transitions: A conceptual framework for researching a generation on the move’, Journal of Youth Studies, 21(2), 203–17.

210  Handbook on transnationalism

Schimmer, Paulien and Frank van Tubergen (2014), ‘Transnationalism and ethnic identification among children of immigrants in the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Sweden’, International Migration Review, 48 (3), 680–709. Schmalzbauer, Leah (2008), ‘Family divided: The class formation of Honduran transnational families’, Global Networks, 8 (3), 329–46. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. (2006), ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (2), 207–26. Sommerville, Kara (2008), ‘Transnational belonging among second generation youth: Identity in a globalized world’, Journal of Social Sciences, 10, 23–33. Stone, Matthew J. and James F. Petrick (2013), ‘The educational benefits of travel experiences: A literature review’, Journal of Travel Research, 52 (6), 731–44. Tran, Ly T. (2016), ‘Mobility as “becoming”: A Bourdieuian analysis of the factors shaping international student mobility’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37 (8), 1268–89. UN DESA (2019), Immigration Migrant Stock 2019, accessed 8 September 2020 at https://​ www​.un​.org/​en/​development/​desa/​population/​migration/​data/​estimates2/​estimates19​.asp. Van Geel, Joan (2019), ‘Conflicting framings: Young Ghanaians’ and Dutch educational professionals’ views on the impact of mobility on education’, Critical Studies in Education, doi:​10​.1080/​17508487​.2019​.1650382. Van Geel, Joan and Valentina Mazzucato (2018), ‘Conceptualising youth mobility trajectories: Thinking beyond conventional categories’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (13), 2144–62. Van Geel, Joan and Valentina Mazzucato (2021), ‘Building educational resilience through transnational mobility trajectories: Young people between Ghana and the Netherlands’, Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Studies, 29 (2), 119–36. Waever Shipley, Jesse (2013), ‘Transnational circulation and digital fatigue in Ghana’s Azonto dance craze’, American Ethnologist, 40 (2), 362–81. Wagner, Lauren (2008), ‘Diasporic visitor, diasporic tourist: Post-migrant generation Moroccans on holiday at “home” in Morocco’, Civilisations. Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines, 1 (57), 191–205. Waters, Johanna (2006), ‘Geographies of cultural capital: Education, international migration and family strategies between Hong Kong and Canada’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31 (2), 179–92. Wessendorf, Susanne (2007), ‘“Roots migrants”: Transnationalism and “return” among second-generation Italians in Switzerland’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33 (7), 1083–102. Whitehouse, Bruce (2009), ‘Transnational childrearing and the preservation of transnational identity in Brazzaville, Congo’, Global Networks, 9 (1), 82–99. Zontini, Elisabetta and Tracey Reynolds (2018), ‘Mapping the role of “transnational family habitus” in the lives of young people and children’, Global Networks, 18 (3), 418–36.

14. Transnational urbanism in the South Arnisson A.C. Ortega and Evangeline O. Katigbak

INTRODUCTION Along the South Superhighway, the main arterial thoroughfare that connects Metro Manila to the provinces of southern Luzon, the busy geographies of everyday life bring together a particular kind of urban “thrown-togetherness” (Massey 2005), juxtaposing rice fields and green spaces with mixed-use commercial complexes, residential subdivisions, and other built structures. Everyday life in this part of the Philippines alludes to an urban transformation that goes beyond topographic narratives of a sprawling metropolis, whereby the built environment from the metropolitan core expands and engulfs rural peripheries. Instead, everyday urbanisms in the region hinge upon broader networks and processes that connect them to places beyond the local and the nation – garment factories where female migrant workers rush out supplies for multinational apparel corporations; export processing zones where call center representatives take in orders from customers from the United States; newly constructed gated residential developments that are planned and marketed to potential clients as Italian neighborhoods. What emerges from these vignettes are transnational narratives that situate urbanisms within dynamic mobilities and the circulation of goods, services, ideas, bodies, and capital. These emergent urban spaces are products of a convergence of transnational forces and processes. In this chapter, we examine transnational urbanism, a term popularized by Michael P. Smith (2001) that refers to an ‘optic’ that situates transnational mobilities and connectivities within contested “historical and geographical contexts” (Smith 2001, p. 5) and demonstrate how it serves as an important lens in coming to grips with contemporary urban transformations in the Philippines and other parts of the Global South. Emphasizing mobilities and interconnectivities, transnational urbanism confronts the epistemological conundrum that urban geography grapples with, primarily around analytical binaries of fixity and flows, relationality and territoriality, locality and globality. In effect, transnational urbanism disrupts the treatment of cities as discrete and bounded territories constituted by settlements and neighborhoods and instead offers a dynamic accounting of flows and mobilities that sustain urban life (see Smith 2001; Collins 2012). Given that studies of transnational urbanism have mostly focused on Global North cities that attract migrants and financial capital, we expand the empirical terrain to include sites beyond the usual subjects of urban theorization and consider a more diverse representation of localities enmeshed with a multiplicity of transnational mobilities and circulations of bodies, ideas, and capital. In this chapter, we examine case study sites that illustrate varying forms of urbanization in the Philippines, a nation whose lifeblood is intimately entangled 211

212  Handbook on transnationalism

with its diasporic population (see Aguilar 2014). We argue that urbanization in the Philippines, given the country’s colonial history and neo-colonial location, relies heavily on transnational flows and connectivities. As such, our examination of transnational urbanisms in the Philippines interrogates spatial configurations and consolidations by emphasizing dynamic relations and entanglements that facilitate urban transformation. We feature three sites of urban transformation that are hinged on transnational relations – (1) gated transnational suburbs and condominium units; (2) islands transformed into tourist hubs through transnational interracial relationships; (3) transnational mansions. Even though these spaces are not located in urban cores of metropolitan regions, they signify the ways in which urban transformation is instantiated and sustained by transnational connectivities, from the role of diasporic capital in fueling real estate development and conversion of islands into resorts to the emotional geographies that underpin the rise of Italian-style mansions in a peri-urban village.

THEORETICAL TERRAINS OF TRANSNATIONAL URBANISMS Transnationalism refers to back-and-forth movements and interactions among peoples, networks, capital, ideas, and practices across national borders (see Glick Schiller et al. 1995; Levitt 2001; Portes 2001). Earlier conceptualizations of transnationalism were understood in terms of categories of people and practices. For instance, initial studies on transnationalism primarily documented the cross-border connections between the United States and Caribbean countries mediated by migrants and their left-behind families through thick ethnographic methods (see, for example, Glick Schiller et al. 1995). As such, transnational actors and their activities have tended to be analyzed from two perspectives – “from above” which pertains to transnationalisms practiced by institutions, from states to multinational corporations, and “from below” which detail actors located in micro-level settings (see Smith and Guarnizo 1998). As the literature expands beyond binary perspectives, transnationalism is cast as an analytical optic which considers broader sets of cross-border practices, networks, and actors and alludes to a sense of simultaneity and interlinkage. This approach prompts us to pay attention to how social and political structures are reworked and reshaped by ongoing transformations in the identities and loyalties of transnational subjects – both those who move and their seemingly sedentary counterparts. Against tendencies to idealize transnational agencies or cast movements as friction-less, critical interventions have argued for place and context, particularly in shaping the ways in which mobile bodies are located and the varied controls that hamper mobility. One such intervention is transnational urbanism. The term was first coined by Michael Smith and Luis Guarnizo (1998) in their edited book, Transnationalism from Below, to describe the ways in which transnational flows and activities are practiced from “below” by actors situated in micro settings, going

Transnational urbanism in the South  213

against “from above” discourses that depict transnationalism as the handiwork of states and large multinational firms. It was further expounded by Smith (2001) in his book, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization, where he foregrounded cities as spaces where transnational activities and practices are enacted, effectively locating globalization through “actions and effects of socially and spatially situated subjects” (Smith 2001, p. 2). As such, transnationalism is constituted by a set of translocal practices that occur in translocalities. Against tendencies that depict transnationalism as unmoored hyper-spaces of flows, Smith (2001) in effect clarifies how it is necessarily grounded in specific geographical contexts. Against the economistic discourse of global cities literature and structuralist accounts of urbanization, transnational urbanism focuses on a grounded approach to understanding cities, highlighting the usefulness of “agency-oriented yet translocalized urban research” (Smith 2005, p. 237). As such, it underscores a relational way of thinking about cities, where a city is conceived as a place that reaches out to other places and yet is marked by its own specificities. This harks back to Massey’s (2005) arguments about holding places as open and progressive, where migrants are able to connect with and participate in social networks that represent home and belonging located beyond the territorial boundaries of a place. It foregrounds the everyday as an analytical vantage point where the mundane spaces of peoples and relationships maintain transnational connectivities (Conradson and Latham 2005; Smith 2005). Thus, Smith (2005, p. 242) describes transnational cities as “pregnant with … social relations of domination-accommodation-resistance” and as such, they serve as “sites of cultural appropriation, accommodation, and resistance to ‘global conditions’ as experienced, interpreted, and understood in the everyday lives of ordinary men and women” (Smith 2001, p. 128). Through this optic, a range of transnational actors, from “above” and “below” are brought together along with middle agents and nonpermanent migrants in the practice of transnational activities (Conradson and Latham 2005; Collins 2012), from holiday travelers (Clarke 2005) to international students (Collins 2010). As such, the optic makes similar claims to Levitt and Glick Schiller’s (2004) concept of the “transnational social field” to accommodate multiple agents, activities, and enterprises indirectly related to transnationalism but part and parcel of translocal experiences. Furthermore, transnational urbanism takes into account built environments, particularly in analyzing the ways in which transnationalism configures the “spacing of … concrete physical artifacts” of cities (Parnreiter 2012, p. 96). Several efforts have interrogated the transnational interconnectivities that imbue urban environments, such as the ethnic transformation of retail landscapes (Friesen et al. 2005), the construction of ethnic monuments (Irazabal 2012), and urban plaza projects which are developed and sustained by various transnational actors (e.g. developers, corporate renters) and organizational logics (e.g. planning systems and principles, financial mechanisms) (Parnreiter 2012). In pushing forward transnational urbanism as a lens to analyze contemporary urban conditions, we argue for the need to attend to contemporary debates in urban studies. While some scholars signaled a supposed “impasse in urban theory” (Peck 2015, p. 160) due to contending debates and contestations around framing contempo-

214  Handbook on transnationalism

rary urbanization, the current moment is an opportune time for creative retheorization of urban transformations, accounting for multiple forces and relations across multiple contexts and terrains. Recent theoretical debates question long-held concepts and categories in urban studies, owing to the expansive nature of urban entanglements and the blurriness of the urban–rural divide. Perhaps the most forceful provocation has been planetary urbanization, a theory that contends that urbanization has virtually gripped the whole planet and as such, demands new modes of analyses (see Brenner and Schmid 2015). Planetary urbanization eschews fixed and long-held categories, primarily the urban–rural binary and, instead, proposes an epistemology that subsumes the “non-urban” as “variegated patterns and pathways of a planetary formation of urbanization … internalized into the very core of the urbanization process” (Brenner and Schmid 2015, p. 162). Against the urban–rural divide, it emphasizes processes underpinning a generalized urbanization, where uneven spatialities of urbanization are “articulated through an explosion of developmental patterns and potentials within a thickening, if unevenly woven, fabric of worldwide urbanization” (Brenner 2013, p. 99). This approach has been criticized for essentially casting a totalizing urbanization with “no ontological Other” (Brenner and Schmid 2015, p. 174), subsuming the “non-urban” and all the other dynamics, relationships, and struggles that produce various spaces (see Roy 2016; Peake et al. 2018). However, the condition and problematique are valid, as dominant urban categories and analysis fail to account for the interconnections that imbue urban processes. In a world where urban transformation has radically transformed relations and ecologies, transnational urbanism’s emphasis on relationality is a relevant and potent approach that situates interconnections in the contextual realities of everyday life. As an approach, transnational urbanism allows us to grapple with the tensions between fixity and mobility. This approach provides a necessary analytical maneuver that accounts for the extended nature of contemporary urbanization, mooring interconnections of places (“explosions”) onto “implosive” dynamics of urban accumulation, and transformations of “non-urban” spaces considered to be “constitutive outsides” of urbanization. A transnational urban lens attends to the grounded negotiations that either resist or embrace interconnections, necessarily exposing the spatial politics of “interrelationships of movements of people, objects, capital and ideas … through overlapping scales of the local, the bodily, the national and the global” (Oswin and Yeoh 2010, p. 170). In using a transnational lens in Global South settings, Xiang (Chapter 3 in this volume) suggests a multi-scalar approach which pays attention to the nation as a key feature of transnational processes. Within the context of a rapidly urbanizing world where interconnections abound, the empirical terrain covered by the transnational urbanisms literature is fairly limited to major global cities. Most studies have focused on emergent spaces of various immigrant populations in Global North cities and rightly so, given their historical role in global finance and as hubs in global migration flows. However, if we are to truly take a relational approach, the mobilities imbuing urban processes in these global cities are interconnected in one way or another with Global South contexts, sites that are not the usual suspects interrogated by urban theory. Thus, we are

Transnational urbanism in the South  215

impelled to ask how transnational mobilities of migrants or flows of capital and ideas impact urban processes in the Global South. If we are to take, for example, Michael Smith’s accounting of how multiple migration patterns “come together … and enter into the contested politics of place-making” (Smith 2001, p. 5) in Koreatown in Los Angeles, it makes sense to also think about how the varied transnational connections and migration flows imbuing Koreatown are differentially impacting urban neighborhoods and communities in South Korea, Mexico, and other migrant-sending countries linked to the place. From the vantage point of urban theory, focusing attention on southern cities is pertinent to contemporary patterns of global urbanization, since much of the urban growth is occurring in the Global South (United Nations 2018). As such, theorizing from Global South terrains is critical if we want to come to grips with contemporary forms of urbanization and in projecting future trajectories of urbanisms. Using a transnational urban lens, we ask how transnational mobilities facilitate urbanization in various southern contexts. We particularly heed calls among postcolonial theorists to provincialize western urban theory and seriously engage with Global South contexts as sites of urban theorization (see Roy 2009; Sheppard et al. 2013). Inspired by calls for “rich experimentation” and “exploration or invention of various methodologies” (Robinson and Roy 2016, p. 181), we feature examples of three variants of urbanization taking place in the Philippines. These three case studies do not just demonstrate area-based traits of transnational urbanisms but also point to the potential of new conceptual formations in theorizing transnational urbanism, where we emphasize the emotional, economic, and political geographies that are reproduced in the process of transnational entanglements and mobilities.

SCALE AND TRANSNATIONAL URBANISM The adoption of transnational urbanism as a lens to analyze urbanization brings the issue of scale to the center of the discussion. As a socially constructed expression of power (Nikiforova and Kaiser 2008; Marston 2000), scale illustrates the unequal power relations among various actors, as seen in the way in which certain scales are invoked to enlist alliances and relationships in meeting particular political ends. We argue that a transnational urban lens has to attend to “scalar politics” (see MacKinnon 2010), principally in underscoring the scaled practices and processes that configure mobilities (e.g. regulations on citizenship, policies on migration) and urban transformation (e.g. rules on land use change, building codes, etc.). In considering the varied ways inter-scalar relationships play out in urbanizing contexts, especially in the Global South, we highlight the “nation” as an arena where policies and programs impacting migration and urbanization are enacted upon and coursed through. In the Philippine case studies that we feature in this chapter, the “nation” figures as a potent scale from which various actors and institutions are enrolled to facilitate mobilities, enact aspirations, and deploy capital and labor, and to enable built environment transformations. We identify three overlapping scalar interrelations that sustain transna-

216  Handbook on transnationalism

tional urban configurations in these case study sites: (1) local/urban; (2) national; (3) transnational (see Figure 14.1).

Figure 14.1

Inter-scalar relationships and three sites

The first set of scalar relationships are consolidated in the local/urban. It is at this scale that a set of relations is negotiated and contested in multiple spaces, from the home to the village and the town. It is in the everyday spaces of neighborhoods where residents grapple with urban transformation, from the influx of new migrants to gated communities and squatter settlements, to land use conversion of agricultural lands. It is at this scale that power relations in the household intersect with those of the village and town, as the middle-class aspirations of residents expressed through their homes or land purchases align with town aspirations of achieving city-hood status. The second set of relationships congeal around collective notions of a Philippine nation. As one of the major migrant-sending countries in the world, the Philippines has developed a deeply ingrained “culture of migration” (Asis 2006) which has been abetted by a series of institutional mechanisms that facilitate, regulate, and promote labor recruitment and deployment, and also harness diasporic capital remitted to the country. Over the decades, Overseas Filipinos (OFs) and Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) have been celebrated as bagong bayani (new heroes) for their contribution to the national coffers, among others (Encinas-Franco 2015). Their role in subsidizing the nation-state has permeated various aspects of national development, including through real estate (see Ortega 2016b; Pido 2017). Based on increasing demand from

Transnational urbanism in the South  217

OFWs, Philippine real estate has become one of the most lucrative property markets in the Asia-Pacific (Sarmiento 2018), leading to significant urban transformation in numerous parts of the country. Meanwhile, new urban developments and town land use plans invoke hegemonic ideals of building a modern and prosperous nation. Over the past few decades, the country has enacted a series of market-oriented programs supporting investment-oriented projects and encouraging public–private partnerships, all of which are geared toward the creation of a globally competitive economy (Bello 2004). Lastly, the nation has become a rallying point, a reflexive invocation to facilitate consent and to achieve particular political and economic goals through various actors, from property developers targeting OFWs to invest and help build the nation, to politicians and other interest groups lobbying for the passage of real estate investment trust law in an effort to rebuild the national economy. Intimately interlinked with nation is the transnational, constituted by OFs, and also overseas organizations and institutions located territorially outside the Philippines. Over the last few decades, the OF community has become a formidable and potent political and economic force shaping Philippine affairs, from gathering support for philanthropic work to consolidating political power of state officials. For the real estate industry, the OFs are an important clientele whose diasporic money constitutes a critical circuit of capital for urban development in the country. We identify these scales not to reinforce a scaffolding depiction of scalar relations but to instead emphasize the ways in which practices are scaled. These three intersecting scalar relationships are activated in the three case studies of transnational urbanisms in different ways, as we detail in the next section. The urban localities we interrogate are translocalities constituted by residents, family members, and kababayans (compatriots) as they navigate localities and across space.

TRANSNATIONAL URBANISMS ACROSS THE ARCHIPELAGO Studies of postcolonial urbanisms have flourished over the past decade. Postcolonial urbanism advocates for the provincialization of urban theory whereby no single urban narrative can fully explain the diverse urban conditions in various part of the world (see Leitner and Sheppard 2016; Sheppard et al. 2013; Roy 2009; Robinson and Roy 2016). As such, it questions the assumed universality of Anglophone urban theory, which is typically drawn from the vantage point of Global North cities. Thus, postcolonial urbanism advances “new geographies of theory” (Roy, 2009, p. 820) which comprise a “shifting ecosystem of critical urban theories” (Leitner and Sheppard 2016, p. 228) wherein multiple theories are in constant critical conversation with one another. Doing so requires a comparative approach, which considers multiple urban contexts (Leitner and Sheppard 2016). Furthermore, such an approach emphasizes Global South terrains as veritable sites of urban knowledge production (Roy 2009). In sum, transnational urbanism benefits from postcolonial urbanism’s insistence on

218  Handbook on transnationalism

theoretical diversity and wider empirical coverage, since transnational mobilities that are reshaping global cities in the North are interconnected in one way or another with cities and villages in the Global South. As rapid urban transformation engulfs the Global South (United Nations 2018), it is imperative to look at transnational urbanisms not just in the usual major cities of the Global North but also southern urban contexts and other sites implicated in transnational urban processes. It is from this postcolonial assertion that we situate our discussion of transnational urbanisms using three case study sites in the Philippines. In order to avoid casting Global South urbanisms as homogeneous spaces of underdevelopment, we locate emergent urban conditions beyond the typical megacity narratives centered around Manila, the capital city of the country. While we acknowledge the important role of Manila in the Philippine diaspora (see Tyner 2000 for examples), we feature other sites that are illustrative of disparate forms of urbanization spurred by transnational mobilities of OFs – (1) properties in gated suburban communities and condominiums, (2) urban transformation of islands and coastal zones, and (3) the rise of Italian-style mansions in peri-urban towns. These spaces illustrate the diverse urban experiences happening across the Philippines, whereby the standard urban accounts drawing on agglomeration economies or state developmentalism are insufficient to explain urban transformation. Instead, we argue that these urban transformations are spatial expressions of Filipino transnational mobilities, wherein remittance monies and diasporic capital are critical sources of financialization crystallizing social, cultural, and political transformation. In each case, we foreground emergent spaces, the various actors, institutions, and their inter-scalar relationships (local/urban, nation, and the transnational) which are all critical in fueling urban transformation, from the real estate industry’s tendency to invoke commitments in helping the nation and the affective housing investments of OFW for their families left behind to the translocal negotiations involving interracial relationships and purchases of island and beachfront properties.

BUILDING DREAMS BACK HOME: FROM SUBURBAN SUBDIVISIONS TO CONDOMINIUM UNITS In recent years, there has been growing interest in the spatial politics of transnational migration and investments in residential real estate, primarily involving rich and middle-class transnational investors in global cities (see Rogers and Koh 2017; Rogers 2016; Pow 2016; Wong 2017; Koh, Chapter 27 in this volume). In the Global South, transnational real estate practice typically involves investments by transnational migrants and returning diasporic communities (see Bose 2014; Kim 2017; McGregor 2014). Beyond financial gains, these diasporic investments also involve “affective” (Faier 2013) and other “ethno-cultural” transactions (Rogers and Koh 2017, p. 5). These diasporic investments have had multiple impacts on urban transformations, with varying spatial expressions – from the rise of “transnational houses”

Transnational urbanism in the South  219

in Accra’s peri-urban fringe (Pellow 2003) to gated communities in “tech cities” of Bangalore (Chacko 2007). In the Philippines, real estate growth in the past two decades has been fueled by demand from OFs and OFWs (Ortega 2016b). For the Philippine real estate industry, the OF and OFW market is big money. Property developers have crafted various programs and mechanisms to effectively tap into the OF market and channel their much-needed remittance monies into developments in the Philippines (see The Filipino Times Staff 2019; Tuason-Magpoc 2017). Philippine developers typically hold overseas property caravans in major cities with significant OF populations. On several occasions, they have participated in government-sponsored Filipino expositions to showcase Philippine tourism and investments or co-sponsor Filipino community-led cultural events, such as concerts and Independence Day celebrations. Among large development firms, a key strategy has been to establish overseas offices where OFs are hired as brokers. This strategy enables them to effectively market Philippine properties by tapping into the intricate local networks of families, friends, and acquaintances within Filipino communities. To further attract OFs, developers market their properties as “family-oriented” and well-secured projects, leveraging the fact that homeownership is a form of “affective investment” (Faier 2013) made by OFs to support families back in the Philippines. One of the major cities frequented by Philippine property caravans is Dubai, the capital city of United Arab Emirates where 265,498 OFs are deployed (Philippine Overseas Employment Administration 2017). One of the many OFWs living in the city is Mario, an engineer who left for Dubai in order to support his family in the Philippines. Whenever he attends property caravans, Mario takes part in various free seminars by real estate developers, from wealth management to fundamentals of property investment. During one of these caravans, Mario decided to take the plunge and invest in a condominium unit in Makati, Metro Manila’s financial hub, with the hope of renting the unit to BPO (business process outsourcing) workers or expatriates. His wife, who resides in Bulacan – a province adjacent to Metro Manila – serves as the property manager, meeting potential renters to ensure they are “decent-looking” (mukhang disente), collecting monthly rent, and paying Home Owner Association (HOA) fees. This arrangement is quite common in many condominium developments in Metro Manila, as OFs and OFWs scramble to capitalize on a bustling condominium market that has restructured Manila’s urban landscape while BPO workers who earn a sizable income seek rental places close to their work in business districts. Mario and his wife, however, tend to avoid BPO workers because they would usually rent with co-workers and were often irresponsible and loud. Instead, they prefer renting to expatriates because they tend to pay rent in advance and are generally “more reliable” (mas mapagkakatiwalaan). Other OFWs in Dubai have also made different property purchases in the Philippines. Zenaida, a jewelry merchant and part-time beautician, followed her husband to Dubai so that they could both work and support their child in the Philippines. After working for five years in Dubai, the couple successfully purchased a two-story mansion in one of the upper-class gated subdivisions in a peri-urban town south of

220  Handbook on transnationalism

Metro Manila. The gated subdivision was marketed as a “Mediterranean-themed” and “world-class” project that promotes “complete family” living with community parks and playgrounds. For Zenaida, they chose the subdivision because it was “quiet” and “secure,” which were critical considerations for their son who was left behind under the care of Zenaida’s mother and another relative. So far, she and her husband are content with their transnational set-up because their son is well cared for and seems to be thriving. In their subdivision, the majority of the households have either one or both parents working overseas in a range of different territories, with a handful involving mixed-race marriages with foreigners of varying nationalities. Such situations are not unique in Zenaida’s subdivision. Other mid- to high-end gated subdivisions are inhabited by households with family members who have had transnational experiences. Thus, underlying these gated “globurbs” (King 2004) are interesting suburban geographies of diverse transnationalisms, which Ortega (2018) calls “transnational suburbs”, with some gated subdivisions themed to reflect particular international regions or trades associated with many of the homeowners (e.g. Seaman’s Village, Hong Kong Village). Despite enshrining their aspirations in the suburban mansion, Zenaida and her husband still consider their set-up lacking and incomplete, simply because they are not with their child. However, Zenaida contends that they “do not have any choice,” because to sustain their life in the subdivision and ensure the future of their son, they need to continuously work overseas. Such contradiction between suburban domestic ideals and overseas work underpins many households in gated subdivisions. These accounts in Manila are similar to other suburban transformations in Global South cities (see Pellow 2003; Chacko 2007). These transnational suburbs demonstrate how transnationalism serves as one of the critical forces that facilitate suburban transformations which define much of contemporary urbanization (see Keil 2018). These two examples of investments in condominiums and gated subdivisions are illustrative of the direct role that OFs and OFWs play in fueling real estate growth and in the rise of particular transnational urbanisms emerging from these types of development. However, behind these urban developments are numerous narratives of dispossession involving urban poor squatter residents, indigenous peoples and peasants whose homes and communities were demolished to make way for new urban projects. In Metro Manila, high-rise condominium developments are one of the many urban projects that aim to create a “globally competitive,” “resilient,” and “green” metropolis. This metropolitan “face-lifting” has entailed the demolition of informal settler communities in various parts of the metropolis (see Ortega 2016a; Choi 2016). Meanwhile, vast tracts of land in the peri-urban provinces surrounding Metro Manila have been converted to non-agricultural uses, with many cases involving the displacement of farming and indigenous communities (see Ortega 2016b; Kelly 2000). Many of these land conversions involve the construction of property developments in the form of residential gated community projects which are marketed to OFs. These accounts of dispossession constitute the insidious underbelly upon which transnational urbanism in the Philippines is built.

Transnational urbanism in the South  221

BODIES OF ACCUMULATION AND ISLAND URBANISMS Islands and coastal zones have long been neglected as sites of urban theorization, despite the fact that many densely populated cities are actually located on islands, from Hong Kong to New York City and Singapore to Abu Dhabi. Islands tend to allude to notions of peripherality, remoteness, and isolation and are oftentimes counterposed against cities of centrality, density, and diversity (Grydehøj et al. 2015). Such conceptual bifurcation has prevented a serious attempt to think about island urbanisms, particularly in island and archipelagic territories which are oftentimes categorized as “less urbanized” (United Nations 2018). While there have been attempts to bridge island and urban studies, from proffering notions of “urban villages” in Pacific islands (Jones 2016) to the negotiations of core–periphery relations in the “island city” of Nuuk (Grydehøj 2014), more is needed to theorize urbanization in islands and coastal zones. In contemporary forms of urbanization, examinations of urbanization on islands may provide theoretical and empirical insights on how centrality and peripherality are negotiated in non-city contexts. A transnational optic provides a useful approach since “real-world island dynamics” are deeply embedded “into complex networks of exchange for goods, people, and ideas” (Grydehøj et al. 2015, p. 8). In the Philippines, several island communities have been radically transformed into tourism hubs. Contrary to their image of rural “backwardness,” these islands are now critical tourist nodes celebrated as “world-class” destinations and often included in recommended travel itineraries which, interestingly enough, reduce the megacity of Manila to a mere entry and exit point. While less immediately visible, urban transformation in these islands is facilitated by transnational processes that interlink gendered subjectivities and interracial relationships, and where Filipina bodies become the site of both household and community capital accumulation. These accounts on bodies, intimacies and interracial relationships provide an important additional research trajectory in the study of race and urbanization, wherein most themes traditionally revolve around racial segregation, marginalization, and poverty in Euro-American cities (e.g. Holloway et al. 2012; Wilson 2007). In January 2018, the state visit of the Philippine President to India was marred by a controversial statement he jokingly made, offering 42 Filipina virgins to prospective investors venturing to the Philippines (Ranada 2018). Such sexist statements, which are not uncommon for the President, are a reflection of the enduring gender relations in Philippine society and the ways in which the Filipina body becomes the offering used to attract foreign capital. This discourse can be seen in various tourism ads that promote the “beauty” of the Philippines through exotic depictions of Filipinas wearing traditional garb. In recent years, much emphasis has been given to attracting foreign retirees to move to the Philippines and invest. Through the Special Resident Retiree’s Visa (SRRV) of the Philippine Retirement Agency (PRA), foreign nationals may relocate to the Philippines as a retiree as long as he/she is at least 35 years old and either invests in properties and/or deposits a minimum of US$25,000 into a designated bank of the government (Philippine Retirement Authority n.d.).

222  Handbook on transnationalism

These recent efforts reinforce the gendered stereotypes underlying transnational relations that match older Caucasian retirees with younger Filipina women. The internet is replete with blog posts, message boards and DIY e-books that promote retirement by moving to the Philippines as “living like a king” surrounded by subservient and loyal Filipina women. Such idealized partnerships have development outcomes. On several islands, these interracial relationships have become key modes of transnational urban accumulation that has rapidly transformed many communities. The Filipina wife is crucial to accumulation from the vantage point of the foreign husband, since foreigners cannot own land and usually need a local wife as a front for property purchases. In one coastal municipality, which is becoming one of the main tourist destinations of an island in Central Philippines, one of the oldest and most popular resorts is owned and operated by Anna, a Filipina who moved to the island with her Canadian husband of two decades, David. Anna hails from the island of Cebu and met David in one of the tourist resorts in Palawan. After marriage, they decided to purchase big chunks of coastal land in a relatively isolated municipality and establish a resort. With financial capital coming from David’s savings in Canada, Anna served as the official owner of the property and resort. The resort boomed, attracting other foreign tourists, initially through David’s personal network and later on through establishing an online presence. The resort triggered an economic boom for the town which led to other resorts sprouting up in various parts of the town, many of which are also owned by Filipina-foreigner couples. Over time, the couple was able to purchase properties in other parts of the Philippines with Anna again acting as the owner. Since Anna serves as the manager of the resort and owner of the property, she has become a prominent figure in the town and was able to build an informal support network involving politicians and other professionals, despite the fact that some belittle her for being a woman. From the point of view of her family and relatives, Anna is a saving grace who has provided substantial financial support to her parents, siblings, and everyone in her kinship circle, particularly those whom she has employed at her resort. Anna’s story is emblematic of the idealized Filipina body that supports the family, the locality, and the nation. Other mixed-race relationships formed on the islands are not as successful and illustrate the precarious conditions in which Filipinas are situated. Lenny and Paul met at one of the resorts in a Visayan island. Lenny, who hails from a rural village in Mindanao, was one of the many migrant women who worked in the resorts and other commercial establishments on the island. After meeting Paul, a middle-aged American who was on an extended vacation in the Philippines, they decided to enter into a relationship and eventually lived together in a rental apartment on the island. However, Paul was very much aware of mixed-race stereotypes involving Filipinas and was cautious of becoming “milked” (gatasan) by Lenny and her family for money and other forms of support. The relationship was further complicated by a general sense of antagonism directed towards migrant women in the village, who were often seen as prostitutes (puta). The relationship ended after five years and future plans of buying properties and building resorts did not happen. Despite this

Transnational urbanism in the South  223

turn of events, Lenny is still pressured to work on the island and support her family back in Mindanao. Island urbanization as an urban process is barely interrogated and conceptualized. In the Philippines, the urban transformations on the islands are not spurred by metropolitan expansion, corporate investment, or state-led development programs. Instead, urban development relies on tourism and ancillary industries that facilitate a cumulative causation of economic activities, demographic change, and transnational connections. On the surface, what seems to have emerged are islands that are embedded in transnational networks of economic, cultural, and social relations, not just with national capitals or regional cities, but also with other parts of the world. Closer examination suggests that at the heart of these urban transformations are intimate geographies of gendered bodies and interracial marriages serving as key modes of urban accumulation and transnational mobilities. The narratives underscore the important role of emotions in sustaining transnational connections and investments in properties (see Wilding and Baldassar, Chapter 6 in this volume). Furthermore, this contributes to efforts in urban studies that push for the notion of the “intimate city” whereby “intimate transactions” and “intimate relations of power within the home, family, neighborhood and the community” (Datta 2016, p. 240) are interconnected with political-economic analyses of urbanization.

DREAM HOMES, PORTABILITY OF PLACE, AND PERI-URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS Houses are power-laden symbolic spaces for transnational migrants where notions of home, belongingness, and community are negotiated (see Levin and Fincher 2010; Sandu 2013; Boccagni, Chapter 9 in this volume). For this case study, we focus on transnational mansions in the Philippines. Across the archipelago, the presence of mansions rising out of verdant green fields are tell-tale signs of households with OF/OFW families. In one way or another, these mansions are signifiers of the socio-spatial transformation of localities, a spatial marker of urban change. Compared to property investments in gated communities and condominium developments in Manila and nearby peri-urban regions, the construction of mansions are typically in situ projects involving the improvement of family-owned houses or land. These mansions are smaller and kinship-based ventures that do not involve the transnational operations of Philippine property developers that market housing and condominium units overseas. In the peri-urban town of Mabini in Batangas province, two hours (by bus) southwest of Metro Manila, a village colloquially known as “Little Italy” is a dramatic illustration of this phenomenon, by which the construction of homes serves as a marker of portability of place through transnational connections (see Katigbak 2015). Migration from the village to Italy started in the late 1970s when a large number of women migrated clandestinely as domestic helpers. Over time, migration from the village to Italy has been facilitated through direct-hiring schemes or family

224  Handbook on transnationalism

reunification programs offered by the Italian state. The ongoing migration of the villagers to Italy for work and family reunification has transformed not only the social fabric of the community but also the materialities of their social relations and the physical characteristics of the place. Little Italy earned its name in popular media because of the imposing houses of migrant families that are curious contrasts to the rural beginnings of the village. The building of these houses represents the realization of personal and/or familial dreams, signifying a sense of belonging, and a critical yardstick of success. The houses serve as spatial imprints of the fulfillment of familial promises and aspirations brokered by transnational labor. Their construction and sustenance are illustrative of the ways in which these houses are emotional investments, the manifestation of the idealized successful migration story. Because of the dominant discourse of successful migration stories, migrants prioritize the building of grand houses as part of their “heroic” desire to improve the welfare of their family. The indefatigable desire to build multi-million peso homes as “trophies” for their migration experience is further fueled by jealousies and boastfulness within the village. One of the transnational migrants, Mark, is critical of this incessant desire to build extravagant homes. He would often point to his migrant cousin who incurred considerable debt in order to build his mansion: “That house was built on debts … No one lives in that house except my cousin’s aged father” (in his late 80s). Meanwhile, other Italian-themed houses in the village are “empty” homes, serving as mere symbols of the successful sojourn of migrants. Lita, a non-migrant relative commented, “I really don’t get it, migrants build houses, fill them with classy appliances that they are unable to use because they live in Rome.” Many residents think of the mushrooming of such residences as a consequence of changing values of the villagers in relation to their experiences in Italy. Specifically, jealousies and boastfulness have reportedly become dominant in the village. Mark thinks that building houses has become a fad (uso) in the village with one family competing with another in having the more grandiose one. He is not alone in this view as other villagers likewise see the rush for building grand houses as founded on the so-called gaya-gaya (imitation) system. These Italian houses reflect the logics of the portability of place that ground the socialities that are shared across transnational spaces. For many migrant villagers, Italy does not only refer to a country in Europe but it is also an imagined extension of their village and family life, largely because of the constancy and the volume of the flows of bodies, material, and social remittances that are multi-directionally exchanged among them. The home in the sending locality – the “original” home – provides spaces of familiarity and belonging that, for migrants, may be difficult to negotiate in destination areas because of the differences in the lifestyle and cultural norms of people from different cultural backgrounds. Hence, another home is created, bearing semblances of the original home, but accommodating the characteristics of the receiving place as well, thereby reflecting a sense of continuity amidst change. It is the openness of place that allows for the porting of socialities that migrants have been accustomed to at the original home to another place, contributing

Transnational urbanism in the South  225

to the recreation of home in the host area (Italy); these “new” homes are negotiated copies of the original home. But with the construction of new homes in Little Italy, migrant villagers continue their place-making practice, this time in porting Italy back into the village. Such building of the house and the home illustrates how emotional and economic geographies are intertwined in the (re)production of translocalities through place.

CONCLUSION The three cases of transnational urbanism that we have presented illustrate some of the diversity of urban experiences in the Philippines. By interrogating the multiple dynamics of transnationality and their interconnections with varied urban transformations in a Global South terrain, we heed postcolonial calls to examine Global South contexts as sites of diverse urbanisms and of rich theorization. While much of the literature on transnational urbanisms has featured urban experiences in global cities, we argue for the need to look into the transnational interconnections with urban transformations in sending countries, particularly in the Global South. There are three lessons that we want to foreground. First, in attending to calls within urban studies to emphasize urban process and the extended nature of urbanization beyond cities, we touched on key aspects of transnational urbanism featuring spaces that are not necessarily in cities but are nevertheless critical sites of urban transformation, such as Italian mansions in the peri-urban fringe or island tourist destinations. Given that current global trends point to how much of the world’s urban growth is located in the Global South, it is critical to account for new urban forms in these contexts and interconnect them with transnational mobilities taking place in other cities. Second, as we advocate featuring a wider variety of sites for empirical analysis and theory-building, we similarly underscore the importance of foregrounding multiple entry points from which transnational interconnections are forged. In this chapter, we focused on certain modalities of entanglements, from Filipina bodies and real estate to houses and emotions. Such varied emphases may potentially illuminate specific dynamics and entanglements that are critical in sustaining transnational connectivities and negotiations. And lastly, our interrogation of the multiple forms of transnational urbanisms, taking place in suburban gated communities, islands, and mansions, provides provisional theoretical lessons on key themes in geography, from place to bodies. For example, the contradictions between suburbanisms of a “complete” family life in gated communities and the mobilities of transnational families illustrate the negotiations involved in the sustenance of kinship relations and suburban living. Meanwhile, the gendered politics of Filipina bodies as sites of urban accumulation emerge in narratives of interracial relationships and the emergent urban transformations in island communities. Furthermore, the construction of new Italian-style homes illustrates the (re)production of new places as migrants navigate translocalities. In this sense, place, in its symbolic sense is ported and emplaced in new territories. These accounts illustrate how urban practices and economic deci-

226  Handbook on transnationalism

sions about whether to invest in real estate, build a mansion, or establish a beach resort, are similarly emotional investments, as migrants and their families left behind retain their national and local loyalties, fulfill familial promises, and aim to reach idealized Filipino dreams.

REFERENCES Aguilar, Filomeno (2014), Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Village, Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Asis, Maruja M.B. (2006), ‘The Philippines’ culture of migration’, Migration Policy Institute, accessed November 12, 2019 at https://​www​.migrationpolicy​.org/​article/​philippines​ -culture​-migration. Bello, Walden (2004), The Anti-Development State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines: Focus on the Global South and UP Department of Sociology. Bose, Pablo (2014), ‘Living the way the world does: Global Indians in the remaking of Kolkata’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 104 (2), 391–400. Brenner, Neil (2013), ‘Theses on urbanization’, Public Culture, 25 (1), 86–114. Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid (2015), ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’, City, 19 (2–3), 151–82. Chacko, Elizabeth (2007), ‘From brain drain to brain gain: Reverse migration to Bangalore and Hyderabad, India’s globalizing high tech cities’, GeoJournal, 68 (1), 131–40. Choi, Narae (2016), ‘Metro Manila through the gentrification lens: Disparities in urban planning and displacement risks’, Urban Studies, 53 (3), 577–92. Clarke, Nick (2005), ‘Detailing transnational lives of the middle: British working holiday makers in Australia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31 (2), 307–22. Collins, Francis L. (2010), ‘International students as urban agents: International education and urban transformation in Auckland, New Zealand’, Geoforum, 41, 940–950. Collins, Francis L. (2012), ‘Transnational mobilities and urban spatialities: Notes from the Asia–Pacific’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3), 316–35. Conradson, David and Alan Latham (2005), ‘Transnational urbanism: Attending to everyday practices and mobilities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31 (2), 227–33. Datta, Ayona (2016), ‘The intimate city: Violence, gender and ordinary life in Delhi slums’, Urban Geography, 37 (3), 323–42. Encinas-Franco, Jean (2015), ‘Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as heroes: Discursive origins of the “Bagong Bayani” in the era of labor export’, Humanities Diliman, 12 (2), 56–78. Faier, Lieba (2013) ‘Affective investments in the Manila region: Filipina migrants in rural Japan and transnational urban development in the Philippines’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (3), 376–90. Friesen, Wardlow, Laurence Murphy and Robin Kearns (2005), ‘Spiced-up Sandringham: Indian transnationalism and new suburban spaces in Auckland, New Zealand’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31 (2), 385–401. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina S. Blanc (1995), ‘From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration’, Anthropological Quarterly, 68 (1), 48–63. Grydehøj, Adam (2014), ‘Constructing a centre on the periphery: Urbanization and urban design in the island city of Nuuk, Greenland’, Island Studies Journal, 9 (2), 205–22. Grydehøj, Adam, Xavier Barceló Pinya, Gordon Cooke, Naciye Doratli, Ahmed Elewa, Ilan Kelman, Jonathan Pugh, Lea Schick and R. Swaminathan (2015) ‘Returning from the horizon: Introducing urban island studies’, Urban Island Studies, 1 (1), 1–19.

Transnational urbanism in the South  227

Holloway, Steven, Richard Wright and Mark Ellis (2012), ‘The racially fragmented city? Neighborhood racial segregation and diversity jointly considered’, The Professional Geographer, 64 (1), 63–82. Irazabal, Clara (2012), ‘Transnational planning: Reconfiguring spaces and institutions’, in Stefan Kratke, Kathrin Wildner and Stephan Lanz (eds), Transnationalism and Urbanism, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 72–90. Jones, Paul (2016), ‘The emergence of Pacific urban villages: Urbanization trends in the Pacific Islands’, Asian Development Bank, accessed May 27, 2020 at https://​www​.think​ -asia​.org/​handle/​11540/​7504. Katigbak, Evangeline (2015), ‘Moralising emotional remittances: Transnational familyhood and translocal moral economy in the Philippines’ “Little Italy”’, Global Networks, 15 (4), 519–35. Keil, Roger (2018), Suburban Planet: Making the World Urban from the Outside In, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kelly, Philip (2000), Landscapes of Globalization: Human Geographies of Economic Change in the Philippines, New York: Routledge. Kim, Hyung Min (2017), ‘Ethnic connections, foreign housing investment and locality: A case study of Seoul’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 17 (1), 120–144. King, Anthony (2004), Spaces of Global Culture: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity, New York: Routledge. Leitner, Helga and Eric Sheppard (2016), ‘Provincializing critical urban theory: Extending the ecosystem of possibilities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 (1), 228–35. Levin, Iris and Ruth Fincher (2010). ‘Tangible transnational links in the houses of Italian immigrants in Melbourne’, Global Networks, 10 (3), 401–23. Levitt, Peggy (2001), The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levitt, Peggy and Nina Glick Schiller (2004), ‘Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society’, International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002–39. MacKinnon, Danny (2010), ‘Reconstructing scale: Towards a new scalar politics’, Progress in Human Geography, 35 (1), 21–36. Marston, Sallie A. (2000), ‘The social construction of scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (2), 219–42. Massey, Doreen (2005), For Space, London: Sage. McGregor, JoAnn (2014), ‘Sentimentality or speculation? Diaspora investment, crisis economies and urban transformation’, Geoforum, 56, 172–81. Nikiforova, Elena and Robert Kaiser (2008), ‘The performativity of scale: The social construction of scale effects in Narva, Estonia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26 (3), 537–62. Ortega, Arnisson A.C. (2016a), Manila’s metropolitan landscape of gentrification: Global urban development, accumulation by dispossession & neoliberal warfare against informality’, Geoforum, 70 (March), 35–50. Ortega, Arnisson A.C. (2016b), Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession, Lanham, MD: Lexington Press. Ortega, Arnisson A.C. (2018), ‘Transnational suburbia: Spatialities of gated suburbs and Filipino diaspora in Manila’s periurban fringe’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (1), 106–24. Oswin, Natalie and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2010), ‘Introduction: Mobile city Singapore’, Mobilities, 5 (2), 167–75. Parnreiter, Christof (2012), ‘Conceptualizing transnational urban spaces: Multicentered agency, placeless organizational logics, and the built environment’, in Stefan Kratke,

228  Handbook on transnationalism

Kathrin Wildner and Stephan Lanz (eds), Transnationalism and Urbanism, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 91–111. Peake, Linda, Darren Patrick, Rajyashree N. Reddy, Gökbörü S. Tanyildiz, Sue Ruddick and Roza Tchoukaleyska (2018), ‘Placing planetary urbanization in other fields of vision’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (3), 374–86. Peck, Jamie (2015), ‘Cities beyond compare?’, Regional Studies, 49 (1), 160–182. Pellow, Deborah (2003), ‘New Spaces in Accra: Transnational houses’, City and Society, 15 (1), 59–86. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (2017), OFW Statistics, accessed November 12, 2019 at https://​www​.poea​.gov​.ph//​ofwstat/​compendium/​2016​-2017​%20deployment​ %20by​%20country​.pdf. Philippine Retirement Authority (n.d.), The SSRVisa, accessed November 11, 2019 at https://​ www​.pra​.gov​.ph/​srrv/​. Pido, Eric (2017), Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Portes, Alejandro (2001), ‘Introduction: The debates and significance of immigrant transnationalism’, Global Networks, 1 (3), 181–93. Pow, Choon-Piew (2016), ‘Courting the “rich and restless”: Globalisation of real estate and the new spatial fixities of the super-rich in Singapore’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 17 (1), 56–74. Ranada, Pia (2018), ‘Duterte Jokes about “42 virgins” as tourist “come-on”’, Rappler.com, January 26, accessed March 23, 2018 at https://​www​.rappler​.com/​nation/​194576​-duterte​ -jokes​-virgins​-come​-on​-tourism. Robinson, Jenny and Ananya Roy (2016), ‘Debate on global urbanisms and the nature of urban theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 (1), 181–6. Rogers, Dallas (2016), The Geopolitics of Real Estate: Reconfiguring Property, Capital and Rights, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Rogers, Dallas and Sin Yee Koh (2017), ‘The globalisation of real estate: The politics and practice of foreign real estate investment’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 17 (1), 1–14. Roy, Ananya (2009), ‘The 21st-century metropolis: New geographies of theory’, Regional Studies, 43 (6), 819–30. Roy, Ananya (2016), ‘What is urban about critical urban theory?’, Urban Geography, 37 (6), 810–823. Sandu, Adriana (2013), ‘Transnational homemaking practices: Identity, belonging and informal learning’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 21 (4), 496–512. Sarmiento, Prime (2018), ‘Is Manila the next best location for property investment in Asia-Pacific?’, South China Morning Post, April 4, accessed November 12, 2019 at https://​ www​.scmp​.com/​property/​international/​article/​2140088/​manila​-next​-best​-location​-property​ -investment​-asia​-pacific. Sheppard, Eric, Helga Leitner and Anant Maringati (2013), ‘Provincializing global urbanism: A manifesto’, Urban Geography, 34 (7), 893–900. Smith, Michael P. (2001), Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Smith, Michael P. (2005), ‘Transnational urbanism revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31 (2), 235–44. Smith, Michael P. and Luis Guarnizo (eds) (1998), Transnationalism from Below: Comparative Urban and Community Research, Somerset, NJ: Transaction Books. The Filipino Times Staff (2019), ‘More OFWs upbeat about investing in PH properties’, Rappler.com, April 27, accessed November 12, 2019 at https://​www​.rappler​.com/​business/​ 229050​-more​-overseas​-filipino​-workers​-upbeat​-investing​-properties​-philippines.

Transnational urbanism in the South  229

Tuason-Magpoc, Liezel (2017), ‘Tapping the OFW millennial market’, Inquirer.net, January 28, accessed November 12, 2019 at https://​business​.inquirer​.net/​223677/​tapping​-ofw​ -millennial​-market. Tyner, James A. (2000), ‘Global cities and circuits of global labor: The case of Manila, Philippines’, The Professional Geographer, 52 (1), 61–74. United Nations (2018), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, accessed November 12, 2019 at https://​www​.population​.un​.org/​wup/​Publications/​Files/​WUP2018​-Report​.pdf. Wilson, David (2007), Cities and Race: America’s New Black Ghetto, New York: Routledge. Wong, Alexandra (2017), ‘Transnational real estate in Australia: New Chinese diaspora, media representation and urban transformation in Sydney’s Chinatown’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 17 (1), 97–119.

15. Transnational higher education Johanna Waters and Maggi W.H. Leung

INTRODUCTION Over the past thirty years, universities have become transformed through internationalisation. One of the consequences of this has been the growth in what has been termed ‘transnational’ higher education. There are two ways in which transnational higher education can be understood – in relation to student mobility, on the one hand, or programme mobility (widely known by the abbreviation TNE), on the other. Here, student mobility refers to the increasing transnational movements of young people within an internationalising and ‘global’ higher education system and labour market (Beech 2015; Brooks and Waters 2011; Lipura and Collins 2020; Sidhu et al. 2019; Liu-Farrer, Chapter 19 in this volume). Programme mobility, in contrast, relates to the ways in which higher education institutions are offering accredited courses to overseas students within their home countries: in other words, higher education institutions (HEIs) are entering foreign educational markets and are in direct competition with domestic universities in attempts to attract students (McBurnie and Ziguras 2007; Knight 2011). In this chapter, we discuss both interpretations of transnational higher education, beginning with student mobility, before focusing on the more policy-driven, institutionalised understandings of TNE in relation to the internationalisation of educational programmes and providers. In conclusion, we consider briefly the meaning of ‘transnational’ in both of these contexts. It should be noted, from the outset, that these perspectives rarely overlap in debates (although see Xu and Montgomery 2019).

TRANSNATIONAL STUDENTS As higher education has become ‘internationalised’, students have, correspondingly, become more mobile, seeking educational opportunities outside their ‘home’ countries. Observed in the latest available figures, the number of ‘foreign students’ engaged in tertiary education programmes worldwide has risen from 2 million in 1998 to 5.3 million in 2017 (OECD 2019). Conceptually, student mobility has often been characterised as ‘transnational’ in nature, to capture the multiple and complex ties students develop and sustain between different nation-states, and between localities within those states (Fincher and Shaw 2009; Geddie 2013; Tran and Pham 2016; Bilecen and Faist 2015). International students represent an increasingly important aspect of knowledge migration, figuring in states’ ‘diaspora strategies’ (Larner 2007; Geddie 2013; Raghuram 2013). And yet, as has been noted, international students 230

Transnational higher education  231

have often been overlooked in the context of broader debates around migration and transnationalism within the wider literature (which have tended to favour other ‘categories’ of migrants, whether more elite business executives or workers in low-skilled sectors) (Waters and Brooks 2012). In this section, we draw on the extant literature on international student mobilities to consider the many reasons why mobile students within internationalising higher education markets are transnational and should therefore be seen as such. We also give attention to the ways in which they experience transnationalism within their everyday lives. Several key texts discuss the internationalisation of higher education and explicitly locate international students within a discourse of ‘transnationalism’. In Paradise Redefined, Fong (2011, pp. 216–17) writes: ‘as pioneers of a brave new world of transnational linkages, transnational Chinese students have helped to reshape China and the developed countries in the image of their own transnational imaginations … As they discovered, created, and embodied new possibilities for flexible developed world citizenship, they also opened up new transnational roads for other Chinese citizens to follow.’ For Fong (2011), as indicated here, citizenship (after Ong, 1999) is an important facet of Chinese students’ transnationalism. There are two implications to this: the acquisition of (new) citizenship in the legal sense, and a notion of ‘global’ citizenship – of being ‘citizens of the world’. Studying in the ‘West’, Fong argues, enables the development of ‘cosmopolitan sensibilities’, or what Ong (1999) referred to as embodied forms of transnational cultural capital (see Lee 2021, for research on ‘Western’ students in China). As we discuss below, links have often been drawn between these aspects of students’ experiences and advantageous labour market outcomes. Recently, however, more work is emerging that challenges Western-centric depictions of international student mobility by emphasising, for example, regional mobility patterns (within Asia) and South–South or North–South migration (Lee 2020; Liu-Farrer 2011; Mulvey 2021; Prazeres 2019; Sidhu et al. 2019; Yang 2020). Focusing specifically on employment and labour, Liu-Farrer (2011) describes international students as (future) ‘transnational migrants’. Her depiction is not unlike that of Robertson (2013, p. 1), who refers to international students as ‘transnational student-migrants … in the early stages of a complex and relatively new type of migration pathway’. In both these projects, the link between student mobility, forms of migration and subsequent citizenship is foregrounded. However, for Liu-Farrer (2011), what distinguishes Chinese international students in Japan is their tendency to eschew citizenship acquisition in favour of permanent residency (PR). They do this, she argues, precisely because it allows them to pursue a transnational lifestyle, seeking the best that both China and Japan have to offer. Citizenship acquisition, in contrast, would force them to choose a political affiliation, in a context where dual citizenship is not permitted. Transnationalism, she writes, captures these students’ ‘employment patterns, entrepreneurial practices and living arrangements’ as well as their ‘lifestyle aspirations’ (Liu-Farrer 2011, p. 5). We discuss this form of transnationalism in more detail below. Soong’s (2016) book Transnational Students and Mobility also prioritises students’ transnationalism in a discussion of their mobilities. Here, Soong emphasises

232  Handbook on transnationalism

students’ transnational experiences and particularly their ‘desires to claim a cosmopolitan ideal within the context of the education-migration nexus’ (Soong 2016, p. 4). Other work that invokes ‘transnational students’ includes Education, Migration and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora (Waters 2008), where students’ transnationalism is related to split transnational households engaging in strategies of social reproduction: families operate transnationally in their attempts to accumulate different types of capital at different sites, concentrated within the household (see Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). Cross-cutting all of this work (above), the concept of ‘transnationalism’, developed in the 1990s in relation to novel conceptualisations of international migration (e.g. Basch et al. 2005 [1994]), forms the basis for understanding international students’ and graduates’ mobility experiences. In addition to these examples, a now large and burgeoning body of work on international student mobilities infers the transnational nature of their engagements. In the following, we explore some of the themes prevalent within the academic literature on transnational higher education students. These include (but of course are not limited to): identity and consumption; employability and social reproduction; and transnational networks (also see Liu-Farrer, Chapter 19 in this volume). Identity and Consumption Internationally mobile students often possess a form of ‘identity’ that could be characterised as ‘transnational’, in so far as it either ‘straddles’ two or more nation-state identities or transcends them (as a ‘cosmopolitanism’ or hybrid identity). The difficulties of ‘straddling’ identities attached to two nation-states were brilliantly observed by Ghosh and Wang (2003), as they moved as international students between Canada, where they were studying, and their homes in India and China (respectively). As Ghosh wrote within this piece: Scared of being perceived as different, yet at the same time eager to maintain my distinct cultural identity, I adopted a dual lifestyle. In the outside world, I wore trousers, drank coffee, ate pork and beef and spoke English all day, while in the inner confinements of my room I wore shalwar kameez and listened to Bengali music over and over again. In those lyrics, I could hear the sweetness of bangla, my mother tongue. (Ghosh and Wang 2003, pp. 273–4)

This notion of a ‘dual lifestyle’ is commonly expressed amongst transnational students. Soong (2016) in her locating of migrants’ lives in ‘transnational space’, discusses their multiple identities. She observes a public–private divide amongst some students, who were seen to display ‘Western’ traits outside the home whilst maintaining more traditional cultural traditions within it. In addition, Liu-Farrer (2011), in her book on Chinese students in Japan, makes a similar point with regards to students’ ‘two’, often incompatible ‘identities’, displayed at different times in differing contexts. Kea’s (2020) work on British-Nigerian girls schooled in Nigeria but sent to the UK for university, examines the ‘third space’ of identity occupied by these young women, epitomising their fundamentally transnational upbringing. Interviews

Transnational higher education  233

were conducted with British Nigerians in their early twenties who were born and raised in London, had been sent ‘back’ to Nigeria for secondary schooling and then had returned to the UK for university. The transnational nature of their identities was strongly evident in the interview transcripts this research produced. Other work describes how transnational students explore their shifting identities through consumption. Collins (2008) describes the ‘culinary choices’ of South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand in relation to the ‘transnational production of familiarity’ (Collins 2008, p. 151) and transnational commodity cultures (Dwyer 2004). Collins makes some fascinating observations about the ways in which international students eat out at ‘Korean’ restaurants – these places, he argues, ‘embody’ Korean-ness whilst creating a form of transnational, hybrid, Korean experience often far removed from the regional or neighbourhood eateries students would have been used to ‘back home’. International students are seen to ‘buy in’, quite literally, to this ‘transnational food imaginary’. As reflected in other literature around studentification, international students, as consumers, are transforming the built environment of ‘host’ cities in unexpected ways (Malet Calvo 2018; Fincher and Shaw 2009). Transnational Employability and ‘Social Reproduction’ Transnational students are implicated in ‘social reproduction’: in relation to household class status and vis-à-vis their own, individualised ‘employability’ and longer-term career prospects. Work on transnational students has explored the role of their mobility in household or familial social reproduction (Collins et al. 2017; Holloway et al. 2012; Kea 2020; Ong 1999; Waters 2006, 2008; Waters and Brooks 2010). In turn, families have an important role to play in supporting and directing student mobility (Beech 2015; Brooks and Waters 2011; Holloway et al. 2012; Tran and Pham 2016; cf. Yang 2018) and, subsequently, have most to gain from a student’s ‘successful’ deployment of institutionalised cultural capital (Waters 2006). Valentin (2015), for example, explored the experiences of Nepalese international students in Denmark and described their transnational movements as ‘class-mobility’ related to a concern with ‘social status’. Other work has also stressed the ‘familial’ nature of international student mobility; how it is often fundamentally linked to securing a household’s future wealth, status and lifestyle (Ho 2017; Wang 2020). Wang’s (2020) research on Chinese students at universities in the United States exemplifies this perspective. Wang deploys a Bourdieusian analysis to consider, directly, the relationship between overseas study, social reproduction and social mobility. In addition, the paper stresses the pivotal role played by family in overseas study. The importance of family can be seen in two ways: first, in providing a suitable ‘habitus’ (including resources) that facilitates migration and, second, through ongoing ‘investment’ in education, such that going overseas for schooling/higher education is seen as a viable and necessary alternative to the domestic system. Presenting a more individualistic narrative, the literature has also explored the ways in which international students are able (or not) to deploy their accumulated

234  Handbook on transnationalism

cultural capital in a transnational or global labour market for ‘personal’ gain. The extent to which students’ qualifications are geographically portable and, correspondingly, which qualifications (institutions, countries) are the most ‘mobile’ and which the least, has been a focus of this literature (Collins et al. 2017; Waters 2006). Research in this area has also entailed elaborating on the kinds of cosmopolitan traits and competencies thought to be developed through overseas study, and the ways in which these traits and competencies can be ‘traded’ in the different labour markets for favourable career prospects. According to Liu-Farrer (2011), ‘moving back and forth is both a necessary and desirable part of their [Chinese graduates’] career development’ (p. 133). In part, she argues, this reflects a significant ‘income discrepancy’ between the two countries and students/graduates’ desires to ‘take advantage’ of this fact. There has also emerged, very recently, a literature on international students’ ‘precarity’ which brings much-needed balance to the view that international students are always ‘successful’ in their pursuits. Just like transnational migrants more generally, who have been seen to suffer discrimination in the ‘host’ country, so international students can often find themselves in precarious and uncertain circumstances (Chacko 2020; Gilmartin et al. 2020; Holloway et al. 2012; see also Liu-Farrer 2011). As noted by Collins et al. (2017), ‘there is considerable unevenness in mobility after‐ study, in terms of graduates’ ability to achieve the careers they desire and in terms of geographical location’. Students find themselves hampered by immigration laws, and gender or racial discrimination, amongst other things. Transnational Networks The kinds of transnational networks developed by international and immigrant students while studying overseas have been explored in the literature. Perhaps the most obvious networks involve family members. Due to migration, family members are usually separated from each other for a period of time (Liu-Farrer 2011), forming transnational or ‘global’ households (Ho 2017). If students remain overseas after graduation, the time of separation is extended. Some students intend to gain permanent residency within their ‘host’ country, with the expectation of bringing other family members to join them at a later date (Baas 2016; Robertson 2013). Regardless, transnational households remain a feature of international student mobility, with all the challenges of maintaining intimate relationships at a distance that this entails (Waters 2008). Students also talk about friendships – both developing new relationships within their ‘host’ country and maintaining friendships at a distance, ‘back home’ (Beech 2015). Networks amongst international students and graduates can involve what could be termed ‘institutional’ ties, such as alumni, where individuals are often located in different parts of the world (Gu and Schweisfurth 2015; Hall 2011). There is also a significant literature attesting to students’ role in ‘knowledge’ networks, within and between universities and wider workplaces (Raghuram 2013; Leung 2015; Liu-Farrer 2011).

Transnational higher education  235

TRANSNATIONAL PROGRAMMES AND PROVIDERS In this section, we consider the ways in which transnational higher education has been discussed in the academic and policy literature in relation to the international mobility of educational programmes and providers. TNE is described as formal academic programmes ‘in which learners are located in a country other than the one in which the awarding institution is based’ (McBurnie and Ziguras 2007, p. 21). Transnational higher education is also sometimes called cross-border education (Healey and Bordogna, 2014). As defined by the British Council (2013, p. 6): ‘The general principal of TNE is that students can study towards a foreign qualification without leaving their home country; meaning that the programmes and providers cross national and regional borders, not generally the student’. Clearly, this represents a very different perspective from the one discussed above. Almost built into TNE is the assumption that students will be immobile. The fact that ‘immobile’ students will, as a consequence of TNE, acquire an international qualification (and one that implies mobility) is rarely discussed (see Waters and Leung 2013). By virtue of studying ‘at home’, TNE students will lack the ‘mobility capital’ that is assumed to attach itself to internationally mobile study (Murphy-Lejeune 2003), including the development of a cosmopolitan outlook, language skills, accent, dress and comportment (Ong 1999), not to mention the social capital acquired through study abroad (Collins et al. 2017). This potential ‘lack’ associated with TNE and the student experience has not been much discussed, and requires further explication (see Finn and Holton 2019, for an outstanding argument about the meanings attached to mobility in relation to higher education). Here, we outline the different types of transnational educational delivery before exploring the themes that have emerged in the literature. Models of TNE There are different ways (‘models’) in which TNE can be delivered to ‘immobile’ students; Healey (2008) outlines this diversity (see also Healey 2013; Healey and Michael 2015; Healey and Bordogna 2014): ‘distance learning’ refers to a situation where students access all teaching materials online, without face-to-face contact with the so-called provider institution (Raghuram et al. 2020). In recent years, the development of ‘Massive Open Online Courses’ or MOOCs has illustrated one potential avenue for ‘mass’ TNE (see Sparke 2017 for a critical discussion of these in relation to geosocial processes). However, as Caruana and Montgomery (2015) argue, after disaggregating the statistics on UK transnational higher education programmes, distance learners represent fewer than half the number of TNE students – those being taught in and through partner organisations overseas in the ‘host’ country are far more significant. ‘Partnerships’, offering a second model, often involve what is known as ‘franchising’ – ‘the higher education equivalent of licencing production to a foreign partner’ (Healey and Bordogna 2014, p. 38). The terms involved with franchising vary,

236  Handbook on transnationalism

although the ‘provider’ institution generally produces the academic content, oversees the quality of the programme and awards the degree, whereas the ‘host’ does the marketing and recruits students onto the programme, and provides the teaching space and (some of) the teaching staff. The ‘validating’ of TNE programmes is similar to franchising, although in this case the host institution has more control over the content of the degree programme (coming up with their own teaching materials etc.), which is then ‘validated’ by the provider institution. ‘Joint programmes’ are another form of TNE; here both provider and host institutions are responsible for the teaching and the content and the degree is awarded jointly. Finally, there are international branch campuses, where an overseas institution establishes a ‘satellite’ campus within a foreign territory. Globally, the numbers of international branch campuses (IBCs) remain relatively small in comparison to the other forms of TNE. Nevertheless, some interesting critical work is beginning to emerge on international branch campuses (e.g. Wilkins 2016, 2017; Lee 2020, 2021). In the next section, we draw upon the extant academic literature to discuss and consider some of the most significant themes emerging from recent academic engagement with TNE. It is worth noting that, compared to work on international students, TNE has not been subject to the same level of critical intellectual scrutiny and has instead been dominated by overly descriptive, grey literature and policy accounts. Emergent themes in the critical academic literature, however, include commercial interests, post-colonial and neo-colonial knowledges and relationships, and ethics. Commercial Interests As McBurnie and Ziguras (2007) observed in their important book on transnational education, TNE is primarily conceived as a ‘business’: ‘an unseemly gold rush threatening to undermine the public service orientation that should be paramount to higher education institutions’ (McBurnie and Ziguras 2007, p. 31). In our own work on UK TNE programmes in Hong Kong, our interviews with university ‘providers’ (UK HEIs involved in the provision of learning materials and granting of degrees overseas) revealed an almost universal tendency to acknowledge the significance of money and profit in overseas ventures (Waters and Leung 2017). There is little doubt that the vast majority of TNE has been viewed as a ‘cash cow’ – a means of generating significant revenue for universities for relatively little effort (Sidhu 2006). TNE has widely been conceptualised as a ‘market’ and a ‘potential growth industry’ (Healey 2013). It has embraced terms like ‘capital, value, services and goods’ and ‘a prevailing instrumental logic … [is] indicative of the tenacious hold of the language of the market on the academic imagination’ (Sidhu 2006, p. 15). Consequently, as Sidhu perceptively implies, critical perspectives on TNE are often sorely lacking. Concomitant with these (market driven) discussions is an emphasis on ‘risk’: usually described in terms of potential loss of money and/or ‘reputational damage’ should a transnational venture fail (Healey 2015). A recent government report on the ‘value’ of UK TNE described the situation in terms that downplay risk and emphasise

Transnational higher education  237

opportunity: ‘UK HE TNE is a vibrant education export enterprise. In 2015, UK revenue from higher education transnational education activity was estimated to be £580 million’ (Universities UK 2016, no page). This emphasis on the ‘benefits’ of TNE within the literature has tended to mean that ethical considerations (including how students are perceived and treated) are side-lined – an ‘ethics of care’ around TNE is displaced (Sidhu 2006). We pursue this line of argument further, below. Post-Colonial Contexts and Neo-Colonial Knowledge Practices and Relationships Many of the geographical contexts within which TNE is ‘played out’, on the ground, are post-colonial societies, still heavily marked by colonialism, including Malaysia (Koh 2017; Sin 2013; Sin et al. 2019), Hong Kong (Leung and Waters 2013a, 2013b; Waters and Leung 2013, 2017), Singapore (Olds 2007) and South Africa (Raghuram et al. 2020). TNE enters a ‘domestic’ education market that is already significantly influenced by pre-existing colonial structures. Consequently, a post-colonial perspective on TNE can be insightful. In her recent book on race, education and migration in Malaysia, for example, Koh (2017) describes the devastating effect of the British colonial project on a post-colonial state and its educational environment. The enduring importance of race and racialisation for explaining contemporary Malaysia is central to her argument. Heffernan et al. (2018) have highlighted what they describe as power and inequalities inherent within teaching partnerships in TNE. And yet, the relationship between the ‘host’ society and the ‘provider’ country/institution is often more complex than a unidirectional flow of power and dominance. First, it is important to stress that it is impossible to apply a singular post-colonial argument to and across societies experiencing TNE. As Sidhu and Christie (2015) argue in relation to their work on Monash University’s branch campus in Malaysia, researchers need to be attentive to the ‘local forms’ and histories of post-colonialism in different places and the ways in which they may intersect with ‘state-building projects and agency grounded in specific places’ (Sidhu and Christie 2015, p. 312). They continue: In postcolonial Malaysia, ethnic differentiation and national development goals mediated the embrace of market ideologies and practices, producing specific market conditions for private higher education expansion. In Australia, government policies in response to economic globalization prompted many of the country’s universities to operate as entrepreneurial institutions in terms of internationalization.

Consequently, an analysis of TNE needs to take into account the ways in which ‘global’ and ‘local’ can operate simultaneously and in ‘multi’ directions and the importance of localised conditions. For Monash University Malaysia, these local conditions include its complex, multi-ethnic post-colonial state arrangements (Sidhu and Christie 2015). Also in Malaysia, in relation to British TNE degrees, Sin’s (2013) work describes the complexity of ‘cultural capital’ acquisition – how many

238  Handbook on transnationalism

students valued the ‘local context’ and localised social capital acquired through staying in Malaysia (as opposed to travelling to the UK for a British education) and yet also bemoaned the absence of travel as part of their degree. In other words, TNE programmes do not operate in a vacuum, and institutions need to pay heed to the geographies of internationalisation – historical and contemporary – and how they intersect with colonial pasts and presents (see Sin et al. 2019 for a comparison of TNE in Malaysia and Hong Kong). Another concern, indicated within the literature, highlights ostensibly inappropriate attempts by ‘providers’ to transfer knowledge from the Global North to the Global South in a way that directly mirrors colonialism (Phan 2017); a model of ‘transference’ that evokes colonial notions of Western knowledge and superiority. In reality, of course, knowledge transfer in TNE is never unfettered (as discussed in Leung and Waters 2013a, 2013b; Sin 2013), but the principle of unproblematic knowledge transfer (from the ‘provider’ institution/country to the ‘host’ institution/ country) often remains unchallenged. On the ground, much of the teaching material is frequently delivered by ‘local’ lecturers, as evidenced by both ‘franchised’ programmes and those that deploy a ‘flying faculty’ model (where the institution delivers some teaching on the course by sending staff over for a period of time) (Waters and Leung 2013). The widespread use of local (non-Western) part-time lecturers has the potential to disrupt, if not undermine, some aspect of Western knowledge transfer through TNE (Waters and Leung 2013). At the same time, this model suggests a level of employment precarity in TNE (reflected in higher education more broadly) and also raises issues (raised by the students themselves) of ‘quality control’ in respect to teaching, which we turn to in the next sub-section. Additionally, it is worth noting that there are now institutions outside of Western contexts involved in TNE, such as Xiamen University’s campus in Malaysia or Savitribai Phule Pune University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. Whilst these initiatives are in their relative ‘infancy’, they do suggest that future research will need to address the growing geographical diversity of TNE. ‘Quality Assurance’, Ethics and Transnational Higher Education Ethical concerns around the internationalisation of higher education have been more extensively discussed in relation to international student mobility than TNE (Yang 2020; Chacko 2020; Waters 2018). Nonetheless, wider discussions around TNE, especially in relation to ‘quality’ assurance issues, suggests a need for this focus. The ways in which TNE students are talked about, represented and looked after by ‘provider’ institutions (and, indeed, host institutions) amount to ethical issues. There has been a suggestion that ‘quality’ in teaching may sometimes be lacking within TNE (Waters and Leung 2017). We will expand on this important perspective briefly, here. As noted above, largely viewed as ‘cash cows’, students have lacked a ‘face’ and a ‘voice’. This is captured in the following statement made by Schulze (2019) about

Transnational higher education  239

a project on international branch campuses, which highlights some problematic issues in relation to the language deployed when discussing TNE: [I]n the development and management of offshore campuses […] a “frontier spirit” emerged as a pattern in their mindset and argumentation … a “gold rush atmosphere”. … An engineer employed at an offshore campus stated that the branches are “all too often out-of-sight out-of-mind” … [R]unning an educational institution abroad also goes hand in hand with a certain form of frontier “mission” – a mission that directs the “pioneers” to share their knowledge and the benefits of their frontier activity. This is remarkable since many offshore campuses are set up in countries with a history of being under European colonial rule.

The colonial language discussed in the previous section is apparent here. Schulze (2019) also mentions an ‘out-of-site out-of-mind’ mentality that would seem to pervade transnational higher education. Although he seems to refer to it in relation to the teaching staff, this is even more true of students. Unlike international students who have a physical and material ‘presence’ on the host university campus, TNE students are frequently ‘invisible’ (Waters and Leung 2017). Discussing fieldwork on transnational higher education (TNE) programmes undertaken over the course of a decade, Phan (2016, p. xiii) articulates her fury at the ‘institutionalised mediocrity inherent in so many aspects of the sector’, including the perceived ‘quality’ of teaching and the accompanying ethical implications. She critiques the ‘one-sided’ ‘romanticisation of the colonised as well as the all-round hegemony and symbolic violence associated with the West’ which has ‘continued to inform much scholarship’ in this area (Phan 2016, p. 3). This, she argues, has resulted in highly circumscribed understandings ‘in which many stakeholders’ multiple identities’ have become stereotypically represented in depictions of TNE (Phan 2016, p. 3). All of these aspects suggest the need for critical, political perspectives on international education in general, and transnational education in particular (Waters 2018; Yang 2020). And yet, policy declarations around TNE continue to emphasise its positive nature, even in relation to the ‘development’ potential for countries ‘hosting’ Western HEIs. As a Universities UK report concluded, TNE has the potential to: rebalanc[e] the global higher education market, allowing more students to study in their own countries and reducing the costs to developing countries in terms of foreign exchange and ‘brain drain’. It can build capacity both at home and overseas, a key driver for universities offering TNE and partners and countries hosting TNE alike. (2016, p. 9)

Practitioners have overwhelmingly emphasised the progressive aspects of TNE in public, whilst privately celebrating the financial benefits that TNE undoubtedly accrues to HEIs. This view sits uneasily alongside an emergent literature highlighting the ‘challenges’ of TNE and students’ views that, when solicited, express disillusionment and dissatisfaction. In addition, as Healey (2017, p. 629) observes, ‘data for enrolments in TNE programmes globally is notoriously sketchy. Very few countries collect data on the

240  Handbook on transnationalism

offshore (TNE) enrolments of their domestic universities. The UK and Australia are notable exceptions’. In contrast, more countries have, over the past few years, begun to collect data on enrolments by their domestic students on courses provided by foreign educational institutions (including Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates) (Healey 2017). Lack of data equates to an absence of student voice and an absence of representation when it comes to TNE, contributing to the sense that TNE students are and will remain ‘invisible’.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has discussed the idea of transnational higher education and has considered two principal (and contrasting) ways in which this term has been represented within the extant academic literature. The first refers to the transnational mobility of international or immigrant students – those who have sought higher education outside their home country/domestic system. As we have noted, at tertiary level the number of international students worldwide has more than doubled over the past twenty years and the significance of international student mobility for debates relating to migration, cities, knowledge economies and so on has notably increased. As we have shown, international students’ mobilities are frequently ‘transnational’ in nature, and we have highlighted this in relation to three key themes: identity and consumption; employability and social reproduction; and transnational social networks. In the second part of the chapter, we turned to explore the other way in which transnational higher education is discussed within academic debates (and particularly within policy circles): that is, ‘TNE’ or the spatial mobility of higher education programmes and institutions. This is achieved in a number of ways, including transnational institutional partnerships, franchising agreements or the setting up of offshore campuses. After discussing different perspectives on how TNE can and does operate, we turned to consider some of the ways in which TNE has been discussed and analysed within the nascent critical social science literature, focusing on: commercial interests; post-colonial and neo-colonial relationships; and quality and ethics. As we have seen, these two literatures/perspectives are rarely combined in discussion (although see Xu and Montgomery 2019) – one focusing on student mobilities and the other on students who are deemed relatively immobile (usually young people studying ‘locally’ for an international degree qualification) (Waters and Leung 2013). The extent to which they engage with social science perspectives on ‘transnationalism’ also differs significantly – work on student mobilities is usually framed squarely within broader discussions of migrant transnationalism, whereas the ‘transnational’ nature of TNE is rarely discussed and bears little conceptual similarity to critical work in migration on ‘transnationalism’. As Mitchell noted in 1997, a great deal of work on transnationalism at that time focused on ‘economic globalization’ – particularly the growing international flows of commodities, services, money and information. This is how TNE is widely discussed today – in terms of the General Agreement on Trade in Services and increased global trade in education (Wilkins

Transnational higher education  241

2017). Neo-liberal agendas, pursued by individual nation-states, have facilitated and, indeed, created a climate in which higher education can be sold, internationally, as a commodity (Sidhu 2006). Recent discourses surrounding TNE have been underpinned and beset by problematic assumptions, including the notion that education can be ‘exported’, that curricula and ideas ‘travel’, and that local, localised cultures will have minimal impact on the teaching and learning experience (see Sidhu and Christie 2015). Both bodies of literature reviewed in this chapter, but especially work on TNE, would benefit from reigniting the original intent of scholarship on transnationalism in relation to migration, and that is its transgressive and critical potential.

REFERENCES Baas, Michiel (2016), ‘Becoming trans/nationally mobile: The conflation of internal and international migration in the trajectories of Indian student-migrants in Australia and beyond’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39 (1), 14–28. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller and Christina S. Blanc (eds) (2005 [1994]), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, London: Routledge. Beech, Suzanne E. (2015), ‘International student mobility: The role of social networks’, Social & Cultural Geography, 16 (3), 332–50. Bilecen, Başak and Thomas Faist (2015), ‘International doctoral students as knowledge brokers: Reciprocity, trust and solidarity in transnational networks’, Global Networks, 15 (2), 217–35. British Council (2013), The Shape of Things to Come: The Evolution of Transnational Education – Data, Definitions, Opportunities and Impacts Analysis. London: British Council. Brooks, Rachel and Johanna Waters (2011), Student Mobilities, Migration and the Internationalization of Higher Education, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Caruana, Viv and Catherine Montgomery (2015), ‘Understanding the transnational higher education landscape: Shifting positionality and the complexities of partnership’, Learning and Teaching, 8 (1), 5–29. Chacko, Elizabeth (2020), ‘Emerging precarity among international students in Singapore: Experiences, understandings and responses’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, DOI:​ 10​.1080/​1369183x​.2020​.1732618. Collins, Francis L. (2008), ‘Of kimchi and coffee: Globalisation, transnationalism and familiarity in culinary consumption’, Social & Cultural Geography, 9 (2), 151–69. Collins, Francis L., Kong Chong Ho, Mayumi Ishikawa and Ai-Hsuan S. Ma (2017), ‘International student mobility and after‐study lives: The portability and prospects of overseas education in Asia’, Population, Space and Place, 23 (4), e2029. Dwyer, C. (2004), ‘Tracing transnationalities through commodity culture: A case study of British-South Asian fashion’, in P. Jackson, P. Crang and C. Dwyer (eds), Transnational Spaces, London: Routledge, pp. 60–77. Fincher, Ruth and Kate Shaw (2009), ‘The unintended segregation of transnational students in central Melbourne’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 41 (8), 1884–902. Finn, Kirsty and Mark Holton (2019), Everyday Mobile Belonging: Theorising Higher Education Student Mobilities, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fong, Vanessa (2011), Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

242  Handbook on transnationalism

Geddie, Kate (2013), ‘The transnational ties that bind: Relationship considerations for graduating international science and engineering research students’, Population, Space and Place, 19 (2), 196–208. Ghosh, Sutama and Lu Wang (2003), ‘Transnationalism and identity: A tale of two faces and multiple lives’, Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 47 (3), 269–82. Gilmartin, Mary, Pablo R. Coppari and Dean Phelan (2020), ‘Promising precarity: The lives of Dublin’s international students’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1080/​1369183X​.2020​.1732617. Gu, Qing and Michele Schweisfurth (2015), ‘Transnational connections, competences and identities: Experiences of Chinese international students after their return “home”’, British Educational Research Journal, 41 (6), 947–70. Hall, Sarah (2011), ‘Educational ties, social capital and the translocal (re)production of MBA alumni networks’, Global Networks, 11 (1), 118–38. Healey, Nigel M. (2008), ‘Is higher education in really “internationalising”?’, Higher Education, 55 (3), 333–55. Healey, Nigel M. (2013), ‘Why do English universities really franchise degrees to overseas providers?’, Higher Education Quarterly, 67 (2), 180–200. Healey, Nigel M. (2015), ‘Towards a risk-based typology for transnational education’, Higher Education, 69 (1), 1–18. Healey, Nigel M. (2017), ‘The optimal global integration–local responsiveness trade off for an international branch campus’, Research in Higher Education, 59 (5), 623–49. Healey, Nigel M. and Claudia M. Bordogna (2014), ‘From transnational to multinational education: Emerging trends in international higher education’, Internationalisation of Higher Education, 3, 33–56. Healey, Nigel M. and Lucy Michael (2015), ‘Towards a new framework for analysing transnational education’, Higher Education Policy, 28 (3), 369–91. Heffernan, Troy, Stephen Wilkins and Muhammad Butt (2018), ‘Transnational higher education: The importance of institutional reputation, trust and student-university identification in international partnerships’, International Journal of Educational Management, 32 (2), 227–40. Ho, Elaine L.E. (2017), ‘The geo-social and global geographies of power: Urban aspirations of “worlding” African students in China’, Geopolitics, 22 (1), 15–33. Holloway, Sarah L., Sarah L. O’Hara and Helena Pimlott-Wilson (2012), ‘Educational mobility and the gendered geography of cultural capital: The case of international student flows between Central Asia and the UK’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44 (9), 2278–94. Kea, Pamela J. (2020), ‘The transnational lives and third space subjectivities of British Nigerian girls’, Global Networks, 20 (1), 170–189. Knight, Jane (2011), ‘Education hubs: A fad, a brand, an innovation?’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 15, 221–40. Koh, Sin Yee (2017), Race, Education, and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies, and a Culture of Migration, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Larner, Wendy (2007), ‘Expatriate experts and globalising governmentalities: The New Zealand diaspora strategy’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32 (3), 331–45. Lee, Kris H. (2020), ‘“I post, therefore I become# cosmopolitan”: The materiality of online representations of study abroad in China’, Population, Space and Place, 26 (3), e2297. Lee, Kris H. (2021), ‘Becoming a bona fide cosmopolitan: Unpacking the narratives of Western-situated international students’, Social and Cultural Geography. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​14649365​.2020​.1821393.

Transnational higher education  243

Leung, Maggi W.H. (2015), ‘Engaging a temporal–spatial stretch: An inquiry into the role of the state in cultivating and claiming the Chinese knowledge diaspora’, Geoforum, 59, 187–96. Leung, Maggi W.H. and Johanna L. Waters (2013a), ‘British degrees made in Hong Kong: An enquiry into the role of space and place in transnational education’, Asia Pacific Education Review, 14 (1), 43–53. Leung, Maggi W.H. and Johanna L. Waters (2013b), ‘Transnational higher education for capacity development? An analysis of British degree programmes in Hong Kong’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 11 (4), 479–97. Lipura, Sarah J. and Francis L. Collins (2020), ‘Towards an integrative understanding of contemporary educational mobilities: A critical agenda for international student mobilities research’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18 (3), 343–59. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2011), Labour Migration from China to Japan: International Students, Transnational Migrants, London: Routledge. Malet Calvo, Daniel (2018), ‘Understanding international students beyond studentification: A new class of transnational urban consumers. The example of Erasmus students in Lisbon (Portugal)’, Urban Studies, 55 (10), 2142–58. McBurnie, Grant and Christopher J. Ziguras (2007), Transnational Education: Issues and Trends in Offshore Higher Education, Abingdon: Routledge. Mitchell, Katharyne (1997), ‘Transnational discourse: Bringing geography back in’, Antipode, 29 (2), 101–14. Mulvey, Benjamin (2021), ‘Conceptualizing the discourse of student mobility between “periphery” and “semi-periphery”: The case of Africa and China’, Higher Education, 81, 437–51. Murphy-Lejeune, Elizabeth (2003), Student Mobility and Narrative in Europe: The New Strangers, London: Routledge. OECD (2019), Education at a Glance, Paris: OECD. Olds, Kris (2007), ‘Global assemblage: Singapore, foreign universities, and the construction of a “global education hub”’, World Development, 35 (6), 959–75. Ong, Aihwa (1999), Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Phan, Le-Ha (2016), Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’: Adjusted Desire, Transformative Mediocrity, Neo-Colonial Disguise, London: Routledge. Prazeres, Laura (2019), ‘Unpacking distinction within mobility: Social prestige and international students’, Population, Space and Place, 25 (5), e2190. Raghuram, Parvati (2013), ‘Theorising the spaces of student migration’, Population, Space and Place, 19 (2), 138–54. Raghuram, Parvati, Markus Roos Breines and Ashley Gunter (2020), ‘Beyond #FeesMustFall: International students, fees and everyday agency in the era of decolonisation’, Geoforum, 109, 95–105. Robertson, Shanthi (2013), Transnational Student-Migrants and the State: The Education-Migration Nexus, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schulze, Marc (2019), ‘Offshore campus development worldwide: Forging a powerful locomotive for the transformation and globalization of higher education?’, accessed 7 September 2020 at https://​ibc​-spaces​.org/​forging​-a​-powerful​-locomotive​-for​-the​-transformation​-and​ -globalization​-of​-higher​-education/​. Sidhu, Ravinder K. (2006), Universities and Globalization: To Market, to Market, London: Routledge. Sidhu, Ravinder K. and Pam Christie (2015), ‘Transnational higher education as a hybrid global/local space: A case study of a Malaysian-Australian joint venture’, Journal of Sociology, 51 (2), 299–316.

244  Handbook on transnationalism

Sidhu, Ravinder K., Kong Chong Ho and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2019), Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia: Emotional Geographies of Knowledge Spaces, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sin, I. Lin (2013), ‘Cultural capital and distinction: Aspirations of the “other” foreign student’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34 (5), 848–67. Sin, I. Lin, Leung, Maggi W., and Johanna L. Waters (2019), ‘Degrees of value: Comparing the contextual complexities of UK transnational education in Malaysia and Hong Kong’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 49 (1), 132–48. Soong, Hannah (2016), Transnational Students and Mobility: Lived Experiences of Migration, London: Routledge. Sparke, Matthew (2017), ‘Situated cyborg knowledge in not so borderless online global education: Mapping the geosocial landscape of a MOOC’, Geopolitics, 22 (1), 51–72. Tran, Ly Thi and Lien Pham (2016), ‘International students in transnational mobility: Intercultural connectedness with domestic and international peers, institutions and the wider community’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 46, 560–581. Universities UK (2016), The Scale of UK Higher Education Transnational Education 2015–2016, accessed 7 September 2020 at https://​www​.universitiesuk​.ac​.uk/​International/​ Documents/​The​%20Scale​%20of​%20UK​%20HE​%20TNE​%202015​-16​.pdf. Valentin, Karen (2015), ‘Transnational education and the remaking of social identity: Nepalese student migration to Denmark’, Identities, 22 (3), 318–32. Wang, Xin (2020), ‘Capital, habitus, and education in contemporary China: Understanding motivations of middle-class families in pursuing studying abroad in the United States’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52 (12), 1314–28. Waters, Johanna L. (2006), ‘Geographies of cultural capital: Education, international migration and family strategies between Hong Kong and Canada’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31 (2), 179–92. Waters, Johanna L. (2008), Education, Migration and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora: Transnational Students between Hong Kong and Canada, New York: Cambria Press. Waters, Johanna L. (2018), ‘International education is political! Exploring the politics of international student mobilities’, Journal of International Students, 8 (3), 1459–78. Waters, Johanna L. and Rachel Brooks (2010), ‘Accidental achievers? International higher education, class reproduction and privilege in the experiences of UK students overseas’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31 (2), 217–28. Waters, Johanna L. and Rachel Brooks (2012), ‘Transnational spaces, international students: Emergent perspectives on educational mobilities’, in Rachel Brooks, Alison Fuller and Johanna L. Waters (eds), Changing Spaces of Education, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 35–52. Waters, Johanna L. and Maggi W.H. Leung (2013), ‘Immobile transnationalisms? Young people and their in situ experiences of “international” education in Hong Kong’, Urban Studies, 50 (3), 606–20. Waters, Johanna L. and Maggi W.H. Leung (2017), ‘Domesticating transnational education: Fortifying discourses of social value and self-worth in “meritocratic” Hong Kong’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (2), 233–45. Wilkins, Stephen (2016), ‘Establishing international branch campuses: A framework for assessing opportunities and risks’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 38 (2), 167–82. Wilkins, Stephen (2017), ‘Ethical issues in transnational higher education: The case of international branch campuses’, Studies in Higher Education, 42 (8), 1385–400. Xu, Cora L. and Catherine Montgomery (2019), ‘Educating China on the move: A typology of contemporary Chinese higher education mobilities’, Review of Education, 7 (3), 598–627.

Transnational higher education  245

Yang, Peidong (2018), ‘Compromise and complicity in international student mobility: The ethnographic case of Indian medical students at a Chinese university’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39 (5), 694–708. Yang, Peidong (2020), ‘Toward a framework for (re)thinking the ethics and politics of international student mobility’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 24 (5), 518–34.

16. Transnational popular culture Youna Kim

Since the mid-1980s, dramatic changes have occurred in the industries of media culture, producing a global media landscape and developing the basis for a new kind of media regime and transnational popular culture. The proliferation of satellite and cable television and online networks, enabled by sophisticated digital technologies and the deregulation and liberalisation of broadcasting and telecommunications, as well as the formation of global audiovisual markets and distribution technologies, have created a complex terrain of multi-vocal, multi-media and multi-directional flows (Thussu 2007). Satellite platforms, transnational television channels and online communication communities have grown rapidly worldwide, especially in Asia (Thomas 2005). Cultural flows in the international media landscape are no longer one-way from the West to the rest, from the core to the periphery, due to the increasing contra-flows emerging from non-Western and non-central contexts. These multi-directional flows create temporary portals or contact zones between geographically dispersed cultures in a digital age of media convergence (Jenkins 2006; Jenkins et al. 2013). Since the 1990s, the borderless digital media and transnational popular culture have penetrated both the emerging and the developed cultural markets of a globalising consumerist world, capturing the imaginations of people who were once accustomed to the traditional national media under government controls. Because of the sheer multiplicity of the forms in which the media appear and the rapid way in which they move through daily routines, mediated cultures provide resources for self-imagining and engines for the formation of identity (Appadurai 1996). The Internet and television create key spaces where people are variously invited to imagine and construct a sense of self – whether as ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, ‘citizen’ and ‘foreigner’, ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ (Cottle 2000). The proliferation of transnational popular culture is an inevitable consequence of these changes at a time when the global media market is rapidly growing, fuelled by the emergence of an urban middle class and globalised consumer culture. These unprecedented changes since the 1990s have created new transnational cultural spaces, mundane mobility and migratory projects – both imagined and enacted – in a digitally connected mobile world. Contemporary migrants are routinely able to establish transnational communities that exist across multiple cultural spaces, while the scale and intensity of cross-border flows of popular media culture and new kinds of transnational networks primarily via the Internet shape the meaning of transnationalism or a multiple yet complex sense of belonging and connection to more than one nation (Gillespie 1995; Cunningham and Sinclair 2001; Karim 2003; Sun 2006; Kim 2011, 2017; Mazzucato and van Geel, Chapter 13 in this volume). The frequent back-and-forth flows of transnational popular culture, moving images, new concepts 246

Transnational popular culture  247

and narratives across time and space are now routine parts of contemporary transnationalism. Transnational cultural connectivity is not a completely new feature, but the thick web of mediation today means that transnational media, popular cultural images and texts move regularly and instantaneously, representing a significant shift in the expansion and the nature of transnationalism, marking not only a quantitative change but also a subtle qualitative shift with its deepening impact, intensity and complexity. Why study transnational popular culture? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in a global digital age? Focusing on the Korean Wave popular culture as a case study, this chapter explores the circulation and implications of transnational popular culture. Specifically, the chapter considers the significance of popular culture and digital technology as an integral resource for soft power and everyday reflexivity alongside its potentials and limits, complexity and implications. As this chapter will demonstrate, in today’s digitally connected mobile world, marked by the expansion of markets, networks, consumers and plurality of cultures entangled in processes of globalisation and interdependence, transnational popular culture can be an increasingly important resource for soft power – a cultural weapon to entice and attract people without the use of military or economic force in order to obtain preferred outcomes (Nye 2004, 2008). Today’s multi-directional flows of transnational popular culture and digitally networked communications give rise to the de-territorialisation of culture and identity politics transcending national boundaries and engaging with power, cultural difference and diversity in unpredictable ways. The emerging consequences of transnational popular culture at macro and micro levels deserve to be analysed and explored in an increasingly global environment. To reveal the obscured role of transnational popular culture, this chapter draws attention to the emergence of a relatively new non-Western alternative – the Korean Wave popular culture – in the historically Western-centric media domain (Boyd-Barrett and Mirrlees 2020) and addresses the significance of soft power and everyday reflexivity in this seemingly cosmopolitan, interconnected digital era. The Korean Wave appears as an example where a postcolonial and somewhat peripheral nation has strengthened its national culture industry to compete against the dominant flow of Western media cultural products, while consolidating a growing position in regional markets. While not denying the obvious power of Western, particularly American, dominance over the international media cultural landscape and the continuing significance of Western media imperialism, the Korean Wave can be recognised as a major site for the production, circulation, representation and consumption of transnational culture today. Its transnational mobility across Asia and beyond is a facet of de-centralising multiplicity of global media cultural flows. The significance of the Korean Wave, especially television drama, popular music and film, can be seen as a conscious, and often intentional, way to counter the threat and insensibility of the Western-dominated media cultural market within the context of global inequalities and uneven power structures.

248  Handbook on transnationalism

SOFT POWER Soft power is the ability to make others act in a way that advances preferred outcomes through attraction rather than threat or coercion. It is the ability to achieve goals based around long-term diffuse effects rather than short-term immediate effects. The soft power of any country rests primarily on three resources: (1) the attractiveness of its culture, (2) its political values, when it lives up to them at home and abroad, (3) its foreign policies, when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority (Nye 2004, 2008). Attractive culture – the set of values and practices that create meaning for society – is one of the soft power resources creating general influence in international relations. Particularly, popular media and consumer culture transcend national borders with such frequency and intensity as to constitute an irrevocable and irresistible force that regionalises, globalises and possibly transforms identity (Berry et al. 2009). It is this power that nation-states seek to promote through the articulation and legislation of cultural policy and the promotion of creative media cultural industries, with a renewed focus on identity, culture and nation branding as an essential component of international relations and foreign policy thinking. Paradoxically, nationalism has been central to the globalisation of popular culture (Kim 2013). The concept of soft power in the digital age has been discussed in relation to popular culture of the non-West, particularly of Korea (Kim 2013, 2019), India (Thussu 2013), Japan (Iwabuchi 2015) and China (Voci and Hui 2018), as these non-Western media industries have created visible, regional and global flows of pop music, television drama, film, animation, online games and so on increasingly challenging the dominant power of Western media culture. A key feature of the globalisation of popular culture is the active role of nation-states focusing on the creation of cool national brands, inevitably reinforcing a commercialised ‘pop nationalism’ or ‘cultural nationalism’ that appropriates popular culture to promote political and economic interests. In a global digital age, collaborative creativity ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, from nation-states and from producers-consumers, can appropriate popular culture to make their society, language and culture more attractive to wider international audiences and open possibilities for soft power. Today’s rapid media globalisation and the mundane use of information and communication technologies present unprecedented opportunities for soft power as well as challenges. Since the late 1990s, South Korea (hereafter Korea) has emerged as a new centre for the production of transnational popular culture, exporting its own media cultural products into Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The spread of Korean popular culture overseas is referred to as the ‘Korean Wave’ or ‘Hallyu’ – a term first coined by Chinese news media in the middle of 1998 to describe Chinese youth’s sudden craze for Korean cultural products. Initiated by the export of television dramas, the Korean Wave now includes a range of cultural products including pop music, film, animation, online games, smartphones, fashion, cosmetics, food and lifestyles (Kim 2013, 2019; Kim and Choe 2014; Lee and Nornes 2015; Lie 2015; Fuhr 2016; Ju 2020). The emergence of the affluent urban middle class in Asia has provided a catalyst for the transnational circu-

Transnational popular culture  249

lation and consumption of Korean popular culture. In a sense, the phenomenon of the Korean Wave is one of imagined cosmopolitanism in the realm of global consumer culture (Kim 2013). The primary site for the development and proliferation of shared global consciousness is located in the mundane, representational domain of mass media and information and communication technologies, intersected with global interdependencies of transnational migration and digital diaspora today (Kim 2011). While the popularity of the Korean Wave is mainly concentrated in neighbouring Asian markets, some of the products reach as far as the United States, Mexico, Egypt, Iraq, and most recently, Europe. This is the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history (Kim 2013). The growing interest in the Korean Wave has triggered an increase in foreign tourists visiting Korea. Each year, about 13 million foreign tourists visit Korea, and two-thirds of the visitors are influenced by the Korean Wave (Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2019). It has also prompted an interest in learning the Korean language, culture and society; each year, about 100,000 international students come to Korea, and a significant motive is their sudden interest in, and imagination about, Korea generated by the Korean Wave (Lee 2018; Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2019). The global circulation of Korean popular culture has improved Korea’s national image and led to heightened market awareness of general Korean products. Overseas sales of Korean consumer goods, including televisions, mobile phones, cars, clothing and cosmetics, have risen in the wake of the strategic appropriation of Korean popular culture. The Korean culture industry is seen to commodify the nation, exporting its popular culture as a cool national brand (Kim 2013). Popular culture was once considered as emotional and low culture – in contrast to high culture such as literature, art and education – in fast modernizing, highly educated neo-Confucian Korea (Kim 2016); but popular culture is now a potent export force providing significant underpinning for the generation of high value and meaning for the nation. In the past, national images of Korea were negatively associated with the demilitarised zone, division and political disturbances, but now such images are gradually giving way to the vitality of trendy, transnational entertainers and cutting-edge technology. The Korean government sees this phenomenon as a way to sell a dynamic image of the nation through ‘soft power’ (Nye 2004, 2008), the ability to attract and influence international audiences without coercion. The culture industry has taken centre stage in Korea, with an increased recognition that the global circulation of media cultural products not only boosts the economy but also strengthens the nation’s image and soft power (Kim 2013, 2019). With the active involvement of the government, the Korean Wave has been largely constructed within nationalistic discourses and policies, and imagined as cultural nationalism – a form of hegemony masked in soft power. This Korean version of nationalistic and expansionistic cultural policy has a tendency to develop into another form of hegemonic cultural imperialism in the region. The Korean Wave of popular culture, as a resource for soft power that emerged in the postcolonial periphery, can ironically generate a new version of cul-

250  Handbook on transnationalism

tural imperialism that is deeply embedded in cultural nationalism and an ideological position that undermines cultural diversity and soft power of attraction. The Korean Wave is a pronounced example of the crossover of culture and economy, and the commercialisation of culture through nation branding, taking a neoliberal capitalist approach in the era of globalisation. Popular culture has emerged as a core component of the nation’s economic competitiveness that extends to interests in cultural influence and more sophisticated politico-cultural leverage. The Korean Wave is not just a media cultural phenomenon but fundamentally about the creation of soft power, favourable nation branding and sustainable development through transnational meaning-making processes. Transnational popular culture has become a potentially important resource for soft power, collaborative creativity and transcultural dialogues to win hearts and minds of people in a digitally connected mobile world.

DIGITAL FAN CULTURE Today’s ubiquitous media flows from the periphery to the West, with greater access through digital technologies, create new cultural spaces and identification within the transnational field, changing the dynamics of identity in unpredictable ways (Cunningham and Sinclair 2001; Karim 2003; Sun 2006; Kim 2011, 2017; Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). Culturally displaced subjects, whether of younger generations or older generations, educated or not, are able to shape and sustain their distinct cultural identity through global media networks and popular culture in everyday transnational lives. Popular media culture and technological change is socially constructed and does not emerge itself without the involvement of the users and fans who have to accept it as relevant in everyday life. Mediated social networks, hyper-connectivity and cultural negotiation result from the accelerated globalisation of the media, the Internet in particular and its time-space compressing capacity. These new kinds of transnational networks, hyper-connectivity and various capacities of mobility – virtual, imaginary and physical – are now changing not only the scale and patterns of transnationalism but also the nature of hyper mobile transnationals of various social classes (Kim 2011, 2017) and their experience and thinking, thus the complex conditions of identity formation. The global expansion of popular culture today can be attributed to the power of digital fan culture. Transnational circulation is significantly aided by fans’ participatory culture and voluntary labour in prompt uploading, forwarding and sharing with wider audiences, while significantly shaping the production, circulation and reception of popular cultural contents (Kim 2013). Transnational popular culture is spreading across the world through the development of digital media forms, the use of the Internet, and online marketing. While the rise of portable videos and CDs, cable and satellite broadcast fuelled the global spread of popular culture in the past, social networking services and video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as smartphones, are now playing a primary role in expanding

Transnational popular culture  251

the space of transnational popular culture (Kim 2013; Choi and Maliangkay 2015; Lee and Nornes 2015; Fuhr 2016; Jin 2016; Ju 2020). More recently, Korean popular culture broadcast on digital streaming platforms such as Netflix has captured the hearts of fans across the world. Netflix has widened the reach and popularity of both Western and non-Western cultural products, expanding the collision and interaction of national televisual cultures and reflecting the prevalence of neoliberal formations of market value and deregulation in media production (Jenner 2018; Johnson 2018; Lobato 2019; Pallister 2019). The Korean Wave is not simply a flow that originates from Korea and transnational corporates; instead it is a multi-directional flow and a highly interactive ongoing process that is created, and possibly sustained, by digitally empowered fan consumers. From the fans’ perspective, the Korean Wave phenomenon can be viewed as a counterweight to Western cultural influence, particularly American media cultural dominance. Driven by a desire to help their idols, fans do real-time translations of idols’ performances on social media. What is significant here is the active role played by marginal, largely invisible yet devoted fans in shaping the Korean Wave’s staying power. It is the power of digital fan labour, both material and immaterial, that encourages fellow fans and new users to participate in transnationally imagined fan communities. Digital fans, as grassroots participants, play an active role in shaping the flow of popular media culture for their own purposes in an increasingly networked culture, complicating media production, circulation and promotion in a world of spreadable media (Jenkins et al. 2013). Often out of pleasure online, digital fans produce and circulate their creative work for free, while demonstrating the eroding distinction between work and play in the affective economy (Scholz 2013). Fandom today, as a creative, transformative and influential community, has increasingly become a mainstream identity moving from the margins (Booth 2015; Bennett and Booth 2016; Click and Scott 2018). Fansubbing, or ‘non-professional subtitling’ (Orrego-Carmona and Lee 2017), has been critical to the growth of foreign popular culture and fandom in the West, based on an implicit understanding that fans from around the world contribute their individual linguistic knowledge for the greater good of the collective. Fan audiences are wooed and championed by niche cultural industries, as long as their activities do not divert from principles of capitalist exchange and recognise industries’ legal ownership of the object of fandom (Gray et al. 2007; Jenkins et al. 2013). Fandom is typically associated with cultural forms that the mainstream, dominant value system denigrates. It is thus associated with, but not confined to, the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of race, gender, age and class (Kim 2013; Choi and Maliangkay 2015; Hubinette 2018; Ohlheiser 2020). The often-repeated claim about K-pop performers’ politeness – their clean-cut features as well as their genteel demeanours – is something of a nearly universal appeal, whether to Muslim Indonesians or Catholic Peruvians (Lie 2015). Fans steadily construct knowledge communities by archiving, annotating and circulating moments of their favoured stars and performances, while

252  Handbook on transnationalism

producing their own vernacular discourses and explanations for why their fan culture matters so much to them (Jenkins 2006). Fan communities activate multiple, transnational sites of engagement that not only aggregate collective intelligence but also come into conflict with mainstream identities. Today’s diasporic communities use digital communication networks to maintain strong ties back to their homelands, while engaging in complex cultural exchanges in host societies. The increasing, multi-directional flows of media and digital technologies facilitate people’s transnational, nomadic, back-and-forth movements, creating new and complex conditions for identity formation in diaspora (Kim 2011). The mediated networks established through the Internet and transnational popular culture have been instrumental in facilitating these changes in contemporary movements, allowing dispersed yet networked migrants to maintain transnationally their home-based relationships and to regulate a dialectical sense of belonging in host countries (Karim 2003; Sun 2006; Kim 2011, 2013, 2017; Boccagni, Chapter 9 in this volume). When digital generations find it difficult to integrate themselves into society in the face of social exclusion or banal racism, they may attempt to construct an inclusive mediated community and affiliation by participating in alternative cultures proliferating through the rapidly evolving digital technologies. The growth of transnational popular culture in online communities may allow fans to imagine new identities and practices at the heart of their social realities, hierarchies and inequalities. As an important interface between the dominant macro and micro forces of identity, digital fan culture can be seen as alternative spaces of identity in which a different voice can be raised and a self can be expressed, contested, re-articulated or re-affirmed in relation to global cultural Others (Kim 2013; Choi and Maliangkay 2015; Hubinette 2018; Ohlheiser 2020).

EVERYDAY REFLEXIVITY The notion of reflexivity has, since the mid-1980s, been a crucial issue for social researchers in Western academic debates – notably in critical ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and feminist epistemology (Skeggs 1995) – emphasising the necessity of reflecting on the conditions (e.g. power relations) under which knowledge is produced. But what about the reflexivity of ordinary people? What about people in a culture where repression is supposed to be pervasive? What is it about the globally connected media world that provides openings for everyday people to make sense of their lives in critical ways? Reflexivity is the major mechanism of grasping a relationship between globalisation, as a mediated cultural force, and experience, since it is precisely reflexivity that is at work in the everyday experience of global media culture (Kim 2005, 2008, 2019). Reflexivity is understood to be central to the constitution of subjects under conditions of global modernity (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Beck et al. 1994). Contemporary subjects are figured in terms of tendencies towards self-reflection, self-analysis, self-confrontation (Beck et al. 1994) and the reflexive monitoring of action and its contexts to keep in touch with

Transnational popular culture  253

the grounds of everyday life (Giddens 1991). This kind of everyday reflexivity comes from an occasionally evident awareness of subjects’ own experience of and position in society, with respect to the overwhelming power of dominant institutions and discourses; and such a capacity is already becoming ‘operative in the critique or the discourses of non-intellectual lay public groups at an informal and pre-political level’ (Beck 1992, p. 75). Since reflexivity is intrinsic to all human life in all cultures, the difference resides in a specific form and degree of reflexivity in a particular context where it is achieved; and also the difference consists in the ‘scale of knowledge and information’ made available in a global condition under which reflexivity takes place (Giddens 1991). Increased flows of the media and transnational popular culture are important resources for the triggering and operating of everyday reflexivity, perhaps even more so in relatively rigid and conservative societies where other sources of reflexivity might not be readily available (Kim 2005, 2008, 2019). The media are central to everyday reflexivity, changing the very nature of reflexivity by providing conditions for increased capacities for reflexivity in the light of non-local information and new knowledge. Social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character (Giddens 1991). This reflexivity involves the routine incorporation of new knowledge into environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganised (Beck et al. 1994). This evolving reflexive project is not just a direct cause-and-effect in the speed of social and cultural change but an increasingly insistent and intense process of mediation. Especially, the extraordinary range of information and knowledge that today’s Internet and transnational popular culture make available constitutes a unique phenomenon, whose importance for understanding present life situations can undermine traditional arrangements and transform traditional forms of social practices (Kim 2005, 2008, 2019; Wallis 2013; Darling-Wolf 2015). It is via the increased exposure to global cultural Others and reflexive capacities that people make sense of life conditions which differ from their own and come to question the taken-for-granted social order. Significantly, what is emerging can be the problematisation of society itself, the increasing awareness of its structural rigidity and discontents as well as the interrogatory attitude towards the surrounding world. Ordinary people may not destabilise the whole system, but border-crossing popular culture can prompt them to critically reflect on the legitimacy of their own social system and imagine new possibilities within the multiple constraints of their social context. Engagement with transnational popular culture constitutes a heightened awareness vis-à-vis gender, sexuality, class, social mobility and so on. When local media cultural productions largely fail to respond to the changing socio-economic status and desire of people – women and youth in particular – it is transnational popular culture that is instead appropriated for making contact with more diverse formations of culture and for making sense of what it means to be a modern self (Kim 2005, 2008, 2013, 2019; Darling-Wolf 2015). Gender and technology are intimately intersected with the formation of modernity or modern subjectivity; women have historically attempted to create cracks and fissures in dom-

254  Handbook on transnationalism

inant narratives of gender norms (Freedman et al. 2013). From the female audiences’ perspective, Korean television dramas are emotionally powerful and self-reflexive. The emotional level of investment in human relations and social realities constitutes a major source of popular pleasure that continues to hook viewers into Korean drama. It provides some of the most recognisable and relevant material that allows viewers to build a felt sense of the self. What makes Korean cultural forms popular has to do with the pleasure of recognisable human experience with powerful emotional responses, a felt sense of the texture of life that reaches not only the intimate sphere but also the heart of the reflexive self. Korean dramas are infused with urban middle-class scenes as representations of modernisation, yet affectively portray youthful sentimentality and provide an imaginary for an increasingly regionalised ‘Asian modernity’ (Erni and Chua 2005). In the urban centres of Asia, there are many young viewers whose desires and aspirations overlap with the way Korean dramas are presented – a beautiful urban environment, young and single professionals, aestheticised lifestyles, and the pure love which is still possible. The Korean Wave reflects an imagination of a new regional cultural formation (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008), or a source of new definitions of the cultural geography of East Asia and East Asian sensibilities that are re-imagined and re-invented via pan-Asian popular cultures (Cho 2011). The circulation of the Korean Wave has spurred imagination of the power of Asia, vernacular modernities and modernising desires. People located in different parts of Asia are adept in using Korean popular culture to imagine their own multiple, at times conflicting, subjectivities, and to negotiate what they see as their distinctive modern identities (Lin and Tong 2008). The rise of the Korean Wave phenomenon is seen as a long-awaited flowering of postcolonial Asian artistic expression, and a creation of a regional Asian cultural manifestation against the erstwhile domination of Western culture (Dator and Seo 2004). Implicitly yet profoundly, Korea’s historical colonial victimhood is pointed out as an intriguing reason behind the popularity of the Korean Wave. The success of Korean popular culture can be understood by global power relations and political sensitivities. The political conflicts and socio-cultural tensions of the divided nation have been used to good effect to create emotionally powerful contents (Kim 2013). Korean culture reflects the nation’s unique sensibility of ‘han’ – a Korean word for a deeply felt sense of oppression and deep-seated grief. Thus, the reason behind the successful phenomenon is a combination of Korea’s tragic history, the intensity of Korean emotive culture, and the non-threatening nature of its people. Often, the ambivalent nature of foreignness in imported Western cultural products can be perceived by two extremes – fascination and threat – but the threat is relatively less manifested in the way Korean popular culture is received. There is a lingering anti-colonial sentiment evident in many Asian countries (Otmazgin and Ben-Ari 2012; Ching 2019). However, Korean popular culture is seen to be a less problematic source of power and ideological threat than some other countries in Asia, for example, the ‘Japanese odour’ (Iwabuchi 2015) that Japanese cultural producers try to remove from their products in order not to induce resistance from regional audiences. Arising

Transnational popular culture  255

as part of the historical milieu of decolonisation, the transnational mobility of the Korean Wave is a facet of the de-centralising multiplicity of global media cultural flows today, and the significance of its popularity is reflective of a region-wide reassertion or imaginary of Asianism, and a key site of decolonisation work that may self-reflexively interrogate and unsettle the global hegemony of Euro-America. Young women – especially those in subordinate and marginalised positions, discontented with the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions of society and persisting constraints of life politics within established dominant orders – are likely to imagine alternative lifestyles and desire to move out of the national and local forms of life and to seek a more open, alternative life experience elsewhere (Kim 2011, 2012, 2017; Wallis 2013; Darling-Wolf 2015). Young Asians’ travel is related to the increasingly mobile patterns of the everyday, taking on a new significance in the construction and narration of ‘individualised’ life stories – mobility biographies shaped by the contradictory relations of media culture, education, labour market conditions and individualisation (for details, see Kim 2011, 2012, 2017). Especially among women and youth, travelling can be apprehended as a ‘must see’ practice, and part of what travelling means is the affirmation of cultural differences acquiring a wider transnational meaning through the recognition and experience of differences in the realm of individual freedom and gender modality. Transnational popular culture is seen to be enabling mobility at multiple levels, by the symbolic, virtual and imaginary travels through space or actual physical displacement between different places.

HIDDEN TRANSFORMATION The spread of the global media intersected with popular consumer culture has profoundly influenced the aspirations, attitudes and mobility of citizens inside the closed societies of Eastern Europe and North Korea (Wagnleitner 1994; Mattelart 1999; Drakulic 2016; Kim 2019). Nations with totalitarian regimes cannot be confident any longer of their immunity from the globalised influence of ubiquitous cultural flows and the possibility of bottom-up change. Low-level dissent or criticism against the regimes may emerge as the circulation of outside culture, consumer capitalism and new cultural awareness grow in a digital age. With increasing numbers of people coming online through mobile phones, computers and tablets with a desire to embrace a more open world, monitoring the users’ online activities, new cultural connections and broader networks is increasingly difficult for repressive totalitarian regimes. The growing forces of transnational popular culture via digital media technologies and such soft power resources potentially stand a better chance of fostering social change than does more immediate and coercive action. The effective weapon appears to be the attractive and less formal forces of soft power. It is important to recognise an intersection between South Korean popular culture and the mobilisation of inner self and possible social change to emerge within communist North Korea, where real-life situations are felt to be particularly constrained

256  Handbook on transnationalism

and mobility in a variety of capacities and forms becomes all the more important (Kim 2019). North Korea still remains the most closed and repressive media cultural environment in the world (Cha 2013; Kretchun et al. 2017). Despite tight controls set by the regime, copies of South Korean dramas, movies and music are increasingly smuggled across the border with China into North Korea. Portable media devices such as Notels (combined ‘notebook’ and ‘television’ multi-media players), mobile phones, DVDs and USB drives containing foreign, mostly South Korean, popular culture are found in exploding private, black markets all over the country (Hassig and Oh 2015; O 2016). The overwhelming majority (98 per cent) of USB owners are reportedly using their USB drives to discreetly store some form of illegal media, South Korean dramas or music (98 per cent) in stark contrast to North Korean entertainment (9 per cent), and furthermore such illegal media content is shared with family (91 per cent) and friends (64 per cent) via USB drives (Kretchun et al. 2017). Within a week of a South Korean television show airing in Seoul, it is already distributed and available in North Korean black markets. Black markets have been instrumental in fuelling a new and creative way for ordinary people to share non-state information and networks in the country that regulates and directs all the media and cultural flows. South Korean dramas and music have become so widespread across North Korea that since 2004 the regime has launched a sweeping crackdown on university students – the biggest audiences. North Koreans caught consuming South Korean popular culture can be subject to severe punishment, imprisonment, or even execution in public; and one can get thrown into a gulag for six months of hard labour for humming South Korean pop songs (Cha 2013). Despite the high risk, many North Koreans continue to yearn for a taste of freedom, modernity and free-market fantasies offered by illegal, smuggled dramas and music, and now through digital technologies. Digital youth and outside culture proliferating through whispering rumours and the forbidden foreign media make North Korea’s isolation more difficult in the light of new images, concepts and lifestyles (Kim 2019). These illicit flows of popular culture from South Korea are quietly transforming how North Koreans self-reflexively see the outside world, their country, and the conditions of their lives. Because the people of North Korea are not allowed to get out of the country, and because outsiders cannot freely get into the country and see the everyday lives and activities of the ordinary people that are often hidden from outsiders, accounts of defectors revealed in the digital media of non-governmental organisations, newspapers and radio (e.g. Daily NK, NK News, Korea Herald, Korea Times, Radio Free Asia) offer some of the valuable sources of information about what is happening inside North Korea. There are indications that North Korea’s young people, the ‘black market generation’, are eager consumers of South Korean popular culture, competitively emulating not only its stylish fashions, hairstyles, cosmetics, beauty standards and even cosmetic surgery but also manners of speech and behaviour, while simultaneously developing individualistic outlooks despite the regime’s unflagging efforts to block the anti-socialist elements of outside culture (Hassig and Oh 2015; Tudor and Pearson 2015; O 2016). The regime facing a quasi-capitalist market economy is liable to become unstable as a result of pressure

Transnational popular culture  257

from the people involved in necessary black market activities and outside culture that permeate all levels of society, from the poorest to the Party and military elites (Tudor and Pearson 2015). South Korean popular culture has been a pull factor for North Korean migration as mediated experiences of South Korean dramas, movies and music enable North Koreans to see and feel the outside world in comparison to their country and drive them to make life-threatening journeys. The soft power of border-crossing popular culture has increasingly weakened the regime’s hold on its people and their imaginations. This contradicts the state’s propaganda line that there is ‘nothing to envy’ in the outside world because North Korea is full of riches and the rest of the world is worse off; yet in reality, North Korea is a place where everybody needs a scam to survive (Demick 2010). Confronted by imaginaries of South Korean culture and higher living standards, North Korean viewers come to internally question and doubt the claims of their own government. This critical reflection emerging from the viewing moment, and such change in awareness, knowledge and the interrogatory attitude towards society may not always produce an easily observable specific action and social transformation in the short run, but new possibilities may arise from a heightened capacity for reflexivity, questioning and re-thinking of the taken-for-granted social order and the conditions of existence (Kim 2019). People’s capacity to make sense of the meanings of everyday life, or the grounds of what they do, what they think and what they feel, has become dependent on the unofficial mediation of South Korean popular culture which is increasingly present in daily exigencies. Such cultural encounter can evoke utopian feelings of possibility acting as temporary answers to the specific inadequacies of society and showing what solutions feel like. Through unexpected and growing capitalist cultural flows, North Korea has become vulnerable to its Southern neighbour’s soft power – an emerging power based on aesthetic appeal rather than military force. Today’s revolutionary digital technologies, combined with an unprecedented concomitant economic and cultural globalisation, are changing the nature of political power and conflict and creating an international commodity boom, popular cultural convergence and homogenising consumer culture around the world (Iverson 2017; Press-Barnathan 2017). The authoritarian regime’s control has sometimes appeared tenuous as the cultural norms of everyday life so assiduously cultivated by its official propaganda are increasingly in flux, and the regime confronts new challenges to maintaining a rigidly controlled public sphere in a fluid and interconnected world of globalisation (Dukalskis 2017). It is wrong to assume that, because its political regime and authoritarian control has not changed significantly, then North Korea must be a static society in which citizens are devoid of agency or in which socio-cultural change and such imagination is insignificant. North Koreans, too, are the agents of change with normal aspirations, hopes and desires, constituting a hidden yet potential force for internal change despite long deep-seated oppression. The significance of cultural consumption practices can be understood as a creative, dynamic and transformative process, often involving active and intended engagement (Kim 2008, 2019). Its appeal and plausibly powerful capacity can invite new cultural dynamics, challenge and social change in North Korea.

258  Handbook on transnationalism

CONCLUSION This chapter has addressed the obscured role of transnational popular culture, soft power and everyday reflexivity in a digitally connected mobile world. Transnational popular culture has become a cultural resource for the growing mass-mediated popular imagination, which is situated within a broader process of global consumerism and a new sphere of digital culture. The term popular culture is used to describe mass-produced cultural products or media distractions, and popular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to high culture, dominant culture and thus viewed as a residual category, texts and practices that fail to meet the standards to qualify as high culture: It is myopic to disregard popular culture as merely trivial, playful culture unworthy of serious consideration (Storey 2018; Kim 2005, 2008, 2019; Otmazgin and Ben-Ari 2012; Brandt and Clare 2018). Popular culture can take the serious and often oppressive regulation of the conduct of everyday life, and turn it on its head. In such spaces of popular culture, oppressed individuals or marginalised groups of society can suspend the regularities of daily life, take pleasure, and in some transcendent way, play with the categories and concepts of the world over which they otherwise have no influence. Experiencing transnational popular culture is not simply about entertainment or a form of escapism. At moments of particular relevance and resonance, meaning-making through popular culture lives in the community of its users and enters into life. Although the experience of popular culture may be hidden and unmarked, there are moments which stand out and are imprinted in users’ memories; the memories of popular culture are intimately linked to their biographies. Although the experience of popular culture may not lead to dramatic social or political change in the short run, and although the importance of the transformations generated by popular culture in the long run are problematically obscured by the attention to short-run immediate effects, people’s mundane changes, imagination and critical reflection triggered by popular culture and expressed in the practices of everyday life can be the basis of social constitution or political subjects.

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Beck, Ulrich (1992), Risk Society, London: Sage. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (1994), Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, Lucy and Paul Booth (eds) (2016), Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture, London: Bloomsbury. Berry, Chris, Nicola Liscutin and Jonathan Mackintosh (eds) (2009), Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Booth, Paul (2015), Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Boyd-Barrett, Oliver and Tanner Mirrlees (eds) (2020), Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Transnational popular culture  259

Brandt, Jenn and Callie Clare (2018), An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US: People, Politics and Power, London: Bloomsbury. Cha, Victor (2013), The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future, New York: HarperCollins. Ching, Leo (2019), Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cho, Younghan (2011), ‘Desperately seeking East Asia amidst the popularity of South Korean pop culture in Asia’, Cultural Studies, 25 (3), 383–404. Choi, JungBong and Roald Maliangkay (eds) (2015), K-Pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry, New York: Routledge. Chua, Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds) (2008), East Asian Pop Culture, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Click, Melissa and Suzanne Scott (eds) (2018), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, New York, NY, USA: Routledge. Clifford, James and George Marcus (eds) (1986), Writing Culture, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cottle, Simon (ed.) (2000), Ethnic Minorities and the Media, Buckingham: Open University Press. Cunningham, Stuart and John Sinclair (eds) (2001), Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diaspora, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Darling-Wolf, Fabienne (2015), Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Dator, Jim and Yongseok Seo (2004), ‘Korea as the wave of a future’, Journal of Futures Studies, 9 (1), 31–44. Demick, Barbara (2010), Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, New York: Spiegel & Grau. Drakulic, Slavenka (2016), How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, New York: Harper. Dukalskis, Alexander (2017), The Authoritarian Public Sphere: Legitimation and Autocratic Power in North Korea, Burma, and China, London: Routledge. Erni, John and Siew Chua (eds) (2005), Asian Media Studies: Politics of Subjectivities, Oxford: Blackwell. Freedman, Alisa, Laura Miller and Christine Yano (eds) (2013), Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility and Labor in Japan, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fuhr, Michael (2016), Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop, London: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gillespie, Marie (1995), Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, London: Routledge. Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss and Lee Harrington (eds) (2007), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, New York: New York University Press. Hassig, Ralph and Kongdan Oh (2015), The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hubinette, Tobias (2018), ‘Who are the Swedish K-pop fans?’, Culture and Empathy, 1 (1–4), 34–48. Iverson, Shepherd (2017), Stop North Korea: A Radical New Approach to the North Korean Standoff, Tokyo: Tuttle. Iwabuchi, Koichi (2015), ‘Pop-culture diplomacy in Japan’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21 (4), 419–32. Jenkins, Henry (2006), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green (2013), Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York: New York University Press.

260  Handbook on transnationalism

Jenner, Mareike (2018), Netflix and the Re-invention of Television, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jin, Dal Yong (2016), New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Johnson, Derek (ed.) (2018), From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels, New York: Routledge. Ju, Hyejung (2020), Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audiences, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Karim, Karim H. (ed.) (2003), The Media of Diaspora, London: Routledge. Kim, Kyung-Hyun and Youngmin Choe (eds) (2014), The Korean Popular Culture Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kim, Youna (2005), Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope, London: Routledge. Kim, Youna (ed.) (2008), Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia, London: Routledge. Kim, Youna (2011), Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters, London: Routledge. Kim, Youna (ed.) (2012), Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kim, Youna (ed.) (2013), The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, London: Routledge. Kim, Youna (ed.) (2016), Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society, London: Routledge. Kim, Youna (2017), Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media, London: Routledge. Kim, Youna (ed.) (2019), South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea, London: Routledge. Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (2019), Hallyu White Paper 2018, Seoul: Korean Culture and Information Service. Kretchun, Nat, Catherine Lee and Seamus Tuohy (2017), Compromising Connectivity: Information Dynamics between the State and Society in a Digitizing North Korea, Washington, DC: InterMedia. Lee, Inhye (2018), ‘Effects of contact with Korean popular culture on KFL learners’ motivation’, The Korean Language in America, 22 (1), 25–45. Lee, Sangjoon and Abé Mark Nornes (eds) (2015), Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lie, John (2015), K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Lin, Angel and Avin Tong (2008), ‘Re-imagining a cosmopolitan “Asian us’’’, in Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds), East Asian Pop Culture, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 73–90. Lobato, Ramon (2019), Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution, New York: New York University Press. Mattelart, Tristan (1999), ‘Transboundary flows of Western entertainment across the Iron Curtain’, Journal of International Communication, 6 (2), 106–21. Nye, Joseph (2004), Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, New York: Public Affairs. Nye, Joseph (2008), The Powers to Lead, New York: Oxford University Press. O, Tara (2016), The Collapse of North Korea: Challenges, Planning and Geopolitics of Unification, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ohlheiser, Abby (2020), ‘How K-pop fans became celebrated online vigilantes’, MIT Technology Review, 5 June, accessed 13 October 2020 at https://​www​.technologyreview​ .com/​2020/​06/​05/​1002781/​kpop​-fans​-and​-black​-lives​-matter/​.

Transnational popular culture  261

Orrego-Carmona, David and Yvonne Lee (eds) (2017), Non-Professional Subtitling, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Otmazgin, Nissim and Eyal Ben-Ari (eds) (2012), Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia, London: Routledge. Pallister, Kathryn (ed.) (2019), Netflix Nostalgia: Streaming the Past on Demand, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Press-Barnathan, Galia (2017), ‘Thinking about the role of popular culture in international conflicts’, International Studies Review, 19 (2), 166–84. Scholz, Trebor (ed.) (2013), Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, New York: Routledge. Skeggs, Beverley (ed.) (1995), Feminist Cultural Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Storey, John (2018), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (8th edition), London: Routledge. Sun, Wanning (ed.) (2006), Media and the Chinese Diaspora, London: Routledge. Thomas, Amos (2005), Imagi-Nations and Borderless Television, New Delhi: Sage. Thussu, Daya (ed.) (2007), Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow, London: Routledge. Thussu, Daya (2013), Communicating India’s Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tudor, Daniel and James Pearson (2015), North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors, Tokyo: Tuttle. Voci, Paola and Luo Hui (eds) (2018), Screening China’s Soft Power, London: Routledge. Wagnleitner, Reinhold (1994), ‘American cultural diplomacy, Hollywood and the Cold War in Central Europe’, Rethinking Marxism, 7 (1), 31–47. Wallis, Cara (2013), Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones, New York: New York University Press.

17. Transnational religion Dominic Pasura

INTRODUCTION This chapter provides a critical and transnational analysis of the role that religion plays in shaping population movements and migrants’ lived experiences and correspondingly evaluates how religious traditions and practices are transformed through processes of movement, displacement and migration. Religion and migration have always been entangled but in the contemporary period questions about belonging, identity, citizenship and global security have become more pertinent, and this entanglement has acquired increased complexity in scale, diversity and significance (Pasura and Erdal 2016). The movement of people also entails the movement of beliefs, traditions, ideas and practices. Until recently, the scholarship on transnational migration has placed more emphasis on economic, social, cultural and political transnational practices, too often overlooking how religious identities and practices are sustained across nation-state boundaries. The chapter seeks to answer the following two questions: How are religious beliefs, institutions and practices transported and transplanted across borders? What is the analytical value of a transnational optic in studying religion on the move? This chapter provides a conceptual discussion of transnational religion which allows for generalisation, contrasts and comparisons rather than adding to the proliferation of case studies.

CONCEPTUALISING RELIGION WITHIN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT There is a growing interest in questions about religion among the public and within humanities and social sciences scholarship. A host of social and political events and trends in recent decades have given an edge to this curiosity about religion, for instance, the Iranian revolution, the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in the USA, the London bombings of 7 July 2005, and the growth of Pentecostalism in the Global South. The classical sociological theories of Durkheim, Marx and Weber predicted an inevitable decline in individual religiosity and institutional religion as a result of modernisation (Bruce 1995). This process of secularisation referred to the empirical-historical patterns of transformation and differentiation of the secular spheres from the religious, with the ideology behind this process, better known as secularism (Casanova 2009). However, recent studies of immigrants and the growth of religion in the Global South have challenged the relegation of religion to the private sphere posited by modernisation theories. Because of growing migrant and 262

Transnational religion  263

diasporic populations in the Global North, scholars have pointed to evidence of religious revitalisation of the Western public sphere. Consequently, contemporary social theorists argue for the place and relevance of religion in modern secular societies (Habermas 2006; Turner 2013). As Turner (2013, p. 8) notes, ‘the academic consensus suggests that the secularisation thesis was just wrong all along, or that it was primarily relevant to northern Europe. Beyond the European secular framework, there is ample evidence that religion plays a major role in society, culture and politics’. The construction of the epistemological Other is the conceptual backbone of the modernity project in which religion became the de facto Enlightenment reason’s primitive other. Binary notions such as religious/secular, tradition/modernity and public/private that underpin Western epistemology, privilege specific ways of being and belonging while marginalising others. The religious/secular binary, for example, ignores how religions are lived, as well as their informal, embodied and material dimensions. As Vásquez (2013, p. 29) correctly argues, ‘by denying religion’s coevalness, by setting it as the archaic, irrational, and a temporal Other, sociology has, in its quest to become a science, rendered itself unable to understand fully the durable social vigor of religion’. The secular and the religious are mutually constituted epistemic categories. Rather than taking a dichotomous framework in studying religion on the move, we gain more analytical refinement from mapping activities across a continuum. Bender et al. (2013) strongly argue for the need to de-centre taken-for-granted categories in the study of religion, specifically the Christianisation of religion, the predominance of textualism, the privileging of belief over practice, ritual and material culture, and the pervasiveness of European and American contexts. Equally, Woodhead (2009) urges researchers to take a global view of religion which entails moving beyond methodological nationalism and breaking free from the captivity of a single theoretical perspective, whether the secularisation thesis or religious vitality theory. For most Western scholars, ‘religion’ means ‘Christianity’ (and more specifically a narrow range of Protestant forms) while other religions are seen as either inferior, primitive or elementary religious forms (Vásquez 2013). Moreover, within this scholarship, there is a tendency to privilege religious ‘belief’ over religious practices, formalised religion over lived religion (McGuire 2008), what Ammerman (2013) referred to as ‘everyday religion’. The impetus to build a theoretical framework of lived religion which focuses less on institutionalised practices than on how believers experience and practise their religion started with the work of Robert Orsi (1985) which considered actions, places, relationships and practices of everyday life as well as structures. The focus on individual religiosity, embodied beliefs and practices challenges the conceptualisation of religion as organisational belonging and thus, best suited to capture the continuities and discontinuities of migrants’ transnational religious practices. In a study of Muslim migrants’ experience of Islam in their everyday lives in Germany and Denmark, Jeldtoft (2011) uses the term ‘non-organized’ to describe the forms of Islam which focus less on institutional or organisational practices. Doing Islam, Jeldtoft (2011, p. 1146) argues, meant a pragmatic religion, ‘it must fit with your daily life and so authority, dogma and tradition are not central

264  Handbook on transnationalism

parts of these Muslims’ lives, because other things are, if not more, then equally important.’ If religion is a social and historical product as Asad (1993) robustly argued, it is imperative to rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about religion as a stable set of beliefs and practices. This approach also questions the view that religious life is primarily confined to contained spaces (e.g., congregations and nation-states), and instead points towards a more historicised, processual, contextualised and lived understanding of religions across borders which pays attention to the role of power and resistance. In countering the modernity-inflected conceptualisation of religion, Levitt (2013, p. 160) sees ‘religion not as a packageable, stable set of beliefs and practices rooted in a particular bounded time and space, but as a contingent clustering of diverse elements that come together within to-be-determined spaces riddled by power and interests’. Religions are not reified substances but complex processes characterised by confluences and flows. As Vásquez (2008, p. 156) points out, ‘we cannot rely on universal, a priori definitions of religion. Rather, we must be attentive to the ways in which local, grassroots, official, national, and transnational actors define and live religion’. If religion and religiosity are simultaneously theological and lived experiences, institutions and loose networks, agreement and disagreement, a reductionist and instrumental account which does not acknowledge these complexities has little analytical merit (Pasura and Erdal 2016). Thus, the conceptual shift in religious studies, from the study of texts and beliefs to a consideration of religious practice and how religions are lived is a welcome development (Vásquez 2008).

MOBILE RELIGIONS It is theoretically productive and empirically useful to see religions as dynamic and mobile rather than as fixed, stable beliefs and practices rooted in a bounded time and space. As Vásquez (2008, p. 158) argues, ‘mobile religions assume at least three overlapping, mutually implicative modalities: transnational, global, and diasporic religion’. How are religious beliefs, institutions and practices transported and transplanted across borders? While there are overlaps in the meanings of these concepts, the analytical priority in this chapter is on transnational and diasporic religions. As a first task, it is imperative to give a brief overview of the intersection of globalisation and religion before focusing on transnational and diasporic religion. Globalisation can be defined as the universal exchange or communication of goods, services, people, information, capital and cultures across national borders into other territories. For Appadurai (1996) globalisation is modernity at large, which illustrates the connection between globalisation, colonialism and modernisation. Globalisation is seen as legitimate and even obligatory in large part because of the role of Christianity as part of the European modernity project. For example, and because of globalisation, Christianity can now be regarded as a non-Western religion. Writing about the decline of Christianity in Britain within a global context, Jenkins (2002, p. 3) argues that ‘the era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the

Transnational religion  265

day of Southern Christianity is dawning. The fact of change itself is undeniable: it has happened, and will continue to happen’. Global processes are largely de-centred from nation-state territories and take place in a world context above and below states, and transnational processes are anchored in and span two or more nation-states. As Ebaugh (2010, p. 115) explains: while the notion of globalisation is an abstract, overarching conceptual framework, that of transnational ties and immigrant networks across borders challenges the researcher to build research designs that capture ways in which international migration is changing how religion is practiced and how religious institutions are adapting to local political and cultural contexts.

Over the past two decades, diaspora and transnationalism have become the two master concepts to understand contemporary migration, described by Faist (2010, p. 9) as ‘two awkward dance partners’. The following sections provide conceptual clarity to the meaning of these terms and how the concepts intersect with religion. Transnational Religions in a Globalising World The literature on transnationalism emphasises the regularity and intensity of cross-border activities initiated by migrants across nation-states. Scholars regard global migration as the third wave of globalisation after the movement of goods and capital (Castles et al. 2013). Migration flows have increasingly become differentiated, encompassing categories such as forced and voluntary, skilled and unskilled, documented and undocumented, internal and international, temporary and permanent (Castles et al. 2013). In some global cities, super-diversity has become a social fact, as seen in the coexistence of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants (Vertovec 2007). In response to the inadequacy of methodological nationalism in social sciences (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), there has been a shift within migration studies from discussions about how migrants are assimilated and integrated into countries of destination to how they maintain and sustain transnational practices and identities across national borders. Scholars have generally delineated the different types of transnational activities into economic, social, cultural and political (Al-Ali et al. 2001; Portes 1999). Nevertheless, as Levitt (2003, p. 847) argues, ‘while migration scholars now generally acknowledge the salience of migrants’ economic, social, and political transnational activities, we have largely overlooked the ways in which religious identities and practices also enable migrants to sustain memberships in multiple locations’. Historically, religion represents one of the oldest long-distance institutions. As Rudolph (1997, p. 1) reminds us, religious communities are ‘among the oldest of the transnationals: Sufi orders, Catholic missionaries and Buddhist monks carried word and praxis across vast spaces before those spaces became nation-states or even states’.

266  Handbook on transnationalism

Levitt (2003, p. 850) regards the levels and components of the transnational religious field as encompassing individual transnational religious practices; the organisational contexts in which transnational migrants enact their religious lives; the ties between local transnational organisations and their host and home-country regional, national, and international counterparts; the role of states; and the role of global culture and institutions. Cruz (2016) offers a typology of ‘transnationalism within Catholicism’ as ecclesiological, liturgical and missiological. The ecclesiological level pertains to the church’s structures, processes and teachings. The church has a global network of institutional, material and human resources around the world. In the context of migration, the liturgical level relates to how migrants maintain transnational ties through rituals, sacraments and popular piety. At the missiological level, the church considers pastoral care as its duty as well as mediating the integration of migrants into places of settlement, for example, through ethnic chaplains (Ryan 2016). Thus far, the key theoretical and methodological developments on transnational religion, as well as most of the identified case studies, with some exceptions (Brown and Yeoh 2018), have relied upon research conducted within European and American contexts. A substantial body of literature, informed by a nation-state centric approach, has explored how migrants, diasporas and ethnic minorities are assimilated and integrated into host societies with a particular focus on issues of belonging, identity formation, exclusion and different forms of citizenship (Dwyer 2000). Studies have examined the role of religion in the migration process (Hagan and Ebaugh 2003; Van Dijk 1997), how it influences the decision-making, routes and destination of migrants as well as how religion facilitates the adaptation or integration of migrants in their new settings. Within the US context, Hirschman (2004) has theorised how religion provides refuge, respectability and resources for migrants. Migrants incorporate themselves as citizens into American society via their religious identities, with all religions becoming ‘congregational’ (Foner and Alba 2008; Warner and Wittner 1998). Religion is grasped as a reflexive, active, strategic identity used in pursuit of equal citizenship. In Europe, however, there has been an underlying assumption that religion, in particular Islam, is not an enabling factor with regard to the integration process. As Pasura and Erdal (2016, p. 7) argue, ‘academics’ preoccupation with Islam and Muslim people, the growth of global Pentecostalism and new religions has diverted us from striking new patterns within mainstream churches, the Roman Catholic Church in particular’. Also, scholars pay undue attention to South to North migration patterns, mirroring the geopolitical agendas of countries in the Global North which prioritise the control and management of non-Western migration. A ‘transnational optic’ (Levitt 2007) provides a useful lens to examine the intersection of migration and religion as it combines both the sending and receiving contexts. As Levitt (2013, p. 163) explains, ‘a transnational optic helps identify the actors, ideas, and technologies that are the carriers of religion. It calls our attention to the real and imagined, past and present geographies through which religion travels and the pathways and networks that guide the elements circulating within them’. Moving beyond the methodological nationalist intellectual limit of the social sciences (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), the transnational optic provides the

Transnational religion  267

framework to explore religious practices, beliefs and objects which are anchored in two or more nation-states. However, contemporary migration and development studies often depict transnational life as occurring at two opposed locations – home and abroad, rarely combining receiving and sending contexts, and thus obscuring the dynamic and perpetual process of migration (see Paul, Chapter 22 in this volume). Another strand of the literature seeks to move beyond this narrow view of transnational migration as occurring between the receiving society and sending society, highlighting the role of transnational networks operating across multiple levels which drives religious movement (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002; Vásquez 2008). As Cherry (2016, p. 202) explains: From the micro individual level of private networks to more formal meso dimensions at the congregational level or macro international and transnational organisations and movements that can transcend both, transnational religious fields and spaces are immensely complex. They occur simultaneously at multiple levels of transnationalism with multi-faceted interactions between global socio-political contexts and the circumstances of local individual lives – not just in two nations or geographic spaces but across multiple spaces wherever diaspora has taken a people.

Hence, studying transnational religion entails examining how ‘religion operates simultaneously on multiple social and geographic scales, from individual and collective praxis to institutional structures to social movements’ (Mahler and Hansing 2005, p. 129). In their study of religion across borders in Houston, Texas, Ebaugh and Chafetz (2002) appropriate a network analysis to examine the variation, intensity and direction of religious flows which criss-cross national borders. As they argue, ‘it was clear religious beliefs and practices follow a circular path. Immigrants bring with them many religious practices from their home countries and subsequently adapt to their lives in the United States. Likewise, as they communicate with family and friends left behind in their homelands, they influence religious structures and practices there’ (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002, p. 6). Recently, Sheringham’s (2013) study examined the role of religion in the everyday, transnational lives of Brazilian migrants in London and on their return to Brazil. The study showed how transnational religious spaces allow migrants to create alternatives spaces of belonging in London, while, simultaneously, maintaining connections with people and places in Brazil. Diasporic Religions Diasporic religion provides an alternative but overlapping theoretical angle to examine the entanglement of religion and migration. Diasporas, as historical and contemporary social formations, are one of the foundations for the movement of religion. As a concept, diaspora is a contested term which has been used as a typological tool to categorise social formations wherein the archetypal model was one of forcible expulsion or scattering and usually associated trauma, as in the Jewish model (Cohen 2008). Diasporas are ‘the exemplary communities of the transnational moment’ (Tölöyan 1991, p. 5). Recently, there has been a shift in the conceptualisation of

268  Handbook on transnationalism

diaspora away from defining diasporas as substantive entities towards understanding diasporas as a process, a stance or mode of practice. As Brubaker (2005, p. 13) argues, ‘rather than speak of “a diaspora” or “the diaspora” as an entity, a bounded group, an ethnodemographic or ethnocultural fact, it may be more fruitful, and certainly more precise, to speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices, and so on’. Although religion has been central to classical definitions of diaspora, until recently, theoretical discussions on the topic of religion were relegated to the background because of the dominance of the secularisation thesis. Religion and diaspora are inextricably interwoven. Cohen (2008) laments that it is difficult to theorise the connection between diaspora and religion because global religions are transnational; there are notable cases where religion is closely linked with ethnicity. Both religion and diaspora provide for the articulation of individual and collective identities, sometimes entangled and strengthening each other. As Johnson (2012, p. 95) observes, ‘religions serve as important carriers of diasporas, even as diasporas extend religions into new places and situations of practice, sometimes invigorating them, sometimes threatening them, always transforming and remaking them’. By examining the relationship between religion and diaspora, two different approaches can be identified within the literature (Pasura 2018). In one approach that prioritises religion over diaspora, an institutional perspective is adopted in the study of the intersection of religion and diasporas. For example, for the Jewish and Sikh diasporas, their religious identities coincide with ethnic and national identities; however, for many secular diasporic groups, religion provides cement to diasporic identities (Cohen 2008). In a second strand of the literature, the dominance of the secularisation thesis in the sociology of religion led to modernist approaches which over-privileged the role of ethnicity and the homeland’s cohesive functions in diaspora/nation-state relations (Pasura 2018). Diasporic religions are seen as ‘territorial cultures’ in that their orientation towards the homeland often relies on ethnic and national markers which set them apart from the host society (Pasura 2018). Because of advances in technologies of contact, the experiences of Somalis in Britain illustrate the coexistence of multiple diasporic horizons – the orientations to other Somalis, to other Muslims and the host society but also intra- and intergenerational fissions. As Liberatore and Fesenmyer (2018) argue, young Muslims in Britain prioritise a universal ‘authentic’ Islam over and above the culture of their parents which they see as particularistic and tied to a place or country. Tweed (1997, 2009) popularised the term ‘diasporic religions’ to highlight the portability of religion as people move within and across national borders. Diasporic religion operates at three levels: the locative, the translocative and the supralocative. One example of the locative level is the way in which diasporic Cubans drew from their religious traditions to recentre themselves in Miami after migration, inscribing the sacred in the local landscape. The Cuban community built a shrine of Our Lady of Charity, the patroness of Cuba. For Tweed, religion orientates diasporic Cubans to position themselves in the new context thereby giving them a sense of belonging. Religion at the translocative level links the diaspora with the homeland. Migration can reinforce established religious beliefs and practices as a way for migrants and

Transnational religion  269

diasporas to holding on to something familiar which guarantees continuity with the past. At the supralocative level and beyond horizontal links with the homeland, the Shrine connects the Cuban people in Miami vertically with God, making their suffering in exile part of the scared narrative of redemption (Tweed 1997). One of the critical shifts in diaspora studies is to de-emphasise group identity and cohesiveness in favour of recognising internal diversity. The emergence of complex diasporas has given rise to what I refer to as ‘multi-religious diasporas’ which are ‘dispersed social groups which simultaneously hold on to conflicting sources of identifications/affiliations’ (Pasura 2018, p. 116). The notion of multi-religious diasporas contributes to new strands of scholarship which seek to dismantle dichotomous ways of thinking in the modern world by emphasising cross-fertilisation between different diasporic cultures and religions as they move and interact. Elsewhere, I suggest that we ‘need to consider the question of the relationship of religion and diaspora at a number of levels, different scales and imaginaries, at the structural, the discursive and the situated levels as well as pay attention to how the relationship between them is dynamic, historically and context specific’ (Pasura 2018, p. 117). At the structural level, the intersection between religion and diaspora is institutionalised through normative secular and multicultural discourses, restrictive immigration laws and coercive integration policies in most Western societies. The role of religion in the public sphere has been predominantly framed through debates about national security and terrorism, in particular the place and role of Islam in shaping and sustaining understandings of cultural and religious difference (Pasura 2012). While the predominant academic focus has been on diasporas as carriers of religion in motion, we also need to pay attention to the different regimes of governance and control practices of states intent on disciplining, harnessing and shaping the movements of diasporas, religious ideas, objects, faiths, and practices across national borders. ‘God may need no passport, but religious beliefs and believers regularly encounter obstacles and roadblocks along their way’ (Levitt 2013, p. 160). At the level of discourse, the intersection between religion and diaspora, migration more broadly, has become the object of academic and policy gaze monitoring, categorising and managing individual subjectivities and collective identities for those perceived as different. The intersection of religion and migration (diaspora) is often approached through an instrumental and reductionist lens. The key characteristics of this exclusionary discourse are its hostility to migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. These expert knowledges have shaped everyday understandings of the intersection of religion and diaspora as fixed, natural and thus affecting processes of developing integration in Western societies. At the situated level, the intersection of religion and diaspora is constructed and renegotiated through everyday interactions within structural constraints of the countries of settlement. Diasporic identities are not static but processual, relational and fluid, and migrants are active in the creation of their new ‘in-between’ worlds. These different levels – the structural, the discursive and the situated – are not mutually exclusive but interact in multifaceted ways in the intersection of religion and diaspora (see Pasura 2018).

270  Handbook on transnationalism

STUDYING RELIGION IN MOTION Examining the intersection of religion and migration ‘allows us to examine simultaneously the complex roles that religion plays in shaping migration patterns and experiences, and, equally to recognize the malleability of religious traditions and practices in processes of (im)mobility and migration’ (Saunders et al. 2016, p. 5). Wong and Levitt (2014, p. 349) made a useful distinction between travelling faiths and migrant religions: Migrant religions travel within the local ethnic confines of the migrant (and home) population, even as they reterritorialize and adapt to new contexts. Travelling faiths, conversely, are religious movements with universal claims around which a religious community forms (deterritorialized religions) that travel to proselytise. Travel is used as a tool in religious outreach to distant communities of the unconverted.

Whereas the ‘travelling faiths’ approach takes an institutional perspective in the study of religions, the ‘migrant religions’ approach explores the lived experience of religion through the prism of migrants and diasporas. The portability of religions across national borders means that religious beliefs and practices cannot be viewed as contained and sealed within nation-states, or the so-called spaces where religions live such as temples, synagogues and churches. As migrants move, they bring with them various forms of religious practices, beliefs and networks across national borders with reconfigurations of religion involving both continuity and change, stasis and rupture (see Xiang, Chapter 3 in this volume). Exploring the intersection between migrant development engagements and religious practices, Erdal and Borchgrevink (2017) demonstrate how Muslim Pakistani migrants in Oslo, Norway, perform everyday rituals which are linked to and reinforce transnational Islamic charity. For instance, transnational migrant journeys to Pakistan and witnessing extreme poverty reinforced the attachment to transnational Islamic charity. Wong and Levitt (2014) suggest three conceptual hooks to study religion in motion: carriers of religion, geographies of circulation and sites of encounter. The carriers of religion category acknowledges that people (migrants as well as pilgrims, tourists, professionals, students, religious leaders) are one important driver of religion in motion. At the same time, they argue that ‘we need to take into account the geographies within which they circulate – the intersecting planes and networks that constitute transnational social fields and their boundaries … In some parts of the world, religious elements circulate in the context of failed states and markets, while in others they encounter strong states and booming economies’ (Wong and Levitt 2014, p. 351). Lastly, at the sites of encounter, there is a need to explain what happens when circulating religious practices encounter what is already in place. Studying transnational religion in motion should start with a ‘ground-up’ approach (Levitt 2003) through examining how individuals and collective groups negotiate their everyday lives across national borders. Carriers of religion in motion such as migrants, pilgrims, students and professionals as well as objects, rituals, ideas and

Transnational religion  271

technologies move and cluster within and across national boundaries. In new places of settlement, migrant religions can be constrained by authorising traditions, leaders and social norms as well as regulatory frameworks which they encounter. Hence, individual agency may be needed to sustain religious practices. Equally, we need to be attentive to how social structures, for instance, sending and receiving nation-states or markets, govern and regulate religions. As Knott (2016, p. 71) put it, ‘religious traditions provide resources for people as they prepare to migrate, make their journeys, arrive and settle, establish themselves in new contexts and negotiate their minority status and rights. These resources do not escape unchanged in the process of migration, however’. Cherry (2016, p. 209) further explains how ‘from material resources to more ideological and spiritual resources or social and cultural capital that are transported, exchanged, adopted, and adapted in transnational migration, these flows are important to understanding the saliency and utility of religion in transmigrant lives’. As migrants arrive in places of settlement, religious practices are not merely transplanted unchanged, but migrants engage in a complex process of negotiation and adaptation of their faiths, as well as the shedding of some religious practices. Often, the encounter with secular discourses and other religions in motion results in collaboration or conflict, or the creation of hybrid identities and religious practices. The geographies of circulation relate to ‘the intersecting planes and networks that constitute transnational social fields and their boundaries … In some parts of the world, religious elements circulate in the context of failed states and markets, while in others they encounter strong states and booming economies’ (Wong and Levitt 2014, p. 351). We need to be attentive to the role of states and markets which manage and regulate what counts as ‘religion’, as well as how different religious carriers across national borders move and cluster, why some religious actors move freely while others are blocked, and this entails examining the different regimes of governance which operate within and between local, national and transnational scales. Religious networks and practices are never neutral but are shaped by power dynamics, revealing both resistance and constraint. As Levitt (2003, p. 852) argues: While research on religion and transnational migration focuses on individuals and the local, regional and national organisations in which they participate, it must nest these processes within the multi-layered social fields in which they take place. Of singular importance is the role of states, which regulate movement and religious expression and thereby strongly influence the magnitude and character of migrants’ transnational religious practices.

Scholars need to be wary of a normative discourse about religion, as Orsi (2012, p. 6) argues, ‘which is deeply enmeshed with the intellectual, political, and military aims of Western nations that distinguishes good religion from bad, the tolerable and the intolerable, with northern European and American Protestantism as exemplary forms of the good and tolerable’.

272  Handbook on transnationalism

CONCLUSION This chapter has examined the question of how transnational religions have been theorised. To explore religion on the move, scholars have often appropriated three overlapping and mutually implicative modalities: transnational, global, and diasporic religion. As Wuthnow and Offutt (2008, p. 209) put it, ‘religion is increasingly viewed as a transnational phenomenon. Although it exists in local communities and is distinctively influenced by a national cultural and political context, it has connections with the wider world and is influenced by these relations’. The movement of people, a recurring phenomenon in this globalising world, also entails the movement of religious beliefs, traditions, ideas, objects and practices. It is important to examine how religion is experienced and performed in new places of settlement, focusing on patterns of continuity and change, at various scales such as the individual, familial, communal, national, transnational and the global. As the chapter has shown, there is a great deal of overlap between diaspora and transnationalism, the ‘two awkward dance partners’ (Faist 2010), and specifically between transnational religions and diasporic religions. One of the key distinguishing features is that whereas religious transnationalism underscores the actual and ongoing exchanges, flows, networks and connections between individuals, religious organisations and institutions across nation-states, diasporic diasporas, which are a prime example of transnationality, entail a strong sense of collective identity, meaning-making and place-making away from home. Diasporic religions mediate migrants’ individual and collective identities as well as providing a tool to engage with both the place of origin and the place of settlement. Studying religion on the move challenges how we think and analyse religion beyond dominant sociological categories. It means de-centring taken-for-granted categories in the sociology of religion and focuses on what is going on at the edges where this core is being challenged (Bender et al. 2013). Bringing together the transnational optic and the lived religion perspective allows scholars to ground their research in the complex everyday lives of migrants. Theoretically, this means shifting emphasis from the understandings of religion and diaspora as coherent and stable, towards seeing these as dynamic, complex and situated. If we think of diaspora and religion as processes, practices and projects and not substantive entities, it allows us to explore ‘the ways in which diasporas are activated and transformed by religious practices, ideas and experiences. We can also consider how, and to what effect, the “religious” is claimed, made sense of, constituted, made and re-made in the process’ (Liberatore and Fesenmyer 2018, p. 235). What is the analytical value of the transnational perspective when studying religion in motion in comparison with the global and methodological nationalist standpoints? Our theoretical position shapes how we collect empirical data, our interpretations and the conclusions we draw. Knott (2016, p. 75) sums this up: If we enter the subject of religious practice through the place of worship … then our conclusions may pertain primarily to the communal scale … If the nation-state, public sphere

Transnational religion  273

or citizenship is our entry point, then religious practices may be seen as statements of intention or identity, as demands for recognition or space, or as resources for integration or civic encounter. A transnational or diasporic gaze may change the focus to one of the movement and circulation of practices and the people and things associated with them.

Migrants’ religions cannot be adequately understood only in the local frame and national frame of references; a transnational optic is needed to capture their multiple orientations. Such a transnational perspective makes it possible to hold these multiple layers in conversation with each other. It incorporates multiple frames of reference into every aspect of religion at different scales. Future research on transnationalism and religion should go beyond the European and American contexts and analyse religions in the Global South. This entails a diversification of what is ‘real religion’ beyond Christianity, which most Western scholars consider the paradigmatic embodiment of religion, and studying other religions on their own terms.

REFERENCES Al-Ali, Nadje, Richard Black and Khalid Koser (2001), ‘Refugees and transnationalism: The experience of Bosnians and Eritreans in Europe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27 (4), 615–34. Ammerman, Nancy Tatom (2013), Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Asad, Talal (1993), Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bender, Courtney, Wendy Cadge, Peggy Levitt and David Smilde (eds) (2013), Religion on the Edge: De-centering and Re-centering the Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Bernardo E. and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2018), Asian Migrants and Religious Experience: From Missionary Journeys to Labor Mobility, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Brubaker, Rogers (2005), ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (1), 1–19. Bruce, Steve (1995), Religion in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casanova, José (2009), ‘The secular and secularisms’, Social Research: An International Quarterly, 76 (4), 1049–66. Castles, Stephen, Hein de Haas and Mark J. Miller (2013), The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th edition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cherry, Stephen M. (2016), ‘Exploring the contours of transnational religious spaces and networks’, in Jennifer B. Saunders, Susanna Snyder and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (eds), Intersections of Religion and Migration, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 195–224. Cohen, Robin (2008), Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Cruz, Gemma Tulud (2016), ‘Brothers and sisters across borders: Theological perspectives on Catholic transnationalism’, in Dominic Pasura and Marta Bivand Erdal (eds), Migration, Transnationalism and Catholicism: Global Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23–50. Dwyer, Claire (2000), ‘Negotiating diasporic identities: Young British South Asian Muslim women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (4), 475–86. Ebaugh, Helen R. (2010), ‘Transnationality and religion in immigrant congregations: The global impact’, Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 23 (2), 105–19.

274  Handbook on transnationalism

Ebaugh, Helen R. and Janet S. Chafetz (eds) (2002), Religion Across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Erdal, Marta Bivand and Kaja Borchgrevink (2017), ‘Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals’, Global Networks, 17 (1), 130–146. Faist, Thomas (2010), ‘Diaspora and transnationalism: What kind of dance partners?’, in Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist (eds), Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 9–34. Foner, Nancy and Richard Alba (2008), ‘Immigrant religion in the U.S. and Western Europe: Bridge or barrier to inclusion?’, International Migration Review, 42 (2), 360–392. Habermas, Jürgen (2006), ‘Religion in the public sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy, 14 (1), 1–25. Hagan, Jacqueline and Helen Rose Ebaugh (2003), ‘Calling upon the sacred: Migrants’ use of religion in the migration process’, International Migration Review, 37 (4), 1145–62. Hirschman, Charles (2004), ‘The role of religion in the origins and adaptation of immigrant groups in the United States’, International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1206–33. Jeldtoft, Nadia (2011), ‘Lived Islam: Religious identity with “non-organized” Muslim minorities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (7), 1134–51. Jenkins, Philip (2002), The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, New York: Oxford University Press. Johnson, P.C. (2012), ‘Religion and diaspora’, Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 3 (1), 95–114. Knott, Kim (2016), ‘Living religious practices’, in Jennifer B. Saunders, Susanna Snyder and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (eds), Intersections of Religion and Migration: Issues at the Global Crossroads, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 71–90. Levitt, Peggy (2003), ‘“You know, Abraham was really the first immigrant”: Religion and transnational migration’, International Migration Review, 37 (3), 847–73. Levitt, Peggy (2007), God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape, New York: New Press. Levitt, Peggy (2013), ‘Religion on the move: Mapping global cultural production and consumption’, in Courtney Bender, Wendy Cadge, Peggy Levitt and David Smilde (eds), Religion on the Edge: De-centering and Re-centering the Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 159–76. Liberatore, Giulia and Leslie Fesenmyer (2018), ‘Diaspora and religion: Connecting and disconnecting’, in Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer (eds), Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 233–40. Mahler, Sarah J. and Katrin Hansing (2005), ‘Toward a transnationalism of the middle: How transnational religious practices help bridge the divides between Cuba and Miami’, Latin America Perspectives, 32 (1), 121–46. McGuire, Meredith B. (2008), Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orsi, Robert A. (1985), The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Orsi, Robert A. (ed.) (2012), The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pasura, Dominic (2012), ‘Religious transnationalism: The case of Zimbabwean Catholics in Britain’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 42 (1), 26–53. Pasura, Dominic (2018), ‘Multi-religious diasporas: Rethinking the relationship between religion and diaspora’, in Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer (eds), Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 113–19. Pasura, Dominic and Marta Bivand Erdal (eds) (2016), Migration, Transnationalism and Catholicism: Global Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Transnational religion  275

Portes, Alejandro (1999), ‘Conclusion – Towards a new world: The origins and effects of transnational activities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 463–77. Rudolph, Susanne H. (1997), ‘Introduction: Religion, states, and transnational civil society’, in Susanne H. Rudolph and James Piscatori (eds), Transnational Religion and Fading States, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 1–24. Ryan, Louise (2016), ‘Building bridges to parishes: The Catholic Church in England and Wales and the role of ethnic chaplains’, in Dominic Pasura and Marta Bivand Erdal (eds), Migration, Transnationalism and Catholicism: Global Perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 291–315. Saunders, Jennifer B., Susanna Snyder and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2016), ‘Introduction: Articulating intersections at the global crossroads of religion and migration’, in Jennifer B. Saunders, Susanna Snyder and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (eds), Intersections of Religion and Migration, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–46. Sheringham, Olivia (2013), Transnational Religious Spaces: Faith and the Brazilian Migration Experience, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tölöyan, Khachig (1991), ‘The nation-state and its others: In lieu of a preface’, Diaspora, 1 (1), 3–7. Turner, Bryan S. (2013), ‘Religion and contemporary sociological theories’, Sociopedia.isa, 1–12. Tweed, Thomas A. (1997), Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tweed, Thomas A. (2009), Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Van Dijk, Rijk A. (1997) ‘From camp to encompassment: Discourses of transsubjectivity in the Ghanaian Pentecostal diaspora’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 27 (2), 135–59. Vásquez, Manuel A. (2008), ‘Studying religion in motion: A networks approach’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20 (2), 151–84. Vásquez, Manuel A. (2013), ‘Grappling with the legacy of modernity: Implications for the sociology of religion’, in Courtney Bender, Wendy Cadge, Peggy Levitt and David Smilde (eds), Religion on the Edge: De-centering and Re-centering the Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 23–42. Vertovec, Steven (2007), ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6), 1024–54. Warner, R. Stephen and Judith G. Wittner (eds) (1998), Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4), 301–34. Wong, Diana and Peggy Levitt (2014), ‘Travelling faiths and migrant religions: The case of circulating models of da’wa among the Tablighi Jamaat and Foguangshan in Malaysia’, Global Networks, 14 (3), 348–62. Woodhead, Linda (2009), ‘Old, new and emerging paradigms in the sociological study of religion’, Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 22 (2), 103–21. Wuthnow, Robert and Stephen Offutt (2008), ‘Transnational religious connections’, Sociology of Religion, 69 (2), 209–32.

PART III TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONS

18. Transnationalism and temporary labour migration Matt Withers and Nicola Piper

INTRODUCTION Transnationalism has an obvious value as a conceptual framework for grounding the diverse cross-border activities associated with international migration. Originating as a critique of methodological nationalism (Basch et al. 1994) that complemented ‘retreat of the state’ arguments within the early globalisation literature (Strange 1996), transnationalism has resisted the latter’s decline into analytical obscurity as a ‘catch-all and say nothing’ concept (Pries 2008, p. 1). Much of this enduring relevance has to do with transnationalism’s tacit acknowledgement of the nation itself (Faist 2000). Whereas globalisation anticipated a steady deterritorialisation of social and economic life, transnationalism placed emphasis on phenomena occurring beyond and between nations without deprivileging the importance of political, economic, social and cultural institutions assembled within national boundaries (Willis et al. 2004). Globalisation has lost credibility amid the persistence of the nation-state – as an actor, unit of analysis and spatio-legal reality (Jessop 1999) – and resurgent economic nationalism in the long wake of the global financial crisis (Eichengreen 2018). Transnationalism, meanwhile, has retained a usefulness in analysing practices, identities and ties that transcend, but also intersect with, national institutions (Dahinden 2017). However, despite having potential for structural and institutional analysis, the transnationalism literature concerned with international labour migration has continued to emphasise migrant transnationalism – i.e. individual and diasporic agency – even while profound changes to the architecture of transnational employment constrain those activities. We argue that structural and institutional factors need to be foregrounded to account for evident and deepening limits to agentic transnationalism. In doing so, we shift our analytical focus towards a more dynamic stratum of cross-border activity populated by networked institutions that reinforce or contest the ‘managed migration’ (Menz 2011) of temporary labour migration schemes.

TRANSNATIONAL AND TRANSIENT LABOUR: AN OVERVIEW Despite tighter global economic integration over the past three decades, and unlike the exchange of goods and services, few people enjoy complete free movement 277

278  Handbook on transnationalism

between countries (Hollifield 2006; Geddes 2019). Instead, migration regimes leverage border security and citizenship policies to regulate the legality and temporality of migrant entries, while employment and welfare regimes use the same criteria to determine legal rights and access to social protection (Bauder 2014). ‘Nations’ thus remain pivotal in establishing the parameters of migration and integration that inevitably delimit, facilitate or provoke different forms of migrant transnationalism. It follows that the characteristics of migration regimes can have significant implications for the scope of transnational activities that migrants can, or might choose to, participate in. For international migrant workers, who made up an estimated 64 per cent of the world’s 258 million international migrants as of 2017 (ILO 2018), the so-called ‘temporary–permanent divide’ is the most evident axis along which rights and opportunities are differentiated (Rajkumar et al. 2012). While permanent immigration pathways involve a more or less gradual realisation of the entitlements associated with citizenship, up to and including naturalisation itself, temporary labour migration is typically based on a social contract riddled with caveats – not only limits on duration of stay, but constraints on mobility, exclusion from local labour laws, circumscribed access to welfare, and restrictions on family accompaniment (Berg 2016). Available statistics indicate that, for migrant workers, pathways to permanency are narrowing. Of labour migrants entering OECD countries in 2017, 583,000 held permanent visas while 4.9 million entered through temporary channels, with the latter group growing almost twice as fast year-on-year (OECD 2019). ‘Hidden’, or de facto, temporary labour migration also abounds, as international students and working holiday makers begin to comprise an ever-greater share of menial employment in traditional immigration countries like Australia (Reilly 2015; Li and Whitworth 2016). Another example is Japan’s ‘trainee scheme’, which allows employers in neighbouring countries to place workers with Japanese companies for a few years, though resulting in little quality ‘training’ and accusations of being a hidden form of low-wage worker supply (Fan 2012). Once a model of foreign employment confined to the failed gastarbeiter (guest worker) programs of post-war Europe and similarly rigid immigration regimes in select countries of destination across West, East and Southeast Asia (Sarkar 2017), temporary labour migration schemes have had a resurgence (Castles 2013), so much so that they are now almost omnipresent (Dauvergne and Marsden 2014). The possibility of ‘permanency’ has been significantly delimited for migrant workers – almost categorically for ‘low-skilled’ work, but increasingly for ‘highly skilled’ workers too – as countries of the North and South embrace temporary labour supply as a ‘flexible’ solution to meeting employer demand while mitigating political unease about immigration (Bryceson 2019). As labour migration regimes converge upon a governing logic of temporality, the ‘temporary–permanent divide’ has not widened so much as permanency itself has faded into the background. Whereas citizenship was once the primary drawcard for attracting human capital in the ‘global race for talent’ (Boucher 2016), the possession of desirable skills might now afford a greater suite of rights – such as family accompaniment, social protection and legal entitlements – but not necessarily a navigable route to ‘settlement’. Indeed, for those of the highly mobile

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  279

global elite who can readily cross borders for spells of foreign employment under favourable conditions, citizenship might seem a redundant offering and at odds with the itinerant nature of their employment (Dauvergne and Marsden 2014). Yet, for the majority of the world’s labour migrants who are considered ‘low-skilled’, foreign employment more frequently entails a collision of temporal restrictions and a deprivation of rights that together engender a precarity extending well beyond the world of work. Under such circumstances, some common assumptions about the characteristics of migrant transnationalism need to be reappraised (Piper and Withers 2018). The transnationalism literature has tended to emphasise forms of agency and diaspora activity that are implicitly grounded in notions of settlement discordant with the contingency of temporary labour migration (Lazăr 2011). There are multiple explanations for this agentic bent. Firstly, the tone-setting ‘first wave’ of migrant transnationalism scholarship (see Portes et al. 1999) emerged from an optimistic rejection of state power and assimilationist policies, instead imagining transnational agency – located in sustained economic, social and political ties beyond borders – as a new platform for adaptation and resistance (Dahinden 2017). While repeat migration between countries of origin and destination was anticipated, these movements were tacitly regarded as agentic: as one of several trajectories of migrant transnationalism adopted by migrant families as part of an intergenerational negotiation of assimilationist pressures (Portes et al. 1999). Secondly, the sheer diversity and complexity of contemporary international migration flows has arguably drawn attention to new and novel experiences of transnationalism at the expense of downplaying less agentic migrant experiences within long-established examples of highly rigid temporary labour migration schemes that are now becoming more prevalent (Asis et al. 2019). There is little discussion of migrant transnationalism within the corridors of short-term contract migration spanning South Asia and the Gulf, for example, despite these sub-regional migration flows being some of the largest and steadiest international population movements in recent history (Humphrey 1993). Finally, agentic transnationalism has, since the early 2000s, been steadily co-opted by proponents of ‘migration-development’. Temporary labour migrants are routinely depicted as agents of (their own) development (Marchand 2015), with remitted incomes positioned as a crucial lever for growth-catalysing investment and entrepreneurship in home communities (Vershinina et al. 2019). The mainstreaming of the migration-development agenda by global policymaking institutions has thus helped cement narratives of migrant agency as integral to transnationalism, including under conditions of regimented temporality. The optimism frequently associated with migrant transnationalism, and emphasis on agentic diaspora activities in particular, needs to be rethought with relation to the paradigm of managed migration and the reorientation of state institutions towards the enforcement of restrictive temporary labour supply arrangements. The systematic denial of the same rights afforded to permanent migrants and citizens alongside specific hiring practices ingrain structural vulnerabilities for temporary migrant workers, whose visa status likely already reflects relatively disadvantaged backgrounds, and can frustrate ‘transnationalism from below’ (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). Temporality

280  Handbook on transnationalism

is foremost among these vulnerabilities, as restrictions on length of stay and an inability to apply for residency limits the formation of stable communities that can meaningfully engage in sustained cross-border practices (Shubin, Chapter 4 in this volume). Here migrant transnationalism is not an alternative strategy to assimilation (Portes et al. 1999), but linked to the absence of choice with regards to settlement. Beyond temporality itself, though, the designation of temporary status is frequently accompanied by overlapping forms of discrimination that further disempower temporary migrant workers. The coordinated contraction of migration, employment and welfare regimes to demarcate situations of exception for specific categories of temporary migrant workers reflects the commodification of migrant labour as a disposable low-cost input for capital accumulation and social reproduction. We argue that these structural and institutional factors have induced a ‘temporality–precarity nexus’ that confines temporary migrant workers to risk-laden and vulnerable livelihoods, often in isolation from families and communities, that fundamentally constrain agentic transnationalism. This is not to say that transnationalism, as a broad framework, is unhelpful in analysing the various ties temporary labour migrants sustain across borders. Rather, we suggest that underlying assumptions of agency need to be tempered in order to account for precarity in major temporary labour migration corridors; that the frustration of migrant aspirations is deserving of greater academic attention; and that ‘transnationalism from below’ is better evidenced by dynamic institutional networks of recruitment and labour activism than by instances of individual empowerment (Ford, Chapter 11 in this volume). In the rest of this chapter, we discuss these themes – precarity, migrant aspirations and institutional networks – with relation to prominent guest worker regimes in Asia. We choose these countries both because they are relatively overlooked in the transnationalism literature and because they serve as archetypal representations of temporary labour migration regimes that are becoming more prevalent the world over. By locating migrant transnationalism in these restrictive settings, we hope to suggest how transnationalism might be meaningfully reconciled with international labour migration that is becoming more frequent but less free.

THE TEMPORALITY–PRECARITY NEXUS More international migration occurs within Asia than anywhere else (UNDESA 2017). Mapping these flows across the continent reveals a series of major ‘migration corridors’ between particular countries and sub-regions (Abel and Sander 2014), each bounded by restrictive migration governance frameworks and sustained by an array of institutions that facilitate the labour supply process (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sorensen 2013). The most prominent corridor exists between South Asia and West Asia, where demand for cheap domestic, construction and service workers in the oil economies of the Persian Gulf has undergirded the largest international movement of labour in history (Jureidini 2010). Elsewhere, smaller corridors occur within and between East and Southeast Asia, mainly taking shape around demand

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  281

for foreign domestic and manufacturing workers in Singapore and Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent Taiwan and Malaysia. In both sub-regional settings, international labour migration is overwhelmingly low-wage and temporary, typically involving workers originating from poorer regions of South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa (ILO 2018). Here, migration governance is largely inseparable from economic governance: admission policies are employer or industry driven, working rights and social protection are curtailed according to citizenship status, and employment is categorically temporary for all but the most favoured of the ‘highly skilled’ (Ahsan 2014). Countries of destination in both sub-regions leverage migration, employment and welfare regimes to stage-manage a ‘temporality–precarity nexus’, in which labour migration is regimented via strict temporal parameters that, in turn, interface with a web of restrictions to the rights and conditions of foreign workers. Strict limits on duration of stay allow situations of exception to be framed as provisional aberrations to the standard employment relationship: permissible only because temporary entrants are non-citizens, and because non-citizens are by definition temporary (Ong 2006). That the resulting working and living arrangements can border upon modern day slavery (Briones 2009), and be endured across iterative visas that may span decades of a worker’s life, is obfuscated by the presumption of agency in migrant workers’ decision to opt-in to each contract (along with more perverse sentiments of charity attached to the employment of foreign workers from poorer countries) (Jureidini 2005). The disingenuity of these justifications is exposed when regional uneven development is considered as a structural backdrop to such immigration regimes. Long histories of colonial occupation, indentured production and imbalanced trade – all compounded by a lopsided distribution of natural resources – have entrenched huge variations in the concentration of wealth within and between the economies of Asia, with exclusion from substantive development becoming a primary driver for temporary labour migration into pockets of capital accumulation (Kaur 2004). Countries of destination can thus orchestrate the rotation of temporary workers into and out of the world’s largest reserve army of labour as a mechanism of wage suppression (Cohen 1987). However, this is also a means of stifling the collective organisation of labour through transience and the threat of deportation (Ngai and Chan 2013) while inculcating a pretence of legitimacy through the repeat migration of those for whom transnational labouring is a survival strategy pursued in the absence of meaningful alternatives (Withers 2019). The kafala system of foreign employment used throughout the Gulf is the most obvious example of this temporality–precarity nexus. By tying the visa status of temporary migrant workers to a single sponsor-employer whose approval is required for workers to terminate or transfer their employment contract, or even exit the country, the kafala system represents a modern form of indentured labour (Khan and Harroff-Tavel 2011; Khalaf et al. 2015). On the one hand, this contingent visa status permits exploitation: employers routinely withhold workers’ passports and can impose conditions of employment that break with contractual obligations. The non-payment, underpayment and delayed payment of wages – including mandatory

282  Handbook on transnationalism

deductions for food, accommodation or other costs to be borne by the employer – are rife and legally permitted (Khan and Harroff-Tavel 2011). On the other hand, migrant workers who do leave abusive employers automatically lose their rights to work and stay in the country of destination and often enter into irregular ‘outwork’ employment that can entail still lower wages and greater risk (Pande 2013; Damir-Geilsdorf and Pelican 2019). That migrant workers have limited access to healthcare and basic social protection, despite being concentrated in physically and mentally hazardous occupations, further conveys the intended ‘disposability’ of this migrant workforce (Kristiansen and Sheikh 2014). Yet, while the kafala system represents the most systematic realisation of a temporality–precarity nexus designed to discipline low-wage migrant workers, it is not without close equivalents in East and Southeast Asia (Sarkar 2017). Migration regimes in prominent countries of destination like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia may present as a patchwork of differing employment standards, which stand in contrast to the regional uniformity of kafala, but they too leverage citizenship status and duration of stay to categorically exclude low-wage foreign workers from basic rights and protections afforded to local workers (Wang et al. 2018). In both sub-regional contexts, the structural pressures driving temporary labour migration (i.e. uneven and exclusionary development across Asia) and institutional constraints on those same migrant workers (i.e. the temporality–precarity nexus described above) combine to permit a distinctively exploitative capital–labour relationship. Here, temporary labour migration functions as an extreme form of labour market segmentation that establishes a subordinate wage floor to achieve an in situ fix for capital accumulation and social reproduction. At the same time, migrants labouring within these situations of exception encounter hard limits to their individual agency, as attempts to manoeuvre beyond the tight confines of overlapping migration, employment and welfare regimes are invariably met with loss of employment and deportation (i.e. rotation back into regional reserve armies of labour). Temporary labour migration is, in general, a response to a lack of local economic opportunities – alongside insufficient or non-existing social protection and the increasing or continuing privatisation of essential public goods, such as health and education (Hujo and Piper 2010). Earning a wage is key for most migrants; for temporary migrant workers, however, this often necessitates a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ in which short-term contracts are renewed over multiple stints abroad. Under such conditions, the scope of migrant aspirations is inevitably reduced: settlement is unattainable, family accompaniment impossible, return visits financially impractical, and so cross-border activities collapse into a ‘thin’ transnationalism chiefly constituted by distance communication and remittances. Indeed, the challenges that international separation poses to personal relationships and care practices are significant enough to have informed the emergence of a dedicated literature addressing transnational family life within the limitations of temporary labour migration regimes (Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). Prolonged transnational separation and repeat migration have been shown to come at great financial and personal cost. Migrants and their families must shoulder a range of mobility costs

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  283

associated with obtaining an international job placement, frequently involving loans and debt repayments that create pressure to retain foreign employment regardless of working conditions. Personal costs are harder to capture and measure, but existing studies demonstrate generally detrimental effects on ‘left-behind’ children (Asis et al. 2019) and emotional distress among women domestic workers who become estranged from their young children (Wong 2010). Analyses at the intersection of migration and masculinity studies have yielded similar findings in male migrants’ emotional suffering when leaving spouses and children behind (Choi and Peng 2016). This is not to discount the ties migrant workers may develop in countries of destination, whether with locals or fellow migrant workers, and indeed much has been written on the long-term implications of these connections (Piper and Roces 2003; Paul, Chapter 22 in this volume). Rather, it is simply a recognition that transnational life – insofar as it is understood as connections maintained across borders and over time – can be extremely limited in these contexts. These corridors of low-wage temporary labour migration between poorer and richer sub-regions of Asia thus present the starkest counterexample to assumptions of agentic transnationalism at the level of the individual worker. Instead, we locate a much ‘thicker’ stratum of transnational activity among the institutional actors vying to reinforce or contest the way these corridors of temporary labour migration are ‘managed’ and regulated. In the following section we explore these networked forms of agency through the activities of two diverse sets of institutional actors: the ‘merchants of labour’ that facilitate the recruitment of temporary migrant workers and international networks of labour activism that have formed in parallel to advocate for migrant rights.

INSTITUTIONAL ACTORS REINFORCING/CONTESTING TEMPORARY LABOUR MIGRATION Older analyses of ‘migration systems’ and more recent discussions of ‘migration intermediaries’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014) both emphasise the importance of institutional actors in shaping migration pathways and influencing the outcomes of those moving within them. Whereas individual migrants are often constrained by limits to their agency, here – at the meso level – there is capacity and dynamism that better typifies the cross-border activities that transnationalism evokes (Xiang, Chapter 3 in this volume). In the context of temporary labour migration, considerable academic and policymaking attention has been given to internationally networked recruitment agents that coordinate labour supply between countries of origin and destination (Jones 2015). In this section, however, we offer a more expansive interpretation of this stratum of transnational activity. We firstly discuss the ‘merchants of labour’ – broadly envisioned to include elements of governance – as an assortment of institutional actors with a common interest in preserving the ‘temporality–precarity nexus’ described in the previous section. We then draw attention to a diversity of social and political networks that have taken shape around exploitative migration corridors, some of which have been mobilised as a point of collective rights struggle for and

284  Handbook on transnationalism

by temporary migrant workers. We conclude with some reflections on ‘transnational labour citizenship’ as a possible framework within which to consolidate existing networks of labour and better redress the precarity of temporary labour migration. The Merchants of Labour – Reinforcing Institutions Bilateral intergovernmental mechanisms between countries of origin and destination typically provide the formal framework that institutional actors operate within (Go 2007). Such mechanisms have become states’ preferred options to maintain ‘orderly and regular’ flows of migrant workers (Kunz et al. 2011) and are a key aspect of ‘managed migration’ policies that seek to promote temporary labour migration. They commonly take one of two forms. A bilateral agreement (BA) is a treaty under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) that articulates obligations and actions to be taken by its parties and creates legally binding rights and obligations between states. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) is a less formal international instrument that sets out procedures for cooperation regarding a specific subject or technical matter (Wickramasekara 2015). In theory, both mechanisms represent an opportunity for states to make practical commitments related to the protection of the rights of migrants and could be seen as a space in which to contest prevailing temporary labour migration practices. However, research into existing bilateral agreements and MoUs concerning temporary labour migration suggests that these instruments suffer from implementation failures and are, in their current form and practice, a weak form of migration governance (Testaverde et al. 2017). With respect to the use of these instruments to protect the rights of migrant workers, especially migrant domestic workers, these problems are exacerbated because, in general, the agreed conditions do not accord with a rights-based approach to migration governance, are neither gender-sensitive nor gender-responsive, and otherwise reflect a lack of respect for migrant workers who come from low-income or minority backgrounds (Shamim and Holliday 2018). In practice, these bilateral agreements and MoUs tend to formalise and extend existing temporary labour migration arrangements. This is partly explained by temporary labour migration being a ‘buyer’s market’ characterised by lopsided bargaining power between numerous countries of origin and relatively few countries of destination. More fundamentally though, it reflects the fact that temporary labour migration – and the accompanying inflow of remittance receipts most importantly – has become integral to political and economic balancing acts in countries of origin (Withers 2019). Economic crises and waves of recession have increased the need to deploy workers overseas, both for remittances and also to act as a safety-valve for latent political discontent, so much so that migration has become an explicit national development policy (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). Governments at both ends of major migration corridors are therefore invested in the expansion of temporary labour migration and, between these coalescing economic interests, there is significant institutional momentum within countries of origin towards policies that promote foreign employment despite known risks to workers (Henderson 2020). In such

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  285

circumstances, government policymakers plausibly count among the ‘merchants of labour’ coordinating the supply of temporary migrant workers (Kuptsch 2006). This can take the shape of government institutions encouraging migration through state-supported job placements, certification programmes tailored to foreign employment opportunities, or pre-departure training requirements that downplay welfare issues by encouraging docility and compliance (Shamim and Holliday 2018). Most notably, though, these institutional pressures have resolved by allowing private recruitment agencies and individual middlemen to assume a pivotal role in facilitating temporary labour migration (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). With migration becoming a central element of employment and development policies in an increasing number of countries across South and Southeast Asia, competition for jobs has risen with the effect of lowering wages and the costs for recruitment being shifted from employers to workers (Palmer 2016). Recruitment agencies have proliferated under these circumstances, developing vast transnational brokerage networks. These networks include employers and recruitment agencies in countries of destination, through to licensed recruitment agents in countries of origin, and extend to unregulated sub-agents and labour brokers that systematically exploit potential migrant workers by providing misleading information about the conditions of employment and inflating recruitment fees (ILO 2013). Transnational networks of finance operate in tandem – spanning state-supported remittance channels, private money transfer businesses, the unregulated hundi or hawala remittance system, all the way to the local moneylenders that often provide loans for recruitment fees (Rahman and Yeoh 2008). The dramatic growth of migration brokerage and financing, together with the widening of social networks of returned migrants who often act as intermediaries, has meant that government efforts to license and monitor private agencies have largely failed (ILO 2013). Despite increasingly sophisticated regulatory frameworks and institutional arrangements across Asia, overlapping vested interests from transnational institutional actors have reinforced a migration system that allows profiteering from the deployment of migrant labour. Social and Political Networks – Contesting The lower rungs of international supply, labour and care chains are often located in developing countries with weak institutions and a large, unprotected workforce (Piper et al. 2017). This particular situation has led workers and human rights advocates to look increasingly to the market to improve conditions on the factory floor, evident in the rise of ‘market-based advocacy strategies’, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (Mullen et al. 2017). Abusive and exploitative labour conditions along global labour supply and care chains have led to concerted efforts to organise the many marginal and excluded workers from the ‘bottom up’ in the form of new methods of labour activism which match globally and regionally networked economies and (re)production systems (Piper et al. 2017). Those methods include features more closely associated with the human rights movement, such as the dissemination of information through transnational networking to galvanise action by various stake-

286  Handbook on transnationalism

holders across space and place (Keck and Sikkink 1998) and the framing of workers’ labour rights as human rights (Kolben 2010). Increasingly such networks include, or are instigated by, migrant rights organisations, with significant leadership emanating from Asia (Ford 2019; Ford, Chapter 11 in this volume). The experiences of low-wage migrant workers in temporary labour schemes are increasingly the source of such expressions of political agency. Being deprived of their political rights due to having precarious status, their political disenfranchisement is further compounded by social and geographic marginalisation that comes with the filling of jobs in certain sectors and places shunned by local workers due to their ‘3D’ (dirty, dangerous and demeaning) nature. Transnational rights advocacy here becomes the crucial political tool available to address structural constraints, the lack of individual capacity and the pervasiveness of institutional failure that temporary low-wage migrants face. This, we argue, is beginning to happen through complex ‘networks of labour activism’. Such networks result from the increasing collaboration between the two key protagonists: labour unions and migrant rights organisations (Ford 2019). The protection of migrant workers’ employment alongside broader rights advocacy has been a longstanding concern for migrant rights activists at the regional and global levels. In the case of migrant domestic worker politics in Hong Kong, for instance, Briones (2009) has demonstrated how CSOs’ militancy has, however, been complemented with strategic silence on more radical demands pertaining to the global economic system and freedom of movement, which has to be understood in light of prevailing political realities and pragmatism. Law (2002) has argued in a similar vein that the strategies of these CSOs have been met with a degree of weariness by some migrant domestic workers; their loud and visible activities being perceived as jeopardising future employment prospects. This is why some CSOs have been reticent in politicising deeper, broader issues, including citizenship and gross structural inequalities in employment, as doing so could threaten employment opportunities for migrant workers. Instead they focus their campaigns on immediate, urgent issues such as wage cuts. Hong Kong has in this respect been an exemplary case for networks of labour activism, since domestic workers have set up their own unions and collaborate with the national trade union body, the Hong Kong Confederation of Free Trade Unions (HKCFTU). In this way, they have tied their political struggle to the most urgent issues their ‘constituents’ are facing, whilst also managing to achieve a degree of political empowerment through self-organising. In addition, by deepening ties with organisations in countries of origin, they produced an institutional transnationalism that stands apart from other corridors of temporary labour migration. By gaining greater strength in numbers and forming alliances across the various nationality groups and with other sectoral unions, they have been able to become more vocal and assert more pressure on the government in Hong Kong, as well as governments of origin countries.

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  287

Towards Transnational Labour Citizenship? The idea of ‘transnational labour citizenship’ offers a potential way of strengthening existing social and political networks to redress temporary migrant workers’ rights and working conditions. The concept links permission to enter a country in search of work to membership with cross-border worker organisations, rather than to the current (often sole) requirement of a job offer from an employer. It would require the enforcement of baseline labour rights and allow migrants to carry benefits and services with them as they move between countries and employers. In addition, it provides channels for recourse. Its goal would be to facilitate the free movement of people while preventing the erosion of working conditions in the countries that receive them (Gordon 2007). Labour organisations that cooperate across borders are, therefore, central to this particular form of citizenship and its translation into practice. According to Gordon, global labour mobility that ensures justice at work for migrants would be achieved through the implementation of cooperative policies between countries of origin and destination on the basis of transnational membership in trade unions. The concept of ‘transnational labour citizenship’ is the product of worker agency and allows us to draw out the complexities involved in types and methods of collective migrant worker organising in settings where unions are weak, political space narrow and resources limited. Gordon’s concept is novel in pushing the boundaries of our thinking around organisational membership. But it leaves somewhat unaddressed the issue of how such de-nationalised forms of citizenship could be achieved in concrete terms; specifically, in relation to the dynamics of temporary labour migration and the resulting temporality–precarity bind that migrant workers confront. In addition, important alliances forged with non-labour organisations are left unattended. However, so far, it has been political organising through (at times flexible) networks of labour and cross-institutional alliances between migrant organisations and labour unions that have led to the advancement of a rights-based perspective to migration governance. This is where the idea of networks of labour activism re-enter the discussion, as there are increasing examples of cross-fertilisation between migrant rights and labour rights activists and their organisations (Piper et al. 2017). One such example would be the membership of the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), a regional network of migrant and labour rights organisations, which in turn is a member of the Global Coalition on Migration whose members include trade unions and migrant rights organisations (Piper and Rother 2020; Piper 2015). The involvement in global migrant rights as well as broader labour rights activism by grassroots and migrant organisations demonstrates the emergence of networks of labour activism and the diversification of targets for reform: advocacy is not only directed at governments but also at supra-national entities or transnational actors. The fledgling global migrant rights movement, emanating from advocacy organisations based in countries of origin and countries of destination, is targeting various policy levels and actors, typically in the form of transnational coalitions and networks. Concentrated, localised pockets of activism are interlinked with global

288  Handbook on transnationalism

and regional advocacy efforts via regional networks. The above mentioned Global Coalition on Migration is one such example, with membership by regional networks such as the MFA, the largest among them spanning the entire Asian region. The MFA has not only been active in lobbying countries of origin and destination along the major migration corridors in and across Asia, but has also been instrumental in shaping the global migrant rights movement and lobbying regional governing entities like ASEAN. In particular, regional networks have been influential in conveying contextual specificities of migration within Asia to multilateral fora, joining global migrant rights advocates in voicing concerns over the fact that ‘migration’ governance (policies that regulate the flow of people) is not matched with ‘labour’ governance (that is, labour rights embedded in functioning labour relations). Here the MFA has taken the lead in developing a holistic rights-based approach to migration involving three main stages: pre-migration, foreign employment and return migration. The rights-based approach thus relates to the obligations and responsibilities not only of countries of destination, but also countries of origin, thus addressing the driving factors of migration and the vicious cycle of repeat migration from a rights perspective. Ultimately, the Global Coalition on Migration is concerned with bringing an end to what it sees as forced economic migration. This is to be done by addressing decent work deficits ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’, to render migration less coercive and more of a choice. By evoking the right to development as per the 1986 United Nations (UN) Declaration as well as the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) notion of Decent Work, the MFA demands the right not to have to migrate in the first place, alongside effective regulation of hiring and employment practices during foreign employment. The key challenge for the MFA to address is the lack of attention paid to ‘labour’ governance including decent work at home as an alternative to the need to migrate (i.e. what we have elsewhere termed ‘protracted precarity’), in addition to, or instead of, an almost exclusive focus on migration governance (i.e. the control of population movements). The strategy of forging complex ‘networks of labour’ facilitates the navigation of the fragmented architecture of migration governance at the global and regional levels. The gradual consolidation of cooperation between unions and migrant rights organisations thereby underpins the argument for the increasingly blurred line between human rights and labour rights frameworks (Piper et al. 2017).

CONCLUSION This chapter has not sought to provide an exhaustive summary of the manifold links between temporary labour migration and transnationalism. Given the huge diversity of managed, de facto and irregular temporary migration flows expanding across the Global North and South, such a task would warrant a handbook in its own right. Rather, we have drawn attention to what we see as a key disjuncture: where agentic theories of migrant transnationalism that emerged during a zeitgeist of optimistic globalism clash with the persistence (and reanimation) of state power expressed through

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  289

the ‘management’ of migration, employment and welfare regimes. That is to say, ‘whoever claimed that the state is “retreating” has obviously never studied migration policy’ (Menz 2011, p. 257). We have purposively situated this discussion in relation to contemporary guest worker migration within Asia’s major sub-regional migration corridors, both as a conspicuous example of an empirical context in which the virtues of migrant agency are less readily extolled and because we see these schemes as archetypal of the direction in which temporary labour migration policies are moving more generally. Here, at the most restrictive end of the temporality–precarity nexus, migrant workers’ aspirations are curtailed by structural limitations to individual capacity to dispute the conditions of their employment or engage in a ‘thick’ transnationalism involving a broad range of cross-border activities. This does not detract from the usefulness of transnational analysis within these temporary labour migration corridors. Instead, we return to Faist’s earlier (2000) observations about the need for a ‘meso link’ in understanding migrant transnationalism and shift our attention towards networked institutional actors whose transnational activities either buttress or contest the structure of the temporary labour migration schemes in question. While the merchants of labour that collectively coordinate international supply of workers are perhaps the most readily identifiable and policy-relevant of these actors, we also discuss the influence of social and political networks that have taken shape around major migration corridors in the collective struggle for migrant workers’ rights. Guilty of no small degree of optimism of our own, we locate Gordon’s (2007) notion of ‘transnational labour citizenship’ as a radical alternative to the paradigm of ‘managed migration’ and demonstrate how diverse networks of labour activism are taking nascent steps towards realising a rights-based approach to migration governance. The message from these networks is clear: temporary labour migration is a livelihood in which choice and agency are often absent from pre-departure, through foreign employment and upon return. A future direction for transnationalism research, then, will be to continue shifting the analytical focus towards this dynamic stratum of institutional actors to capture the challenges networks of labour activism face in collectively espousing a competing vision of temporary labour migration.

REFERENCES Abel, Guy J. and Nikola Sander (2014), ‘Quantifying global international migration flows’, Science, 343 (6178), 1520–1522. Ahsan, Ahmad (2014), International Migration and Development in East Asia and the Pacific, Washington, DC: World Bank. Asis, Maruja M.B., Nicola Piper and Parvati Raghuram (2019), ‘From Asia to the world: “Regional” contributions to global migration research’, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 35 (1–2), 13–37. Basch, Linda G., Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, New York: Gordon & Breach.

290  Handbook on transnationalism

Bauder, Harald (2014), ‘Domicile citizenship, human mobility and territoriality’, Progress in Human Geography, 38 (1), 91–106. Berg, Laurie (2016), Migrant Rights at Work: Law’s Precariousness at the Intersection of Migration and Labour, London and New York: Routledge. Boucher, Anna (2016), Gender, Migration and the Global Race for Talent, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Briones, Leah (2009), Empowering Migrant Women: Why Agency and Rights Are Not Enough, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Bryceson, Deborah F. (2019), ‘Transnational families negotiating migration and care life cycles across nation-state borders’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (16), 3042–64. Castles, Stephen (2013), ‘The forces driving global migration’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34 (2), 122–40. Choi, Susanne Y.P. and Yinni Peng (2016), Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family, and Gender in China, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Cohen, Robin (1987), The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour, Aldershot: Gower. Dahinden, Janine (2017), ‘Transnationalism reloaded: The historical trajectory of a concept’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (9), 1474–85. Damir-Geilsdorf, Sabine and Michaela Pelican (2019), ‘Between regular and irregular employment: Subverting the kafala system in the GCC countries’, Migration and Development, 8 (2), 155–75. Dauvergne, Catherine and Sarah Marsden (2014), ‘The ideology of temporary labour migration in the post-global era’, Citizenship Studies, 18 (2), 224–42. Eichengreen, Barry J. (2018), The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era, New York: Oxford University Press. Faist, Thomas (2000), The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fan, Jiaoyan (2012), ‘On Chinese trainees and interns in Japan’, Beijing Law Review, 3 (2), 56–63. Ford, Michele (2019), From Migrant to Worker: Global Unions and Temporary Labor Migration in Asia, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Gammeltoft-Hansen, Thomas and Ninna Nyberg Sorensen (eds) (2013), The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Geddes, Andrew (ed.) (2019), The Dynamics of Regional Migration Governance, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Go, Stella (2007), ‘Asian labor migration: The role of bilateral labor and similar agreements’, paper presented at the Regional Informal Workshop on Labour Migration in Southeast Asia: What Role for Parliaments, Manila, 21–23 September. Gordon, Jennifer (2007), ‘Transnational labour citizenship’, Southern California Law Review, 80, 503–87. Henderson, Sophie (2020), ‘State-sanctioned structural violence: Women migrant domestic workers in the Philippines and Sri Lanka’, Violence Against Women, 26, 1598–615. Hollifield, James F. (2006), ‘The emerging migration state’, International Migration Review, 38 (3), 885–912. Hujo, Katja and Nicola Piper (eds) (2010), South-South Migration: Implications for Social Policy and Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Humphrey, Michael (1993), ‘Migrants, workers and refugees: The political economy of population movements in the Middle East’, Middle East Report, no. 181 (March), 2–7.

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  291

International Labour Organization (ILO) (2013), Recruitment Practices of Employment Agencies Recruiting Migrant Workers: A Review Aimed at Improving Recruitment Regulations and Drafting Recruitment Guidelines, Colombo: ILO. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2018), ILO Global Estimates on International Migrant Workers: Results and Methodology, 2nd edition, Geneva: International Labour Office. Jessop, Bob (1999), ‘Reflections on globalisation and its (il)logic(s)’, in Peter Dicken, Philip Kelly, Lily Kong, Kris Olds and Henry W.C. Yeung (eds), Globalisation and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories, London: Routledge, pp. 21–40. Jones, Katherine (2015), Recruitment Monitoring and Migrant Welfare Assistance: What Works? Dhaka: International Organization for Migration (IOM). Jureidini, Ray (2005), ‘Migrant workers and xenophobia in the Middle East’, in Yusuf Bangura and Rodolfo Stavenhagen (eds), Racism and Public Policy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 48–71. Jureidini, Ray (2010), ‘Trafficking and contract migrant workers in the Middle East: Trafficking contract migrants’, International Migration, 48 (4), 142–63. Kaur, Amarjit (2004), Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalization, the International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink (1998), Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Khalaf, Abdulhadi, Omar Al Shehabi and Adam Hanieh (eds) (2015), Transit States: Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf, London: Pluto Press. Khan, Azfar and Hélène Harroff-Tavel (2011), ‘Reforming the kafala: Challenges and opportunities in moving forward’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 20 (3–4), 293–313. Kolben, Kevin (2010), ‘Labor rights as human rights?’, Virginia Journal of International Law, 50, 449–84. Kristiansen, Maria and Aziz Sheikh (2014), ‘The health of low-income migrant workers in Gulf Cooperation Council countries’, unpublished manuscript. Kunz, Rahel, Sandra Lavenex and Marion Panizzon (eds) (2011), Multilayered Migration Governance: The Promise of Partnership, London: Routledge. Kuptsch, Christiane (ed.) (2006), Merchants of Labour, Geneva: International Labour Organization. Law, Lisa (2002), ‘Sites of transnational activism: Filipino non-government organisations in Hong Kong’, in Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Peggy Teo and Shirlena Huang (eds), Gender Politics in the Asia Pacific Region, London: Routledge, pp. 205–22. Lazăr, Andreea (2011), ‘Transnational migration studies: Reframing sociological imagination and research’, Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 2 (2), 69–83. Li, Yao-Tai and Katherine Whitworth (2016), ‘When the state becomes part of the exploitation: Migrants’ agency within the institutional constraints in Australia’, International Migration, 54 (6), 138–50. Marchand, Marianne (2015), ‘Migrants as “experts” or “agents” of development? A postcolonial feminist critique’, in A.L. van Naerssen (ed.), Women, Gender, Remittances and Development in the Global South, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 189–203. Menz, Georg (2011), The Political Economy of Managed Migration: Nonstate Actors, Europeanization, and the Politics of Designing Migration Policies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mullen, Matthew, Purwo Santoso, Joash Tapiheru and Elisabeth Valiente-Riedl (2017), ‘Market might in factory Asia: The struggle to protect labour’, Global Campus Human Rights Journal, 1 (1–2), 47–70.

292  Handbook on transnationalism

Ngai Pun and Jenny Chan (2013), ‘The spatial politics of labor in China: Life, labor, and a new generation of migrant workers’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 112 (1), 179–90. OECD (2019), International Migration Outlook 2019, Paris: OECD Publishing. Ong, Aihwa (2006), Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Palmer, Wayne (2016), Indonesia’s Overseas Labour Migration Programme, 1969–2010, Leiden: Brill. Pande, Amrita (2013), ‘“The paper that you have in your hand is my freedom”: Migrant domestic work and the sponsorship (kafala) system in Lebanon’, International Migration Review, 47 (2), 414–41. Piper, Nicola (2015) ‘Democratising migration from the bottom up: The rise of the global migrant rights movement’, Globalizations, 12 (5), 788–802. Piper, Nicola and Mina Roces (eds) (2003), Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Piper, Nicola, Stuart Rosewarne and Matt Withers (2017), ‘Migrant precarity in Asia: “Networks of labour activism” for a rights-based governance of migration. Debate: Addressing migrant precarity in Asia’, Development and Change, 48 (5), 1089–110. Piper, Nicola and Stefan Rother (2020) ‘Political remittances and the diffusion of a migrant rights agenda in transnational activist networks: The case of the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA)’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46 (6), 1057–71. Piper, Nicola and Matt Withers (2018), ‘Forced transnationalism and temporary labour migration: Implications for understanding migrant rights’, Identities, 25 (5), 558–75. Portes, Alejandro, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt (1999), ‘The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 217–37. Pries, Ludger (ed.) (2008), Rethinking Transnationalism, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Rahman, Md Mizanur and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2008), ‘The social organisation of Hundi: Channelling migrant remittances from East and South-East Asia to Bangladesh’, Asian Population Studies, 4 (1), 5–29. Rajkumar, Deepa, Laurel Berkowitz, Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston and Robert Latham (2012), ‘At the temporary–permanent divide: How Canada produces temporariness and makes citizens through its security, work, and settlement policies’, Citizenship Studies, 16 (3–4), 483–510. Reilly, Alexander (2015), ‘Low-cost labour or cultural exchange? Reforming the working holiday visa programme’, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 26 (3), 474–89. Sarkar, Mahua (2017), ‘Constrained labour as instituted process: Transnational contract work and circular migration in late capitalism’, European Journal of Sociology, 58 (1), 171–204. Shamim, Ishrat and Jenna Holliday (2018), Women and Migration in Bangladesh, New York: UN Women. Smith, Michael P. and Luis Guarnizo (eds) (1998), Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Strange, Susan (1996), The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, New York: Cambridge University Press. Testaverde, Mauro, Harry Moroz, Claire H. Hollweg and Achim Schmillen (2017), Migrating to Opportunity: Overcoming Barriers to Labor Mobility in Southeast Asia, Washington, DC: World Bank. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UNDESA) (2017), International Migration Report 2017, New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Vershinina, Natalia, Peter Rodgers, Maura McAdam and Eric Clinton (2019), ‘Transnational migrant entrepreneurship, gender and family business’, Global Networks, 19 (2), 238–60.

Transnationalism and temporary labour migration  293

Wang, Chieh-Hsuan, Chien-Ping Chung, Jen-Te Hwang and Chia-yang Ning (2018), ‘The foreign domestic workers in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan: Should minimum wage apply to foreign domestic workers?’, The Chinese Economy, 51 (2), 154–74. Wickramasekara, Piyasiri (2015), Bilateral Agreements and Memoranda of Understanding on Migration of Low Skilled Workers: A Review, Geneva: International Labour Office. Willis, Katie, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and S.M. Abdul Khader Fakhri (2004), ‘Introduction: Transnationalism as a challenge to the nation’, in Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Katie Willis (eds), State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Withers, Matt (2019), Sri Lanka’s Remittance Economy: A Multiscalar Analysis of Migration-Underdevelopment, London and New York: Routledge. Wong, Angela (2010), Identifying Work-Related Stressors and Abuses and Understanding Their Impact on the Health and Well-Being of Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore, Singapore: HOME. Xiang, Biao and Johan Lindquist (2014), ‘Migration infrastructure’, International Migration Review, 48 (1), 122–48.

19. International students as transnational migrants Gracia Liu-Farrer

The international student population has been growing rapidly. In 2017, 5.3 million students were studying in a country different from their countries of origin, more than doubling the number of 2 million in 1998.1 Meanwhile, international students’ mobility patterns and trajectories have also been changing. International education is no longer confined to destinations in North America and Europe, accessible by only the brightest and the wealthiest, but has become a more widely available opportunity in different world regions, producing more expansive and multi-directional student mobilities (Kell and Vogl 2012; Collins 2013; Ge and Ho 2014). International education has also been adopted by a diverse array of stakeholders – national, regional and local governments, educational institutions, employers, families and individual students – to fulfil different objectives: from cultivating regional identity (Mitchell 2012), importing labour (Hawthorne 2005; Liu-Farrer 2009), internationalising education systems (Altbach 2004; Mok 2007; Yonezawa 2007; Ishikawa 2009; Knight and Morshidi 2011), and producing revenues and financing schools (Collins 2006; Findlay et al. 2011), to accumulating cultural capital and looking for adventure, freedom and personal growth (Waters 2008; Waters et al. 2011; Xiang and Shen 2009; Sancho 2017). Because of the complex agendas incorporated into international education, the demographic profiles of international students and their transnational mobilities also appear diverse. This chapter introduces various types of international students that have been the focus of academic discussion, and describes the different patterns of mobilities that have emerged in their transnational migration (see also Waters and Leung, Chapter 15 in this volume). Through presenting students’ varied mobilities, the chapter also aims to emphasise that transnational migration in the contemporary world denotes more than a bi-focal perspective (Vertovec 2009) that involves back and forth movements between source and destination countries as presented in early transnationalism literature. Instead, transnationalism underscores the continued cross-border ties that individuals, organisations and institutions are able to maintain through different movements across frontiers.

MULTIPLE FACES OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS As a result of the complex motives and modes of international education, internationally mobile students take on diverse identities, from the participants in and 294

International students as transnational migrants  295

beneficiaries of the education internationalisation programmes and regional integration initiatives, to fee paying consumers for educational commodities, to workers for different segments of the labour market in the host economy. This section is organised around several types of international students that have featured in the literature since the late 1980s. Although not necessarily discrete, these categories are characterised by different demographic profiles and linked to varying objectives for studying abroad. Globe-Trotting University Students An unprecedented number of tertiary level students are studying abroad (OECD 2019). Several simultaneous developments are driving the continuous expansion of this movement. First, the rising emphasis on academic credentials in the post-war years has made higher education a necessity for white collar jobs. With recent credential inflation, even an undergraduate degree has become insufficient in some contexts: one needs a postgraduate education credential to be distinguished from others on the job market (Waters 2009). Second, the expansion of higher education enrolment in many Asian countries has devalued local university degrees, except for the top national institutions, in many countries (Xiang and Shen 2009). Meanwhile, the growing emphasis placed on world university rankings has intensified the hierarchies of global higher education (Marginson 2008). Consequently, internationally recognised credentials have gained additional market value (Moskal 2017). Third, with economic globalisation, employers have placed a greater value on foreign language skills, especially English language competency in countries outside of the Anglophone West, which can be attained through international education for students who are not in or from English speaking countries (Gerhards and Hans 2013). Fourth, international education at the tertiary level has been increasingly organised transnationally (Phan 2017). The numerous bilateral exchange programmes between institutions, flourishing transnational higher education programmes,2 educational aid programmes, and the integrated regional education schemes such as Erasmus in Europe have expanded the opportunities for study abroad. Finally, education has become increasingly commercialised. Educational institutions hope to supplement their financial resources through international students’ tuition fees, and national governments see higher education as a lucrative export industry (Collins 2006). These economic calculations often lead to escalated efforts in recruiting international students. As a result of the expansion, institutionalisation and commercialisation of higher education, along with the development of a global hierarchy of higher education, educational opportunities have proliferated for those with the economic wherewithal. Some students seek international education as an alternative route or a second chance to access higher education, particularly when the competition for places in elite domestic universities is fierce. Others pursue international education for added market value. Among Chinese students in Japan, Liu-Farrer (2014) observed that many chose to study in Japan after failing to realise their aspirations to enter

296  Handbook on transnationalism

a Chinese university, or because they wished to change to a discipline that promised a better career future. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong students in Waters’ (2008) study, their Chinese counterparts in Xiang and Shen’s (2009) investigation and the Korean graduate students that Jongyoung Kim (2011) has researched, all seek to gain better labour market positions in their home countries by obtaining overseas educational credentials. Outside East Asia, international students from middle-class Kazakhstan families also view overseas educational credentials as a strategy to enhance their market positions at home (Holloway et al. 2012). Even among some students from the United Kingdom, an education from an elite university in the United States is considered more desirable than the prestigious universities in the UK (Findlay et al. 2010). Besides those pursuing a foreign degree, a large number of international students cross borders for semester exchanges or to spend a year abroad. The Erasmus programme, a short-term exchange scheme supported by the European Union, has mobilised millions of students across Europe. According to a European Commission’s report, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the European Erasmus programme grew annually by an average of 5.4 per cent. In total, more than 2 million students had participated from the beginning of the programme in 1987 until 2013 (European Commission 2013). In addition, emerging destinations of international education have also seen more short-term international students (Ziguras and McBurnie 2011). While the majority of international students out of Asian countries pursue degrees, the majority of students from high-income countries who come to Asia tend to be short-term exchange students who study abroad in order to learn language or experience foreign cultures (Ziguras and McBurnie 2011). Early Study Abroad Students Besides tertiary level students, an increasing trend in international education involves students in primary and secondary schools. Such phenomena – called ‘parachute kids’ who are left alone to pursue education in a foreign country (Zhou 1998) or ‘wild geese families’ in which children are accompanied by their mothers (Huang and Yeoh 2005; Kim 2010; Kang 2012) – are most frequently observed in the flow from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China to a limited number of destinations, such as the US, Canada, Australia and Singapore. Researchers point out that this form of transnational student mobility has its historical roots in Confucian teaching prevalent in these countries, which makes providing children with the best possible education central to parental duty (Waters 2015). Parents’ concerns with providing their children with good quality education have escalated with the rise of the contemporary knowledge-based economy, the emphasis on educational credentials, and the increase in educational competition within these countries. Many middle-class and upper-middle class families in East Asia therefore took advantage of the opening of global education markets for pre-tertiary education to send their children abroad. The parents hope that these young students will have a head-start in the global competition for internationally recognised educational credentials and

International students as transnational migrants  297

to accumulate the types of cultural, social and sometimes emotional capital that will allow them to be successful in the globalised world (Kang 2012; Waters 2015). While countries such as Canada or Australia might attract parents whose economic resources allow them to migrate as ‘business investors’ or ‘entrepreneurs’, Singapore and other Asian countries with English-medium education, geographical proximity, and relatively affordable living costs also appeal to East Asian families, including those of middle-class and lower-middle class backgrounds (Kim 2010). This form of transnational migration is usually initiated by parents as a household class reproductive strategy, an endeavour to fashion a global personhood for their children, or, among the newly rich, a symbol signalling one’s wealth and class status (Liu-Farrer 2016). However, research also emphasises the agency of children in the mobility process (Kang 2018). Children are the main agents in navigating the social terrain in this form of transnational mobility, and often actively participate in charting their future trajectories (Huang and Yeoh 2011). In contrast to well-off Asian families sending their children abroad to build a global education profile, the reverse trend of transnational migration – going ‘back’ to parents’ home countries for study – has also been observed among children of some Asian and African immigrants (Liu-Farrer 2020; Bledsoe and Sow 2011). Such a ‘homecoming’ trend is both for attaining transnational cultural capital, such as additional languages, and for instilling traditional values and protecting children from adverse cultural influences in the host countries. For example, many children born in Chinese immigrant families in Japan have had the experience of returning to China for schooling, from as short as one semester to as long as three or four years in order to learn the Chinese language (Liu-Farrer 2020). Studies of West African families in Europe, on the other hand, find that a significant number of immigrants send their children back to Africa to be schooled in their home countries because many were concerned with the corrupting cultural and moral environment in Western contexts. The parents believe that an education in the home country is necessary to ensure that the youth acquire the discipline necessary to succeed in the West while understanding their obligations to their families (Bledsoe and Sow 2011). Student-Workers Attaining an education or education credential is the primary purpose for which most international students embark on the journey of cross-border migration. However, international students are a diverse body of individuals who take on different identities including that of ‘worker’. Not only is international education a de facto channel for skilled labour migration (Hawthorne 2005; Tremblay 2005; Ziguras and Law 2006; Moon 2019), countries with labour shortage also take advantage of international students as a source of low-wage labour (Liu-Farrer 2009; Withers and Piper, Chapter 18 in this volume). Moreover, while education export countries view foreign students’ tuition payments as a major source of revenue, taking on a paid job is what makes international education accessible to students without sufficient economic means.

298  Handbook on transnationalism

Most education-providing countries, such as the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan, grant conditional part-time work permits to international students. A large number of international students in Australia and Japan, for example, have been found to work long hours off campus while pursuing education (Nyland et al. 2009; Baas 2012; Mahmud 2014; Liu-Farrer 2011a). In Japan, international students are officially counted as part of the workforce. Out of the 1.46 million foreign workers reported by employers in Japan in 2018, 18.6 per cent of them or 298,000, were migrants who held a student visa but had obtained a work permit to work part time.3 In Australia, postgraduate students from India consider part-time work as an essential part of their experiences of study abroad (Baas 2012). Because of the provision for international students to work, education programmes with low academic thresholds, such as language education, have sometimes become a channel for individuals to enter the country primarily for the purpose to work. This is the case in Japan. Japan has serious labour shortages but has refused to import workers it considers unskilled. As a consequence, a migration industry has emerged in Japan to take advantage of international education as a channel for importing labour, and some language academies and educational brokerages use the promise of labour opportunities to recruit students (Liu-Farrer and Tran 2019). Many Chinese students from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Bangladeshi students throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and Nepalese and Vietnamese students in the 2010s, arrived in Japan primarily as workers. In Mahmud’s (2014) study of Bangladeshi language students in Japan, earning as much money as possible to remit home was the only meaning these students saw in their ‘studying’ in Japan. The several hours a day spent in the language school from Monday to Friday were to fulfil the attendance requirement for the student visa as well as to provide a rest period. Many of them worked 75 to 80 hours a week on two or more jobs, greatly exceeding the legally permitted 28 hours a week. Although excessive low-wage labour compromises international students’ educational goals and well-being (Nyland et al. 2009; Marginson et al. 2010), the opportunity to work made it possible for resource-poor students from developing countries to go abroad to study. While language academies might be the end point of educational mobility for some, the majority of students managed to enter a tertiary institution in the host country. As Liu-Farrer (2011a, 2020) argues, the experience of off-campus labour sometimes serves the purpose of language training and preparing them for the corporate labour market by enhancing students’ understanding of the host society work ethic.

THE DIFFERENT PATTERNS OF TRANSNATIONAL STUDENT MOBILITIES The largest flows of international students have been from countries in Asia and Africa to a few dominant educational destinations in North America, Europe and

International students as transnational migrants  299

Oceania. In 2017, OECD countries attracted 3.7 million of the 5.3 million international students in the world, and Asian students made up 56 per cent of them (OECD 2019). Moreover, four English speaking countries, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, received more than 40 per cent of all mobile students in OECD and partner countries (OECD 2019). Immigration has also been an outcome of such mobilities. A study in the US found that 66 per cent of foreign students who had been awarded science and engineering doctorates in the US in 1997 were still residents in the US ten years later (Finn 2010). International education pathways into Australia, too, were perceived as linked to the prospect of immigration (Robertson 2013). Not only did students from India seek immigration through education channels (Baas 2012), UK students’ choice of studying in Australia was also related to their intention to immigrate there (Findlay et al. 2010). While such trends of student migration remain significant, it is important to recognise that the directions of international student mobilities have become greatly differentiated along with the expansion and diversification of international education. Transnationality, both in terms of back and forth border crossing and more fluid and multiple mobilities trajectories, has become a more dominant phenomenon. This section highlights the developing trends in student mobilities both during and after the study period, and emphasises the transnational and fluid nature of such mobility. Intra-Regional Migration While traditional international education destinations in North America and Europe still maintain a high volume of inbound students from other parts of the world, international student mobilities increasingly take place between countries in the same region (Kuroda 2016; Ge and Ho 2018). This phenomenon has to do with education programmes organised by regional governing bodies in order to expose students to intercultural learning as well as to instil in students a sense of common regional identity. For example, the Erasmus programme in Europe is intended as a civic experience, with the aim that students will build a European consciousness through this organised European study abroad programme. Kristin Mitchell’s (2012) survey of 2,000 respondents from 25 European Union countries gives evidence for the effectiveness of this civic logic of Erasmus. Erasmus experience is reported to contribute to attitudinal changes about Europe among participants and strengthen their European identity. The success of the Erasmus project has inspired national governments in Asian countries to adopt this organised, and to a large extent, top-down approach to international student mobilities, in the hope that such educational mobility will help cultivate a regional identity among students, and establish connections among organisations and students through such networks (Chun 2016). The ASEAN International Mobility for Students (AIMS) and the CAMPUS Asia programme initiated jointly by the governments of China, Korea and Japan are examples of such international mobility programmes.

300  Handbook on transnationalism

In addition, with the globalising education market, some nation-states positioned on the educational periphery aim to use international education to upgrade and internationalise their national education systems, attract talent and expand their political and cultural influences (Ge and Ho 2018). Many have set numerical targets for international student recruitments. Several regional education hubs have emerged in Asia and Africa, including Qatar, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Hong Kong (HK) and Botswana (Kell and Vogl 2012; Knight 2013; Sidhu et al. 2014; Gunter and Raghuram 2018). The majority of students in these emerging international education destinations come from other countries within the immediate region (Ge and Ho 2014, 2018). While organised student mobility programmes facilitate intra-regional mobilities, students choose to study within the region also out of consideration for the cultural affinity and geographic proximity, historical linkages, accumulated cross-border social networks, and relatively low financial costs (Collins 2013; Ge and Ho 2018; Liu-Farrer 2020). Transnational economic connections also play a role. Research on international student mobilities in East Asia has noted that Asian students often study in China because of Chinese economic influences in the region (Ge and Ho 2018). Japan has also become a major destination of international education by being the first advanced economy in Asia to play a leading role as a source of foreign investment in countries such as China and Vietnam (Liu-Farrer 2020). Moreover, the thickening economic ties between countries in East Asia have created increased career opportunities for international students who can serve as bridging agents in transnational businesses, and in turn, these career niches have enhanced incentives to study each other’s languages and enrol in each other’s educational programmes (Liu-Farrer 2011b; Ge and Ho 2018). Economics and politics, however, are not the only driving forces. Young people’s choices of study abroad destinations are driven as much by the lure of culture and adventure as by economics (Waters et al. 2011). Cultural attraction, often promoted by the state and its various agents, has been a significant driver of student mobility to the US and UK (Bu 2003; Kim 2013). Recently, this pattern has also become particularly notable among international students bound for Japan and Korea. Asian students, as well as students from other world regions, choose these two destinations often because of the influences of the popular cultural products and media industry produced in these two countries (Ge and Ho 2018). In the European Union, too, Mediterranean countries are chosen by some students because they are attractive tourist and cultural destinations (González et al. 2011). Differentiated ‘Returns’ With the expanding knowledge-based economy, developed countries compete to recruit highly skilled labour and view international education as an incubator for such labour. Countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Japan have initiated favourable policies not only to woo international students, but to retain them in their labour markets (Hawthorne 2005; Ziguras and Law 2006; Oishi 2012). Nonetheless,

International students as transnational migrants  301

according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) statistics, only around 20 per cent of international graduates remain in the host labour market upon graduation (OECD 2011). The majority of them eventually return to their home countries. Return migration is engendered in a complex social, economic and political context (Collins et al. 2017). For some international students, return is a regrettable outcome after failing to secure a job in the destination country because of formidable institutional and cultural barriers, such as the denial of work visas or the rigid skill requirements in domestically oriented employment systems in the host countries (Lu et al. 2010; Bijwaard and Wang 2016; Moskal 2017). For others, return migration is intended because the internationally recognised credential and their transnational cultural capital have higher value in the labour market at home (Waters 2005; Rosenzweig 2006). Zweig and Han’s (2010) survey data of returned Chinese students in Guangzhou indicates that those with overseas education experiences earned more than those without. Again, economic rationales do not explain fully students’ return migration. Studies have pointed out the importance of affective reasons for mobility decisions. International graduates return to their home countries because of parental expectations, marriage, or their socio-emotional adaptation (Lu et al. 2010; Liu-Farrer 2014). ‘Return’, however, does not necessarily entail a U-turn. For most international students, ‘return’ means going back to a large city in the home country. The term ‘J-turn’ might be a better illustration of this trajectory. Statistics on the return of international students back to China show that returning students tend to concentrate in Beijing, Shanghai and the Guangzhou/Shenzhen areas. According to the survey done by Ministry of Education’s Study Abroad Service Center, the majority of returned students who were employed in Beijing area did not have their original household registrations in Beijing. The students who were from Beijing were fewer than 10 per cent. Many came from Hebei, Shandong, Liaoning and other provinces. They stayed because of the better labour market potential in the capital city (Wang and Lü 2013). In addition, university rankings have a direct effect on international students’ employment potential and, in some regions or countries, individuals’ chance of residency. For example, between 2012 and 2019, despite the two-year post-study work visa being terminated, the UK remained an attractive destination for Chinese students. Many spent 30,000 GBP for a 9-month master’s degree from a UK university because of the policy implemented by the Shanghai government, which specifies that a Shanghai residency is attainable for individuals who have obtained a university degree from a non-211 university if ‘they have a master’s degree from one of the top 500 university in the university rankings’.4 Chinese students choose to study abroad, at least partially, to increase their chances of migrating to major cities in their home country, illustrating an important linkage between internal and international migration (Skeldon 2018).

302  Handbook on transnationalism

Fluid and Multiple Mobilities In the context of the recent regionalisation of international education and the various incentive schemes for return, and given the fact that international education is considered by many students as a pathway to adventure, personal growth as well as capital accumulation, internationally mobile students’ trajectories appear increasingly fluid, sometime circular, and other times multinational (see also Paul, Chapter 22 in this volume). First, students are more likely to move multiple times to different destinations throughout their life course to pursue education. Literature on international student mobility has indicated how a differentiated and hierarchical educational field shapes mobility trajectories (Jöns and Hoyler 2013), and students’ mobility intentions vary according to the choice of destinations (Findlay et al. 2011). As a result of such perceived global educational hierarchy, students and families sometimes take a step-wise approach to achieve upward education mobility through geographic mobilities. Collins et al. (2014) found that some postgraduate international students in Singapore considered National University of Singapore ‘a stepping stone’ to another destination, with the US featuring as the aspirational destination. Moreover, international education is tied to students’ personal growth and different instrumental concerns and cultural interests in different stages of their life course (Geddie 2013). With international education being built into the higher education curriculum in many countries, students also have more possibilities to participate in different organised or self-initiated international education. Increasingly, therefore, students’ education takes place in multiple geographic locations, reflecting a wider emerging characteristic of transnational migration as described in Paul’s chapter on the transnationalism of multiple migration (Paul, Chapter 22 in this volume). Second, international students’ post-study trajectories are also characterised by fluidity. As complex as the motivations for international education, the decision for taking the next step is often suspended in relation to conflicting desires. A study by Alberts and Hazen (2005) reveals that international students in the US struggle in deciding to stay or return. On the one hand, better professional opportunities could be found in the US. On the other, some were disenchanted by American society’s materialism, felt a sense of social alienation, feared or experienced racism, or longed for friends and families at home. Even when international students study abroad with an intention to immigrate, obtaining a permanent residency does not mean settling in the country, but rather provides a tool for more flexible mobility. In Baas’ (2016) study, Indian students aim to achieve permanent residency in order to maximise the freedom to move not only back and forth between home and host countries but also to other countries where opportunities can be found. ‘Permanent residency’ is therefore desired for the freedom to be ‘permanently temporary’ while retaining the rights that allow for indefinite stays (Baas 2016, p. 28). Finally, neither staying in the host country nor returning to the home country finalises the mobility trajectories of international students. Instead, international students’ language skills, transnational cultural and social capital accumulated through

International students as transnational migrants  303

international education, and their inter-cultural exposure often allow them to occupy unique structural positions in the transnational economy (Liu-Farrer 2011b), or find employment in multinational firms (Waters 2008; Moskal 2017). Such career trajectories entail frequent transnational mobility.

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION An increasing number of people are crossing borders to study. Such a growth of internationally mobile students is brought about by the rapid expansion and diversification of international education as well as changing economic and social contexts in many countries and regions. School is an essential institution of political and cultural cultivation and labour market preparation. The fact that schooling takes place mostly during one’s youth makes international education a desirable programme to carry out a multitude of objectives by a wide range of stakeholders. For example, regional and national governments actively use international education as a tool to cultivate regional identities and intercultural outlook among the younger generation as well as a way to recruit talent and labour. At the same time, the expansion of international education is in tandem with a changing educational landscape, characterised by an interconnected global field of education with distinct hierarchies. Consequently, an unprecedented number of students are able to participate in international education for different periods of time. Though international education seems increasingly accessible given the growing number and diversity of students, it is important to note that social class continues to influence individuals’ mobility potential and trajectories (Phan 2017; Lipura and Collins 2020). As seen in the different types of students this chapter introduces, international education is utilised as a strategy of social reproduction among middle- and upper middle-class families around the world in a context of economic uncertainty (Valentin and Dhungel 2016). While some students embark on the study abroad journey not just out of economic calculation but also ‘for excitement, fun and adventure’ (Waters et al. 2011, p. 456), not all students can afford such adventures. Family background – economic resources, parents’ education and early international travel experiences – strongly affects whether or not students take up the opportunity to study abroad (Findlay et al. 2010; Gerhards and Hans 2013; Green et al. 2015). Among immigrant children who return to their parents’ home countries for education, their transnational education strategy is essentially predicated on taking advantage of unequal economic development in the sending and receiving country, and converting the financial resources gained from the home country into transnational cultural capital in order to achieve social mobility in both countries. Similarly, most student-workers are often from middle-class backgrounds in their own countries (e.g. Baas 2012; Mahmed 2014; Valentin and Dhungel 2016), where only people of considerable means are able to graduate from high school and pay their way to an education in a developed country. People from the lower classes, if they migrate, usually become migrant workers.

304  Handbook on transnationalism

In addition, given its multifaceted characteristics – as a commodity, a means of capital accumulation and a channel of labour migration, international education engenders and depends on a migration industry that profits from facilitating student mobility (Adhikari 2010; Collins 2012; Hulme et al. 2014; Sidhu 2002; Thieme 2017; Lan 2019). Most universities in the UK, Australia and language schools in New Zealand and Japan, for example, rely on brokers, or external recruitment agents, to bring in students (Collins 2012; Beech 2018; Liu-Farrer and Tran 2019). The presence of an education-migration industry produces and perpetuates cross-border student mobility not only by actively searching for students and facilitating the process of migration, but also shaping students’ decision-making process (Hagedorn and Zhang 2011). Its profit-driven motive and predatory nature, however, introduces additional precarity in the process of international education and at times increases hazards for international students’ human security (Forbes-Mewett and Nyland 2008). Regardless of these pitfalls, international student mobilities continue to expand, motivated by individual desires and practical concerns, driven by families’ social reproductive aspirations, and initiated by organised programmes for political and civic purposes. As a result, international students have become a significant transnational force in the contemporary world. Their transnationality is not only manifested in the back and forth movements between origin and destination countries, but increasingly involves multi-directional, multiple and fluid mobilities.

NOTES 1. The term ‘international mobile student’ is used by UNESCO to refer to ‘Students who have crossed a national or territorial border for the purpose of education and are now enrolled outside their country of origin’. See http://​ uis​ .unesco​ .org/​ en/​ glossary​ -term/​ international​-or​-internationally​-mobile​-students, accessed on April 7, 2020. The number is from Education at a Glance 2019: OECD Indicators. See https://​www​.oecd​-ilibrary​ .org/​sites/​17d19cd9​-en/​index​.html​?itemId​=/​content/​component/​17d19cd9​-en, accessed on April 7, 2020. 2. Transnational education programme refers to joint education programmes between universities based in different countries, which are often collaborations between a western education provider and a local university. 3. Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Summary of Registered Foreign Workers in 2018. MHLW 2018. https://​www​.mhlw​.go​.jp/​content/​11655000/​000472892​.pdf. 4. Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, available at http://​rsj​ .sh​.gov​.cn/​201712333/​xxgk/​flfg/​gfxwj/​rsrc/​06/​201711/​t20171103​_1271445​.shtml. ‘211’ universities refer to universities designated by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China as key universities, with the mission of raising the research standards of high-level universities.

International students as transnational migrants  305

REFERENCES Adhikari, Radhika (2010), ‘“The dream-trap”: Brokering “study abroad” and nurse migration from Nepal to the UK’, European Bulletin for Himalayan Research, 35–36, 122–32. Alberts, Heike C. and Helen D. Hazen (2005), ‘“There are always two voices …”: International students’ intentions to stay in the United States or return to their home countries’, International Migration, 43 (3), 131–54. Altbach, Philip G. (2004), ‘Globalization and the university: Myths and realities in an unequal world’, Tertiary Education and Management, 10, 3–25. Baas, Michiel (2012), Imagined Mobility: Migration and Transnationalism among Indian Students in Australia, London: Anthem Press. Baas, Michiel (2016), ‘Becoming trans/nationally mobile: The conflation of internal and international migration in the trajectories of Indian student-migrants in Australia and beyond’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39 (1), 14–28. Beech, Suzanne E. (2018), ‘Adapting to change in the higher education system: International student mobility as a migration industry’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (4), 610–625. Bijwaard, Govert E. and Qi Wang (2016), ‘Return migration of foreign students’, European Journal of Population, 32 (1), 31–54. Bledsoe, Caroline H. and Papa Sow (2011), ‘Back to Africa: Second chances for the children of West African immigrants’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 73 (4), 747–62. Bu, Liping (2003), Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century, Westport, CT: Praeger. Chun, Ja-hyun (2016), ‘Can CAMPUS Asia program be a next ERASMUS? The possibilities and challenges of the CAMPUS Asia program’, Asia Europe Journal, 14 (3), 279–96. Collins, Francis L. (2006), ‘Making Asian students, making students Asian: The racialisation of export education in Auckland, New Zealand’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 47 (2), 217–34. Collins, Francis L. (2012), ‘Organizing student mobility: Education agents and student migration to New Zealand’, Pacific Affairs, 85 (1), 137–60. Collins, Francis L. (2013), ‘Regional pathways: Transnational imaginaries, infrastructures and implications of student mobility within Asia’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 22 (4), 475–500. Collins, Francis L., Kong Chong Ho, Mayumi Ishikawa and Ai‐Hsuan Sandra Ma (2017), ‘International student mobility and after‐study lives: The portability and prospects of overseas education in Asia’, Population, Space and Place, 23 (4), e2029. Collins, Francis L., Ravinder Sidhu, Nick Lewis and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2014), ‘Mobility and desire: International students and Asian regionalism in aspirational Singapore’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35 (5), 661–76. European Commission (2013), History of the ERASMUS Programme, accessed 7 April 2020 at https://​web​.archive​.org/​web/​20130404063516/​http://​ec​.europa​.eu/​education/​erasmus/​ history​_en​.htm. Findlay, Allan M., Russell King, Alist Geddes, F. Smith, A. Stam, M. Dunne, R. Skeldon and J. Ahrens (2010), Motivations and Experiences of UK Students Studying Abroad, University of Dundee: Department for Business Innovation and Skills. Findlay, Allan M., Russell King, Fiona Smith, Alistair Geddes and Ronald Skeldon (2011), ‘World class? An investigation of globalisation, difference and international student mobility’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (1), 118–31. Finn, Michael G. (2010), ‘Stay rates of foreign doctorate recipients from U.S. universities, 2007’, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, accessed 8 April 2020 at https://​www​ .osti​.gov/​servlets/​purl/​971617​-XvYtjt/​.

306  Handbook on transnationalism

Forbes-Mewett, Helen and Chris Nyland (2008), ‘Cultural diversity, relocation, and the security of international students at an internationalised university’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 12 (2), 181–203. Ge, Rochelle Y. and Kong Chong Ho (2014), ‘Researching international student migration in Asia: Research design and project management issues’, Journal of Population Research, 31 (3), 197–217. Ge, Rochelle Y. and Kong Chong Ho (2018), ‘Intra-Asia higher education mobilities’, in Gracia Liu-Farrer and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds), Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 75–91. Geddie, Kate (2013), ‘The transnational ties that bind: Relationship considerations for graduating international science and engineering research students’, Population, Space and Place, 19 (2), 196–208. Gerhards, Jürgen and Silke Hans (2013), ‘Transnational human capital, education, and social inequality: Analyses of international student exchange’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 42 (2), 99–117. González, Carlos R., Ricardo B. Mesanza and Petr Mariel (2011), ‘The determinants of international student mobility flows: An empirical study on the Erasmus programme’, Higher Education, 62 (4), 413–30. Green, Wendy, Deanne Gannaway, Karen Sheppard and Maryam Jamarani (2015), ‘What’s in their baggage? The cultural and social capital of Australian students preparing to study abroad’, Higher Education Research & Development, 34 (3), 513–26. Gunter, Ashley and Parvati Raghuram (2018), ‘International study in the global south: Linking institutional, staff, student and knowledge mobilities’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 16 (2), 192–207. Hagedorn, Linda S. and ‘Leaf’ Y. Zhang (2011), ‘The use of agents in recruiting Chinese undergraduates’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 15 (2), 186–202. Hawthorne, Lesleyanne (2005), ‘“Picking winners”? The recent transformation of Australia’s skilled migration policy’, International Migration Review, 39 (3), 663–96. Holloway, Sarah L., Sarah L. O’Hara and Helena Pimlott-Wilson (2012), ‘Educational mobility and the gendered geography of cultural capital: The case of international student flows between Central Asia and the UK’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44 (9), 2278–94. Huang, Shirlena and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2005), ‘Transnational families and their children’s education: China’s “study mothers” in Singapore’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 379–400. Huang, Shirlena and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2011), ‘Navigating the terrains of transnational education: Children of Chinese “study mothers” in Singapore’, Geoforum, 42 (3), 394–403. Hulme, Moira, Alex Thomson, Rob Hulme and Guy Doughty (2014), ‘Trading places: The role of agents in international student recruitment from Africa’, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 38 (5), 674–89. Ishikawa, Mayumi (2009), ‘University rankings, global models and emerging hegemony: Critical analysis from Japan’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 13 (2), 159–73. Jöns, Heike and Michael Hoyler (2013), ‘Global geographies of higher education: The perspective of world university rankings’, Geoforum, 46, 45–59. Kang, Yoonhee (2012), ‘Transnational motherhood in the making of global kids: South Korean educational migrants in Singapore’, in Caroline Plüss and Kwok-bun Chan (eds), Living Intersections: Transnational Migrant Identifications in Asia, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 149–66. Kang, Yoonhee (2018), ‘A pathway to “constant becoming”: Time, temporalities and the construction of self among South Korean educational migrants in Singapore’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39 (5), 798–813. Kell, Peter and Gillian Vogl (2012), International Students in the Asia Pacific: Mobility, Risks and Global Optimism, Dordrecht: Springer.

International students as transnational migrants  307

Kim, Jeehun (2010), ‘“Downed” and stuck in Singapore: Lower/middle class South Korean wild geese (kirogi)’, in Emily Hannum, Hyunjoon Park and Yoko Goto Butler (eds), Globalization, Changing Demographics, and Educational Challenges in East Asia, Bingley: Emerald Publishing, pp. 271–311. Kim, Jongyoung (2011), ‘Aspiration for global cultural capital in the stratified realm of global higher education: Why do Korean students go to US graduate schools?’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 32 (1), 109–26. Kim, Youna (2013), Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters, New York: Routledge. Knight, Jane (2013), ‘Education hubs: International, regional and local dimensions of scale and scope’, Comparative Education, 49 (3), 374–87. Knight, Jane and Sirat Morshidi (2011), ‘The complexities and challenges of regional education hubs: Focus on Malaysia’, Higher Education, 62 (5), 593–606. Kuroda, Kazuo (2016), ‘Regionalization of higher education in Asia’, in Christopher S. Collins, Molly N.N. Lee, John N. Hawkins and Deane E. Neubauer (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Asia Pacific Higher Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 141–56. Lan, Shanshan (2019), ‘State‐mediated brokerage system in China’s self‐funded study abroad market’, International Migration, 57 (3), 266–79. Lipura, Sarah Jane and Francis L. Collins (2020), ‘Towards an integrative understanding of contemporary educational mobilities: A critical agenda for international student mobilities research’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18 (3), 343–59. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2009), ‘The burden of social capital: Fujian Chinese immigrants’ experiences of network closure in Japan’, Social Science Japan Journal, 11 (22), 241–57. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2011a), Labour Migration from China to Japan: International Students, Transnational Migrants, London: Routledge. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2011b), ‘Making careers in the occupational niche: Chinese students in corporate Japan’s transnational business’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (6), 785–803. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2014), ‘Tied to the family, bound to the labour market: Understanding Chinese student mobility in Japan’, in Akiyoshi Yonezawa, Yuto Kitamura, Arthur Meerman and Kazuo Kuroda (eds), The Emergence of International Dimensions in East Asian Higher Education, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 185–206. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2016), ‘Migration as class-based consumption: The emigration of the rich in contemporary China’, China Quarterly, 224, 499–518. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2020), Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-Nationalist Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Liu-Farrer, Gracia and An Huy Tran (2019), ‘Bridging the institutional gaps: International education as a migration industry’, International Migration, 57 (3), 235–49. Lu, Yixi, Li Zong and Bernard Schissel (2010), ‘To stay or return: Migration intentions of students from People’s Republic of China in Saskatchewan, Canada’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 10 (3), 283–310. Mahmud, Hasan (2014), ‘“It’s my money”: Social class and the perception of remittances among Bangladeshi migrants in Japan’, Current Sociology, 62 (3), 412–30. Marginson, Simon (2008), ‘Global field and global imagining: Bourdieu and worldwide higher education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29 (3), 303–15. Marginson, Simon, Chris Nyland, Erlenawati Sawir and Helen Forbes-Mewett (2010), International Student Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Kristin (2012), ‘Student mobility and European identity: Erasmus study as a civic experience?’, Journal of Contemporary European Research, 8 (4), 490–518. Mok, Ka H. (2007), ‘Questing for internationalization of universities in Asia: Critical reflections’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 11 (3/4), 433–54.

308  Handbook on transnationalism

Moon, Rennie J. (2019), ‘International students as skilled labour migrants for Korean SMEs’, Asian Survey, 59 (4), 607–29. Moskal, Marta (2017), ‘International students pathways between open and closed borders: Towards a multi‐scalar approach to educational mobility and labour market outcomes’, International Migration, 55 (3), 126–38. Nyland, Chris, Helen Forbes‐Mewett, Simon Marginson, Gaby Ramia, Erlenawati Sawir and Sharon Smith (2009), ‘International student‐workers in Australia: A new vulnerable workforce’, Journal of Education and Work, 22 (1), 1–14. OECD (2011), International Migration Outlook: SOPEMI 2011, Paris: OECD Publishing, accessed 7 April 2020 at http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.1787/​migr​_outlook​-2011​-en. OECD (2019), Education at a Glance 2019: OECD Indicators, accessed 7 April 2020 at https://​www​.oecd​-ilibrary​.org/​sites/​17d19cd9​-en/​index​.html​?itemId​=/​content/​component/​ 17d19cd9​-en. Oishi, Nana (2012), ‘The limits of immigration policies: The challenges of highly skilled migration in Japan’, American Behavioral Scientist, 56 (8), 1080–1100. Phan, Le-Ha (2017), Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’: Adjusted Desire, Transformative Mediocrity, Neo-Colonial Disguise, Abingdon: Routledge. Robertson, Shanthi (2013), Transnational Student-Migrants and the State: The Education-Migration Nexus, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosenzweig, Mark R. (2006), ‘Global wage differences and international student flows’, in Susan M. Collins and Carol L. Graham (eds), Brookings Trade Forum 2006: Global Labour Markets, Washington, DC: Brookings International Press, pp. 57–96. Sancho, David (2017), ‘Escaping India’s culture of education: Migration desires among aspiring middle-class young men’, Ethnography, 18 (4), 515–34. Sidhu, Ravinder (2002), ‘Educational brokers in global education markets’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 6 (1), 16–43. Sidhu, Ravinder, Kong Chong Ho and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2014), ‘Singapore: Building a knowledge and education hub’, in Jane Knight (ed.), International Education Hubs: Student, Talent, Knowledge-Innovation Models, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 121–43. Skeldon, Ronald (2018), ‘Internal and international migration: Separate or integrated systems?’, in Gracia Liu-Farrer and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds), Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations, London: Routledge, pp. 173–83. Thieme, Susan (2017), ‘Educational consultants in Nepal: Professionalization of services for students who want to study abroad’, Mobilities, 12 (2), 243–58. Tremblay, Karine (2005), ‘Academic mobility and immigration’, Journal of Studies in International Education, 9 (3), 196–228. Valentin, Karen and Laxmi Dhungel (2016), ‘Gendered mobilities and return migration: A study of highly skilled female returnees in Nepal’, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 48, 77–102. Vertovec, Steven (2009), Transnationalism, New York: Routledge. Wang, Huiyao and Miao Lü (2013), Current Situation and Development Trends of Chinese Returnees in 2012, Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Waters, Johanna L. (2005), ‘Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 359–77. Waters, Johanna L. (2008), Education, Migration, and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora, New York: Cambria Press. Waters, Johanna L. (2009), ‘In pursuit of scarcity: transnational students, “employability”, and the MBA’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 41 (8), 1865–83. Waters, Johanna L. (2015), ‘Educational imperatives and the compulsion for credentials: Family migration and children’s education in East Asia’, Children’s Geographies, 13 (3), 280–293.

International students as transnational migrants  309

Waters, Johanna L., Rachel Brooks and Helena Pimlott-Wilson (2011), ‘Youthful escapes? British students, overseas education and the pursuit of happiness’, Social and Cultural Geography, 12 (5), 455–69. Xiang, Biao and Wei Shen (2009), ‘International student migration and social stratification in China’, International Journal of Educational Development, 29 (5), 513–22. Yonezawa, Akiyoshi (2007), ‘Japanese flagship universities at a crossroad’, Higher Education, 54, 483–99. Zhou, Min (1998), ‘“Parachute kids” in Southern California: The educational experience of chinese children in transnational families’, Educational Policy, 12 (6), 682–704. Ziguras, Christopher J. and Siew Fang Law (2006), ‘Recruiting international students as skilled migrants: The global “skills race” as viewed from Australia and Malaysia’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4 (1), 59–76. Ziguras, Christopher J. and Grant McBurnie (2011), ‘International student mobility in the Asia-Pacific: From globalization to regional integration?’, in Simon Marginson, Sarjit Kaur and Erlenawati Sawir (eds), Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 123–40. Zweig, David and Donglin Han (2010), ‘“Sea turtles” or “seaweed”? The employment of overseas returnees in China’, in Christiane Kuptsch (ed.), The Internationalization of Labour Markets, Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies, pp. 89–104.

20. Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction Juan Zhang

INTRODUCTION In 2019, two stories in South Korea involving foreign women as migrant wives broke international news. In June, a Filipina migrant Emma Sumampong in Hoengseong County received her official hyobu-sang award as a model ‘filial daughter-in-law’ from South Korea’s Family Welfare Association (Lee 2019; Philippine Daily Inquirer 2019). Having met her South Korean husband through a Philippine church matchmaking service, Sumampong became one of the tens of thousands of women who have married South Korean men and migrated to the rapidly ageing nation. Hyobu-sang has been a longstanding award in rural Korea for women upholding traditional family values such as filial piety, which in Sumampong’s case involves not only caring for the young and old, managing domestic chores and working on the family farm, but also holding part-time jobs to supplement family income. As the main caregiver to her 89-year-old mother-in-law and three school-aged children, Sumampong starts her day at 5 a.m. to prepare meals, manage household chores, and engage in paid work as a clerk at the county office. Her dedication to the family prompted the municipal official to nominate her for the award, praising her for setting ‘such a good example to other migrant wives in our town’. A month later, a violent incident of abuse caught on video showed how a Vietnamese migrant wife was brutally assaulted by her Korean husband in the presence of their young child (Lamb 2019). The Korean husband slapped the woman in the face and yelled ‘didn’t I tell you that you are not in Vietnam?’ as the migrant wife crouched in a corner. This video went viral on Facebook and triggered intense national outrage over long-term neglect and domestic violence that many migrant wives had experienced in the past decades since the influx of marriage migrants in both rural and urban areas (Kim 2015). The BBC’s Korean Service reported that while a high number of foreign wives in Korea experienced domestic violence on a regular basis, few would file reports with the authorities. The director of the Woman Migrants Human Rights Centre in Daegu was quoted explaining how ‘South Korean husbands and their families deliberately refrain from helping their migrant wives obtain citizenship or visa status’ and how reporting abuse and upsetting the husband was ‘tantamount to giving up her (the wife’s) “Korean Dream”’ (BBC 2019). These two stories, when juxtaposed, show the seemingly diverging fate of migrant wives in Korea, where one is officially praised for being a model migrant and the other reduced to a victim of abuse stripped of her ‘Korean Dream’. Both the award 310

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction  311

and the abuse serve as sobering reminders of how longstanding patriarchal norms continue to govern transnational marital and family life through a closely interwoven cultural and political system of discipline and reward in and beyond Korea. On the one hand, restrictive immigration regimes in countries like Korea require migrant wives to be completely dependent upon their husbands for legal status and to be fully assimilated into local social and familial life – failure to participate in this ‘citizenship project’ often leads to marginalisation, social and political exclusion, and various forms of violence (Kim 2013). On the other hand, when migrant wives abide by such norms, they may receive monetary reward and moral recognition as a model subject for upholding traditional virtues such as filial piety. Sumampong’s dedication and her hyobu status – a title ‘virtually no Korean woman in their 20s and 30s would want to be called’ (Lee 2019) – were publicised broadly as setting a perfect example for other marriage migrants to emulate in becoming ideal wives and daughters-in-law. This systematic form of discipline and reward reflects particular gendered relationships between women, men and nation-states that Jongwilaiwan and Thompson (2013) call ‘transnational patriarchy’. Examining how marriage migrants from Thailand negotiate their intimate relations with husbands in Singapore, Jongwilaiwan and Thompson (2013, p. 365) argue that a new, transnational patriarchal bargain takes place as individuals experience varied regimes of citizenship across borders. Transnational patriarchy redefines conjugal relations when husbands ‘parley citizenship rights into patriarchal privileges’ within marriage, and migrant wives renegotiate a moral sense of self away from being ‘dutiful daughters’ toward their natal families and become filial daughters-in-law in host societies. Thai wives in Singapore are able to negotiate ‘clashing cultural scripts’ (Jongwilaiwan and Thompson 2013, p. 374) of marriage and familial roles as they cross borders to meet the socio-cultural expectations of becoming caring wives and dutiful daughters-in-law. What Jongwilaiwan and Thompson do not make explicit is the specific ways in which transnational patriarchy constitutes a particular transnational disciplinary regime fundamentally dependent upon sustained gender and geopolitical inequalities across borders. Such a disciplinary regime sets a limit on how a migrant woman navigates relations of power in both the public domain and within the sphere of the intimate, pinning her to a specific location of disadvantage where her status of being a wife and a non-citizen is conflated. ‘Clashing cultural scripts’ and transnational patriarchal bargains are symptomatic of the polymorphic borders that migrant women encounter when they marry abroad in anticipation of ‘lives worth waiting for’ (Gray 2011). Many often find it hard to break away from rigid categories of ‘wife or worker’ (Piper and Roces 2003), which limit the possibility of engaging in everyday strategies and flexible ways of optimising life options. Once categorised by the state immigration apparatus as ‘wife’, the migrant woman is immediately expected to withdraw from political and professional participation in social affairs (Friedman 2016) and reorient her entire life on reproduction and care as the husband’s dependant. On top of coping with the already troubling ‘clashing cultural scripts’ across borders, wives have to deal with such enforced dependency that further subdues

312  Handbook on transnationalism

migrant agency and mobility as well as limits their claims to citizenship (Cheng and Choo 2015). This chapter offers further reflection on this transnational disciplinary regime around gendered politics of movement across borders and the regulatory apparatus that reaches deeply into the private and intimate domains of transnational marriage and family life. This reflection is in part informed by fieldwork carried out in Singapore (2010–11) through a collaborative project entitled ‘State boundaries, cultural politics and gender negotiations in international marriages in Singapore and Malaysia’ (2008–11), and by other pieces of research and writing on transnational mobilities, governmentality and the biopolitical control of gendered and ethnicised bodies across borders (Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). In this chapter, I borrow Anna Tsing’s (2005) useful concept friction and consider migrants’ unequal encounters and entangled engagements with unfamiliar power structures, social relations, and cultural norms when individuals try to move across political as well as sovereign boundaries. Friction offers a useful analytical lens as it captures the sometimes awkward and sometimes sticky situations migrant women (and men) have to grapple with when they aspire to marry and move abroad for a better life. Instead of seeing marriage as a ‘natural’ life event and a smooth journey of finding a partner and building a family together based on romanticised ideas of love, care and responsibility, friction helps to bring to light uneasy relations, uncomfortable negotiations, unwilling compromises and untenable positions. Transnational patriarchal bargains, ‘clashing cultural scripts’, awkward recognition and disciplinary brutalities are all emblematic of friction at work, as transnational marriage causes abrasions that lead to stumbling and scuffing as well as creates tractions that pave new ways for interaction and exchange. Using friction as a framework, this chapter reviews recent literature on transnational marriage migration in the Asian context and teases out key areas where friction helps to move the analytical attention towards multiple and emergent forms of border crossing and the ensuing complexities around gendered identities, entangled mobilities, and transforming regulatory approaches that govern migrant bodies and practices. First, friction recognises interrupted mobilities as a result of uneven encounters and competing exercises of sovereign and disciplinary power across borders. Marriage migrants do not experience smooth journeys in either marriage or migration, and do not seamlessly become ‘agents of development’ in terms of making reproductive contributions in host societies and monetary contributions to home countries (see e.g. Piper and Lee 2016). Friction shows that disruption, waiting, and putting one’s life on hold can be a common experience, and marriage migrants’ mobility practices are often precarious. Second, friction highlights discordant social and cultural norms that govern women’s bodies not only within home spaces but also in the public domain in relation to their access to citizenship rights and acknowledgements. Migrant wives have to renegotiate their classed and ethnicised identities, control their sexual and reproductive behaviours, and conform to sets of gender norms that may or may not be compatible with their sense of self. Moreover, friction reveals the intimate geopolitics on social relationships and the broader ideologies

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction  313

on family life embedded in specific historical and political contexts. The familiar stories of ‘global hypergamy’ (Constable 2005), when understood through the unique historical and socio-cultural specificities of time and location, reveal strategies that enable women’s transnational movements and the structural constraints that limit their choices and viable pathways. To begin, I revisit Anna Tsing’s (2005) original thesis on friction as a metaphor to describe how universal ideals are rubbed against local situated realities and how this kind of ‘rubbing’ creates multiple forms of conflict and engagement. In the context of transnational marriage migration, universal ideals such as love and care are often played up against old and new forms of desires, expanding reproductive crises, persistent gender inequalities, and coercive politics of exclusion. I will then review the ways in which friction can be felt in relation to interrupted migrant mobilities and socio-cultural specificities that redefine intimate relations around marriage and family. In conclusion, I join scholarly writings on gender and power and challenge dichotomous thinking that often pins migrant women into conceptual and policy categories across borders. These artificial categories do not reflect a vital sense of womanhood and migrants’ continuous practice of self-making through different life stages in the transnational context. Binaries such as ‘wife or worker’ and ‘hyobu or victim’ reduce the complexity around migrant women’s own sense of aspiration and strategy. They also legitimise social and political structures that reinforce women’s vulnerability. Friction provides a perspective that calls for a different politics of recognition, which may create a point of engagement for marriage migrants to author their own mobility projects across time and space without being tied down by birthplaces, hierarchical borders, and imposed dependency ordered by heteropatriarchal norms.

TRANSNATIONAL MARRIAGE MIGRATION AND ITS FRICTION Transnational marriage migration has emerged as a distinct sub-field within migration studies and a subject of considerable scholarly and public interest in recent decades. Numerous research monographs (Thai 2008; Faier 2009; Freeman 2011; Charsley 2013), edited volumes (Constable 2005; Palriwala and Uberoi 2008; Ishii 2016), and policy briefs (Siddiqui 2008; UNESCAP 2015) report the growing trend of marriage migration in different parts of the region and its accompanying social and cultural transformations. More recently, journal special issues (e.g. Citizenship Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008; Cross-Currents e-Journal no. 15, 2015; Critical Asian Studies vol. 48, no. 4, 2016; JEMS 2019) have contributed to widening the empirical evidence and analytical foci on migrant spouses’ transnational mobility, family and intimate life, their cultural and political assimilation, as well as gendered and classed experiences around citizenship issues. Examining marriage migration through the lens of the migration–development nexus, Chung et al. (2016) trace migratory routes of marriage migrants from Southeast to East Asia, where foreign wives from

314  Handbook on transnationalism

Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and mainland China arrive in destinations of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. In recent years, wives from Cambodia, Mongolia and Uzbekistan who migrate to East Asia are also on the rise in response to changing immigration policies as these destinations face serious demographic and care crises. Yeung and Mu’s (2019) editorial introduction to a special issue on migration and marriage in the Asian context has provided a comprehensive description of inter-marriage trends, noting new patterns of Asian ‘marriage-scapes’ (Ishii 2016) with heterogeneous directions of movement, which challenge the conventional understanding of a South–North migratory trajectory underpinning the familiar ‘cartographies of desire’ (Constable 2005, p. 7). These new directions help to inform a different understanding of global connections, where marriage and family-making reveal the ‘unpredictable effects of global encounters across difference’ (Tsing 2005, p. 3). The growing trend of transnational marriage migration across Asia creates the impression (and perhaps imagination) of a new era of unimpeded motion when people are able to travel freely and marry anyone. But as Tsing (2005, p. 5) reminds us, ‘how we run depends on what shoes we have to run in’, and transnational movements and aspirations around marriage are often caught up in the frictions caused by immigration barriers, divergent cultural norms, body politics and incompatible visions of family life. These frictions may dampen desires and cause disruptions; they may also create new ways of negotiating with governmental powers, gender rules, and uneven terrains of transnational geopolitics. Writing on Chinese marriage migrants’ experiences of waiting in uncertainty in Singapore, Zhang et al. (2015) examine how conflicting aspirations and actions lead to a sense of dislocation and disempowerment for migrant women. Chinese migrant wives find themselves ‘trapped’ in small public housing flats in Singapore, isolated from friends and support networks, and become immobile as they are not allowed to work as dependants of their Singaporean husbands. Mismatched mobility expectations create ‘sticky engagements’ (Tsing 2005, p. 6) where strategies and priorities around self-projects and family ideologies have to be renegotiated through friction. Friction also points towards an analytical direction on im/mobilities, moving forward and backward, pauses and interruptions as well as motions and continuities that are far from smooth or straightforward. Marriage provides a pathway for transnational mobility; it also restricts when and how sexualised and ethnicised bodies can move across borders, especially how ‘gendered duties and desires’ (Cheng and Choo 2015, p. 657) might be activated at different life stages. In theorising how friction offers different social meanings to motion, Tsing (2005, p. 6) notes: Speaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of defining movement, cultural form, and agency. Friction is not just about slowing things down. Friction is required to keep global power in motion. It shows us (as one advertising jingle put it) where the rubber meets the road. … Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding and particularising.

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction  315

Transnational marriage and family provide exactly the points of contact when ‘rubber meets the road’, where migrant bodies become intimate sites and potentially new ‘ethnic frontiers’ (Lan 2008) upon which productive and reproductive politics open up or close off opportunities for incorporation and further movement. In the case of Taiwan, as Lan (2008) explains, marriage migrants and migrant domestic helpers are subject to constant state control over their sexuality and reproduction. Such measures of control help to uphold moral orders of heteronormative marriage and domesticity. Close contact with foreign bodies within intimate relations and home spaces has ‘not always led to the relaxing of borders and prejudices but often prompt an anxiety to reclaim territorial and social exclusion’ (Lan 2008, p. 857). Such anxiety characterises the kind of friction migrants encounter on a daily basis, which implicate uneven terrains of transnational geopolitics, and hierarchical processes of differentiation. In what follows, I will detail two key aspects where friction is acutely experienced as marriage migrants move across borders. The first explores what Bélanger and Silvey (2020) call ‘an im/mobility turn’ that looks at multiple forms of immobilities generated by regulations, inequalities, and divergent disciplinary regimes. With the im/mobility turn, it is possible to make clear that marriage migration is often fraught with many complications, and that migrant precarity and migrant waiting are not an indication of exceptional circumstances but a gendered and embodied everyday norm. The second looks closely at the intimate geopolitics across time and space that weave together unequal relations and mixed desires. Just as Shubin (Chapter 4 in this volume) explains the importance of unsettling dominant approaches of framing and narrating time as synchronous progression of migrant life course and life projects, this chapter traces historical specificities of intimate unions that involve moving bodies across territorial and socio-temporal boundaries. I show continuities and differences in the way relationships and relationalities are shaped by individual as well as familial aspirations, and by temporal and longer-term mobility strategies.

FRICTION AS INTERRUPTED MOBILITIES When Sheller and Urry (2006) observed a ‘mobilities turn’ where ‘all the world seems to be on the move’, they also cautioned against a ‘romantic reading of mobility’ especially the ‘privileging of cosmopolitan mobility’ over other forms of movement without taking into consideration mobility’s relation to power. Friction provides a more grounded and less romantic reading of mobility as it sheds light on rough contact when dreams of cosmopolitan lives are rubbed against realities of borders and checkpoints, gendered confines and multiple misrecognitions. Transnational migrants are often inspired to venture out of their familiar social and cultural environments and seek opportunities for work, love, care, and a better life elsewhere (Faier 2009). But their ‘venturing out’ is likely to be contained within the structures ordered by familial, social and sovereign regimes on both sides of the border. In this sense, transmigrants’ desire for unimpeded physical and social mobility brings them face to face with delays and dilemmas that may force them to slow down, find a detour, and

316  Handbook on transnationalism

negotiate alternative pathways. Friction as interrupted mobilities provides a space in-between where migrants carry out different approaches of ‘self-fashioning’ (Ong 2008), as a conscious practice of adaptation and to gain recognition. Such practices reflect what Elliott and Urry (2010) call ‘portable personhood’ when mobile lives become socially and spatially fragmented. As migrant self-making becomes a ‘portable’ project, interruptions and pauses are perhaps the expected ‘glitches’ that could be negotiated away with patience, will, and resources. In Zhang et al.’s (2015) study on Chinese marriage migrants in Singapore, interruptions and waiting become a key theme when aspirational women have to refashion a sense of self and become ‘proper housewives’ living in Singapore’s hinterland. Their self-transformation includes dressing down deliberately, switching to a more frugal lifestyle, and speaking in Chinese dialects at home – all of which are incompatible with migrant expectations of living a ‘cosmopolitan life’ in Singapore. These practices, nevertheless, are regarded as a necessary step and strategy for them to gain recognition and acceptance in family and society. This compromising situation creates friction on family relations and women’s self-perception. Waiting in the hope of regaining ‘real mobility’ in a foreseeable future shapes women’s subjective experience of living in uncertainty. Caren Freeman’s (2011) detailed ethnographic study also notes such a state of uncertainty when Chinese women of ethnic Korean origin (i.e. Chosŏnjok women) migrate to South Korea for marriage and work. Freeman argues that Chosŏnjok women’s mobility is deeply embedded in the ‘gendered geographies of power’ (Mahler and Pessar, 2010) that illuminate the broader transnational space of contested marriageability and employability. Chosŏnjok women in South Korea dream of upward social mobility as they ‘climb up’ an imagined ladder of destinations only to confront the harsh reality of multiple restrictions enforced through gender norms, citizenship politics, and the hierarchies of national/ethnic identities. These restrictions, experienced as a halt in Chosŏnjok women’s mobility projects, create interruptions and frictions that limit women’s mobile desires and aspirations. Nevertheless, transnational marriages continue to serve an instrumental purpose for Chosŏnjok women to gain access and legitimacy in Korea over time, providing further pathways for bringing friends and kin across national borders as a strategy to form stronger ethnic networks within the host society and consolidate kinship relations back home. Focused on rural Korea, Jung (2012) documents a prevalent feeling of unease and isolation when ‘moving through the public spaces of the community is a formidable task’ for marriage migrants who ‘rely on the company of their husbands or fathers-in-law to move around’ (Jung 2012, p. 201). Intriguingly, friction and anxiety are most noticeably felt when migrant women marry into relationships not only as foreign wives but also foreign daughters-in-law who have to negotiate different inter-generational power dynamics. Migrant wives speak of constant feelings of being under surveillance and in isolation on a daily basis. While wives do not enjoy the company of their in-laws, they still go out together or travel further afield in their presence as a necessary compromise to regain a degree of mobility. ‘Going out’ provides opportunities for migrant wives to expand on friendship circles and ethnic net-

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction  317

works that are crucial for providing immediate help and moral support. Wives from different countries such as Mongolia and Uzbekistan form inter-ethnic networks based on a loosely defined ‘Asian’ identity as they speak of their positionality not as a ‘foreign bride’ but as a ‘cosmopolitan wife’ (Jung 2012, p. 204). There are a number of other in-depth studies that document similar experiences of migrant women’s interrupted mobilities and their situated strategies of coping with differences, making adaptation, and negotiating power relations within family and community spaces (Sheu 2007; Friedman 2016). While most of these migrant strategies are reminders of the kind of ‘transnational patriarchal bargains’ that normalise and reinforce gendered and classed inequalities across borders, these ‘bargaining’ practices also reflect the productive potential of engaging with friction and transforming its politics (Kandiyoti 1988). Shared experiences of isolation and difficulties may lead to enhanced informal solidarities across ethnic and national boundaries when a broader sense of ‘sisterhood’ and womanhood is shared among marriage migrants as a form of empowerment and in collective claims-making (Bonifacio 2009; Kim 2013). Interrupted mobilities can be debilitating yet hopeful at the same time, pushing migrants to seek non-linear, alternative pathways in their mobility projects as these women carefully navigate spaces of possibility across and within state boundaries (Lu et al. 2016).

FRICTION AND THE INTIMATE GEOPOLITICS In marriage migration, the concept of friction also reminds scholars of the historical specificities of mobile practices and the emergent patterns of border-crossing motivated by diverse imaginations of life elsewhere and socially mediated desires of the other from afar. Marrying across geographical distances and socio-cultural differences is certainly not a new phenomenon. The movement of bodies across national borders in the facilitation of marriage and other reproductive purposes has always been a central project of the empire and its colonial missions. Journalist Anne de Courcy (2012) told stories of ‘the fishing fleet’ – young British women who became ‘husband hunters’ and pursued eligible British men working as colonial administrators, businessmen, and soldiers in the Raj since the mid-nineteenth century. De Courcy’s tales depicted these young women as both desperate and hopeful, willing to travel across the seas in search of decent husbands to fulfil their destinies as wives and mothers so that they could retain social respectability. Similar stories continued well into the early twentieth century when Japanese women migrated to the United States and Canada as ‘picture brides’ to the first generation of Japanese immigrant men (Ayukawa 1995). In the 1940s, ‘war brides’ formed the largest group of female migrants from Britain to be married to American G.I.s (Virden 1996). At the turn of the twentieth century, women from China and Japan arrived in Southeast Asia in the wake of the migrant coolie economy under British colonial rule and became lovers, wives and concubines to migrant labourers and traders (Rerceretnam 2012). Many of such conjugal arrangements challenged long-held marriage norms and crossed ethnic

318  Handbook on transnationalism

and religious boundaries (Loos 2008). These earlier forms of transnational intimacies show that movements across borders for conjugal and reproductive purposes have been historically facilitated and regulated to suit different social, cultural and political agendas. Since the 1990s, economic globalisation and the increasing opportunities for transnational migration have altered the geopolitical dynamics of work and family life, and reordered imaginations of desirable and undesirable migration destinations. The ‘globalisation of biography’ (Beck 2000, p. 73) shows how individual lives have been transformed by this new reality of ‘globality in one’s own life’ (Beck 2002, p. 24), where transnational processes begin to generate diverse ways of organising one’s intimate identities and a sense of ‘belonging in different worlds’ (also see Mazzucato and van Geel, Chapter 13 in this volume). Constable’s (2003) ethnography on ‘romance on a global stage’ notes this persistent ‘cultural logic of desire’ that tells the tale of how love and intimacy continue to be informed by a history of colonialism between nations, and how new formations of geopolitical hierarchies alter the geography of desire at both local and global scales. Lieba Faier’s (2009) ethnography of Filipinas in rural Japan gives a nuanced examination of the kind of intimate encounters between Filipina migrants and Japanese men, set in the context of a history of military and cultural engagements between the Philippines, Japan and the United States. Even as Filipinas dream about Japan as a second America, a destination that evokes notions of wealth, freedom and adventure, many find marriage to rural Japanese men a pathway leading to a dead end. While intimate encounters between migrant wives and Japanese husbands may feature as embodied sites of hybrid cosmopolitan identities and the performative politics of belonging, they also make clear the commonalities and divergences in norms of love and care within patriarchal families. Recent scholarly work has explored how gendered marriage and mobility patterns shape women’s transnational journeys, not only as marriage partners but also filial daughters who are expected to make provision to their natal families back home (Thai 2012; Khoo and Yeoh 2018). Thai (2012) notes that one of the key motivations for Vietnamese women to migrate and marry overseas partners is to provide financial support to parents and family members back in the homeland. They take on roles as ‘transnational daughters’ who are expected to bring monetary benefits back to their families and kin. Yeoh et al. (2013) explore the social meaning of remittances and chart connections ‘between two families’ as Vietnamese marriage migrants negotiate relationships with marital and natal families. Sending remittances becomes a significant ‘act of recognition’ for Vietnamese marriage migrants as they enact transnational identities as filial daughters. Sending money home as an act of care also shows how interconnected family lives are constantly shaped by differences in power and resources across contexts, when migrants negotiate relations of reciprocity and support at home (Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume). In northern Thailand, migrant Thai wives who are married to foreign husbands are expected to become not only ‘dutiful daughters’ to their natal families, but also patrons and sponsors of their Thai community (Angeles and Sunanta 2009). The whole rural

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction  319

community demands ‘daughter duty’ from migrant wives as the community itself is recognised as a familial extension. Thai wives are therefore expected to not only take care of their immediate family members and kin, but also make contributions to schools, temples, and community affairs. Such ‘duty calls’ could trigger tension and friction within transnational marriages, especially when money becomes a constant issue of familial conflict and discontent. Husbands resent the fact that they have been treated like a ‘walking ATM’ (Thompson et al. 2016, p. 60), and feel pressured to keep up with masculine roles as breadwinners and providers on a transnational scale (Cheng et al. 2014). Money is symbolic of the many forms of friction embedded in transnational processes, especially in the case of marriage migration where wives as dependants do not have the means to earn their own income in host societies. Money, with its associated meanings of status, dignity and security, brings to light complex emotional negotiations involved in transnational family practices. Husbands often view their wives’ remittance-sending as ‘extra’ and sometimes unnecessary spending, while wives feel the strain of juggling the desires and needs between marital and natal families (Yeoh et al. 2013). Acts of juggling and negotiations around remittances invariably monetise family relationships across borders as they show complex social obligations that underpin the imbalanced reciprocity within transnational family spaces (Thai 2014). Husbands’ accounts of family finances and masculine identities provide an important perspective of the intimate negotiations within transnational marital and familial relations. Indeed, in the familiar stories of global romance and intimate encounters, women on the move are routinely featured as the prominent social actor whereas men’s presence is less visible (Kim 2010; Chung et al. 2016, p. 464). A few studies on men as marriage migrants (e.g. Gallo 2006; Charsley and Liversage, 2015; Thompson et al., 2016) focus on their experiences and expressions of masculinity, offering insightful theorisation on transnational mobility and intimacy from men’s perspective. Charsley and Liversage’s study (2015), in particular, gives voices to ‘silenced husbands’ who are Pakistani and Turkish nationals living in Europe as marriage migrants and explores how transnational marriage migration has destabilised men’s lives and their sense of masculinity as they experience unexpected hardship and a sense of defencelessness. Thompson et al. (2016) offer stories of Western men (farang men) living in Thailand as foreign husbands and sons-in-law who are constantly negotiating their masculine identities in relation to other Western sex tourists in Thailand and the Thai families they have married into. These accounts provide a much-needed perspective on men’s encounters and the various forms of friction they experience as migrant husbands. While they may be small in number in comparison to female marriage migrants in Asia and beyond, their gendered encounters with biopolitical borders and transnational patriarchal norms help to open up new dimensions of the global intimate. From the ‘husband hunters’ of the ‘fishing fleet’ to the ‘war brides’ and ‘picture brides’ in the early twentieth century, from cosmopolitan wives to transnational filial daughters under globalisation, migrant women continue to cross borders in pursuit of their dreams and aspirations, be it social acceptance, autonomy, adventure, or

320  Handbook on transnationalism

familial obligation and duty. Their motivations and movements reflect women’s awareness of the uneven geopolitics and various routes of possibility. Historical specificities of colonial (and postcolonial) encounters as well as economic globalisation shape how notions of desire and despair inform intimate liaisons, giving them different meanings and particular cultural and social connotations across context. Migrant spouses experience vulnerabilities and empowerment at the same time as they take on multiple subject positions as wives and daughters, dependants and care-givers in different home and community spaces. Current studies show that both migrant wives and migrant husbands have to uphold gendered expectations and family norms across geopolitical territories and social fields, although many are able to make bargains for freedom and recognition to varying degrees. Friction is always at the heart of intimate cross-border unions as bodies come together and bring with them the more complex networks of families and kin, communities and nations. When cosmopolitan Filipinas go to rural Japan in search of America, and when Western men arrive in rural Thailand as farang husbands, friction strings together divergent locations and destinations that bring these women and men towards unexpected marriage destinies. In the intimate geopolitics of marriage and transnational family life, friction creates tension as it fastens otherwise loosely connected social relations.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS This chapter uses friction to shed light on transnational marriage migration within the broader Asian context. Two main points on friction are discussed in relation to the gendered experiences of im/mobilities and the intimate geopolitics of marriage and family life on a transnational scale. Analytically, friction can potentially open up in-depth discussions on emergent trends and practices around transnational social relations. Older notions of global hypergamy are already on the wane as migrants embrace more diverse forms of ‘marriage destinies’ (Khoo and Yeoh 2018). Friction shows the ‘entanglements of migration and marriage’ where migrants inhabit the ‘interstices between individual aspirations and social (gendered) obligations’ (Khoo and Yeoh 2018, p. 704). It is also clear that ‘South–South marriages’ are on the rise, fundamentally challenging long-held assumptions about desirable marriage destinations. Tokoro (2016) shows the emergent reversal of the centre–periphery imagination and new patterns of marriage migration that produce novel geopolitical hierarchies. China, for example, has become a desirable migration destination in recent years for women from Vietnam and Russia (Barabantseva and Grillot 2019). Vietnamese and Russian marriage migration to China indicates particular historical, racialised and gendered forces that transform people’s imagination and desire. It also provides impetus for the Chinese state to revise regulatory and legal frameworks to incorporate these foreign bodies into the familial and reproductive domains of Chinese social life. With these changes in destination politics, it is important to reconsider familiar dynamics of intimacy, marriage and transnationalism and to take into account

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction  321

emerging themes previously not recognised. These may include thinking through different notions of skills, affinity, and how the remapping of self and other create new articulations of desire. Friedman’s (2016) study of professional marriage migrants from mainland China to Taiwan, for example, provides a good example of how highly educated wives are capable of manoeuvring through immigration policies that restrict their access to skilled work. The lack of skills recognition in host societies creates friction when migrants wish to be recognised not only as wives and mothers but also as professionals with particular knowledge and skillsets. Friedman critiques a persistent labelling of migrant identities that associates skill with labour migration and care and reproduction with family migration. The friction around skill mismatch and skill misrecognition felt by many marriage migrants can contribute to feelings of underappreciation and self-doubt, when educated professionals experience not only a sudden loss of mobility but also a loss of their entire professional identity. Apart from skills, friction makes its presence felt through paradoxical imaginations of the marriage migrant. She is both a figure of the traditional woman whose simplicity is suitable for Asian family life and at the same time a potential ‘gold digger’ with unrestrained promiscuity (Zhang and Yeoh 2020). This ambiguous construction of the marriage migrant reflects a longstanding orientalising gaze reminiscent of a colonial ‘cultural logic of desire’ (Constable 2003) in postcolonial societies. Friction shows the entanglement of everyday desires informed by this gaze and ‘the unexpectedly persistent effects of particular historical encounters’ (Tsing 2005, p. 2). As men and their families search for more authentic ‘oriental simplicity’ in marriage migrants, they reproduce patriarchal family ideologies on the basis of broader geopolitical hierarchies of nation-states (Zhang and Yeoh 2020). Lastly, friction as interrupted mobilities shows how desires of smooth border-crossing are often met with delays, disorientation, and diversion. It also creates possibilities for new connections to be built on shared experiences of misrecognition and forced dependency. Friction, when understood through the intimate geopolitics of desires and the moral geographies of care and duty, brings to light situated gender dynamics and transnational familial negotiations. For quite some time, writings on transnational marriages have tried to move away from the ‘victim versus agent’ binary and suggest a continuum of positionalities and possibilities where migrant women can be recognised as social and economic agents with varied experiences of multiple forms of exclusion and vulnerabilities (Ishii 2016; Yeung and Mu 2019). Yeoh and Chee (2015) also point out the shifting trajectories when marriage migrants try and change their subject position in the face of hardened boundaries between family life and work. These shifting trajectories create ‘categorical instability’ (Yeoh and Chee 2015, p. 199) that unsettles identity binaries and enables a more fluid understanding of womanhood encompassing a broad sense of social and political agency. Taking a friction perspective helps to make clear this embedded ambiguity and changeability in the processes of marriage and migration, as both women and men perform transnational productive and reproductive roles.

322  Handbook on transnationalism

REFERENCES Angeles, Leonora C. and Sirijit Sunanta (2009), ‘Demanding daughter duty: Gender, community, village transformation, and transnational marriages in northeast Thailand’, Critical Asian Studies, 41 (4), 549–74. Ayukawa, Michiko (1995), ‘Good wives and wise mothers: Japanese picture brides in early twentieth-century British Columbia’, BC Studies, 105–106, 103–18. Barabantseva, Elena and Caroline Grillot (2019), ‘Representations and regulations of marriage migration from Russia and Vietnam in the People’s Republic of China’, Journal of Asian Studies, 78 (2), 285–308. BBC (2019), ‘South Korea shocked by abuse of “marriage migrants”’, 10 July, accessed 20 November 2019 at https://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​news/​world​-asia​-48917935. Beck, Ulrich (2000), What is Globalisation?, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich (2002), ‘The cosmopolitan society and its enemies’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (1–2), 17–44. Bélanger, Danièle and Rachel Silvey (2020), ‘An im/mobility turn: Power geometries of care and migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46 (16), 3423–40. Bonifacio, Glenda (2009), ‘Activism from the margins: Filipino marriage migrants in Australia’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 30 (3), 142–68. Charsley, Katharine (2013), Transnational Pakistani Connections: Marrying ‘Back Home’, London: Routledge. Charsley, Katharine and Anika Liversage (2015), ‘Silenced husbands: Muslim marriage migration and masculinity’, Men and Masculinities, 18 (4), 489–508. Cheng, Catherine M.C. and Hae Yeon Choo (2015), ‘Women’s migration for domestic work and cross‐border marriage in East and Southeast Asia: Reproducing domesticity, contesting citizenship’, Sociology Compass, 9 (8), 654–67. Cheng, Yi’En, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Juan Zhang (2014), ‘Still “breadwinners” and “providers”: Singaporean husbands, money, and masculinity in transnational marriages’, Gender, Place & Culture, 22 (6), 867–83. Chung, Chinsung, Keuntae Kim, and Nicola Piper (2016), ‘Marriage migration in Southeast and East Asia revisited through a migration-development nexus lens’, Critical Asian Studies, 48 (4), 463–72. Constable, Nicole (2003), Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Constable, Nicole (ed.) (2005), Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. de Courcy, Anne (2012), The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj, London: Orion Publishing. Elliott, Anthony and John Urry (2010), Mobile Lives, London: Routledge. Faier, Lieba (2009), Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Freeman, Caren (2011), Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friedman, Sara L. (2016), ‘Revaluing marital immigrants: Educated professionalism and precariousness among Chinese spouses in Taiwan’, Critical Asian Studies, 48 (4), 511–27. Gallo, Ester (2006), ‘Italy is not a good place for men: Narratives of places, marriage and masculinity among Malayali migrants’, Global Networks, 6 (4), 357–72. Gray, Breda (2011), ‘Becoming non-migrant: Lives worth waiting for’, Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (3), 417–32. Ishii, Sari (ed.) (2016), Marriage Migration in Asia: Emerging Minorities at the Frontiers of Nation-States, Singapore: NUS Press.

Transnational marriage migration in Asia and its friction  323

Jongwilaiwan, Rattana and Eric C. Thompson (2013), ‘Thai wives in Singapore and transnational patriarchy’, Gender, Place & Culture, 20 (3), 363­–81. Jung, Hyunjoo (2012), ‘Constructing scales and renegotiating identities: Women marriage migrants in South Korea’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 21 (2), 193–215. Kandiyoti, Daniz (1988), ‘Bargaining with patriarchy’, Gender and Society, 2 (3), 274–90. Khoo, Choon Yen and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2018), ‘The entanglements of migration and marriage: Negotiating mobility projects among young Indonesian women from migrant-sending villages’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 39 (6), 704–21. Kim, Daisy Y. (2015), ‘Resisting migrant precarity: A critique of human rights advocacy for marriage migrants in South Korea’, Critical Asian Studies, 49 (1), 1–17. Kim, Minjeong (2010), ‘Gender and international marriage migration’, Sociology Compass, 4 (9), 718–31. Kim, Minjeong (2013), ‘Citizenship projects for marriage migrants in South Korea: Intersecting motherhood with ethnicity and class’, Social Politics, 20 (4), 455–81. Lamb, Kate (2019), ‘South Korea bans men with history of abuse from marrying foreign women’, The Guardian, 11 October, accessed 20 November 2019 at https://​ www​ .theguardian​.com/​world/​2019/​oct/​11/​south​-korea​-bans​-men​-with​-history​-of​-abuse​-from​ -marrying​-foreign​-women. Lan, Pei-Chia (2008), ‘Migrant women’s bodies as boundary markers: Reproductive crisis and sexual control in the ethnic frontiers of Taiwan’, Signs, 33 (4), 833–61. Lee, Claire (2019), ‘In rapidly aging South Korea, the “model daughter-in-law” is Filipino’, The Japan Times, 15 November, accessed 20 November 2019 at https://​www​.japantimes​.co​ .jp/​news/​2019/​11/​15/​asia​-pacific/​social​-issues​-asia​-pacific/​south​-korea​-model​-daughter​-in​ -law​-filipino/​#​.XeutQuj7Sul. Loos, Tamara (2008), ‘A history of sex and the state in Southeast Asia: Class, intimacy and invisibility’, Citizenship Studies, 12 (1), 27–43. Lu, Melody C.W., Juan Zhang, Hee Leng Chee and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2016), ‘Multiple mobilities and entrepreneurial modalities of Chinese marriage migrants in Malaysia’, Current Sociology, 64 (3), 411–29. Mahler, Sarah J. and Patricia R. Pessar (2010), ‘Gendered geographies of power: Analyzing gender across transnational spaces’, Identities, 7 (4), 441–59. Ong, Aihwa (2008), ‘Self-fashioning Shanghainese: Dancing across spheres of value’, in L. Zhang and A. Ong (eds), Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 182–96. Palriwala, Rajni and Patricia Uberoi (eds) (2008), Marriage, Migration and Gender, New Delhi: Sage. Philippine Daily Inquirer (2019), ‘From PH bride to S. Korea “model in-law”’, 15 November, accessed 10 January 2020 at https://​www​.pressreader​.com/​philippines/​philippine​-daily​ -inquirer​-1109/​20191115/​281522227914951. Piper, Nicola and Sohoon Lee (2016), ‘Marriage migration, migrant precarity, and social reproduction in Asia: An overview, Critical Asian Studies, 48 (4), 473–93. Piper, Nicola and Mina Roces (eds) (2003), Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Rerceretnam, Marc (2012), ‘Intermarriage in colonial Malaya and Singapore: A case study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Roman Catholic and Methodist Asian communities’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 43 (2), 302–23. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry (2006), ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (2), 207–26. Sheu, Yea-huey (2007), ‘Full responsibility with partial citizenship: Immigrant wives in Taiwan’, Social Policy & Administration, 41 (2), 179–96.

324  Handbook on transnationalism

Siddiqui, Tasneem (2008), ‘Migration and gender in Asia’, paper presented at United Nations Expert Group Meeting on International Migration and Development in Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, Thailand, 20–21 September. Thai, Hung Cam (2008), For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Thai, Hung Cam (2012), ‘The dual roles of transnational daughters and transnational wives: Monetary intentions, expectations and dilemmas’, Global Networks, 12 (2), 216–32. Thai, Hung Cam (2014), Insufficient Funds: The Culture of Money in Low-Wage Transnational Families, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Thompson, Eric C., Pattana Kitiarsa and Suriya Smutkupt (2016), ‘From sex tourist to son-in-law: Emergent masculinities and transient subjectivities of farang men in Thailand’, Current Anthropology, 57 (1), 53–71. Tokoro, Ikuya (2016), ‘Centre/periphery flow reversed? Twenty years of cross-border marriages between Philippine women and Japanese men’, in S. Ishii (ed.), Marriage Migration in Asia: Emerging Minorities at the Frontiers of Nation-States, Singapore: NUS Press, pp. 105–17. Tsing, Anna L. (2005), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. UNESCAP (2015), Asia-Pacific Migration Report 2015: Migrants’ Contributions to Development, accessed 10 January 2020 at https://​www​.unescap​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​ SDD​%20AP​%20Migration​%20Report​%20report​%20v6​-1​-E​.pdf. Virden, Jenel (1996), Good-Bye Piccadilly: British War Brides in America, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Heng Leng Chee (2015), ‘Migrant wives, migrant workers, and the negotiation of (il)legality in Singapore’, in S.L. Friedman and P. Mahdavi (eds), Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility Across Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 184–205. Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Heng Leng Chee, Thi K.D. Vu and Yi’En Cheng (2013), ‘Between two families: The social meaning of remittances for Vietnamese marriage migrants in Singapore’, Global Networks, 13 (4), 441–58. Yeung, Wei-Jun J. and Zheng Mu (2019), ‘Migration and marriage in Asian contexts’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46 (14), 2863­–79. Zhang, Juan, Melody C.W. Lu and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2015), ‘Cross-border marriage, transgovernmental friction, and waiting’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33 (2), 229–46. Zhang, Juan and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2020), ‘Searching for Oriental simplicity: Foreign brides and the Asian family in Singapore’, Gender, Place & Culture, 27 (10), 1415–37.

21. Transnational mobilities and return migration Anastasia Christou and Brenda S.A. Yeoh

INTRODUCTION The transnationalism approach to the study of contemporary population movements and migration-related phenomena highlights at least three important observations about mobility across borders. For one, it accounts for the flexibility and multi-directionality of migration as an embodied and emotional experience of border crossings between two or more nation-states (while acknowledging the complexity and friction that might be involved in all kinds of movement). Second, it energises elements of agency (even within structural constraints and conditions) for migrants who are able to make a choice for both livelihood and identity reasons to maintain relations across borders. Third, it prompts attention to multi-stranded relations that connect transnational communities and across transnational social spaces (Faist 1998). In this context, the interconnection between transnationalism and the phenomenon usually labelled ‘return migration’ is not always straightforward. Carling and Erdal (2014, p. 2) suggest that the two phenomena overlap, at times blurred but also distinct, and are complexly folded into migration life histories and trajectories. Hence, migrants can be transnationals with intentions of return, or returnees who have sustained transnational lives, while homecoming visits can also figure in-between these periods as markers of life events. What characterises the array of movements is a clear sense of the diversity of experiences and a fluidity of spatio-temporal modalities that are shaped by age, gender, generation and life stage. As Sinatti (2011) explains, by emphasising that people live simultaneous lives in multiple locations and forge interconnectedness between home and host countries, the transnational lens has shown that return migration may take different forms and with different degrees of temporal permanence. This chapter first discusses conceptual linkages between notions of return, return migration and transnational mobilities before reviewing two main themes where the transnational approach has been significant in destabilising binary fixities in the way ‘return migration’ has been studied. In the first theme, we give attention to the burgeoning literature on ancestral returns, ethnic return migration and homeland visits among settled immigrants of different generations. In the second theme, we turn to the question of return among transnational migrants who undertake temporary overseas sojourns – primarily to improve personal and family livelihood opportunities – to explore issues of reintegration, adaptation, social remittances and identity 325

326  Handbook on transnationalism

negotiations. In the conclusion, we reflect on the material and emotional dimensions of transnational return as an idealised but provisional form of mobility.

FROM RETURN MIGRATION TO TRANSNATIONAL RETURN MOBILITIES As Xiang (2013, p. 7) observes, historically return has been ‘a norm rather than an exception’ in human migration. He goes on to note that ‘Ravenstein’s (1885) “laws of migration” stipulated that every migration stream is accompanied by a counter flow, and the migration-system theory of the 1970s identified return as an integral part of all migration systems’ (Xiang 2013, p. 7). As the norm, return migration often connotes the restoration of the natural and social order in the country of origin when the initial reasons for migration have dissipated or the aims of migration accomplished. Yet, return does not always signify virtuous or victorious completion but can be accompanied by a variegated range of emotions and outcomes, and returning migrants may experience hoped-for reunions, ignominious failure, or alienation in their own homeland. As King and Christou (2011, p. 454) put it, ‘Within (return) migration, there is a tension between mobility on the one hand, and a search for a stable home(land) in which to settle and “belong” on the other.’ Early typologies of return migration (Gmelch 1980; Long and Oxfeld 2004) have utilised several dimensions in classifying the phenomenon. These include the length of time migrants intended to remain abroad (e.g. temporary stays to permanent settlement), the place of return (e.g. original place or reconstructed homeland), and their reason(s) for returning (e.g. different degrees of volition from voluntary return to forced repatriation). In these earlier studies, short visits without the intention of remaining at home are usually excluded from the compass of return migration. More recent scholarship influenced by the mobilities paradigm and the transnationalism optic has questioned the hard dichotomy between migration and return and suggested that they should be seen as ‘repeated instances of mobility’ in the context of transnational social fields (Erdal et al. 2016, p. 836). As King and Christou (2011, p. 453) write, ‘What characterises recent (transnationalism) studies of return is a far more variegated and nuanced exploration of the ontology of return, stretching its meaning across time, space and generations’. The temporality of return is seen as provisional and elastic, as the actual outcome may not cohere with the original intention and what was intended as permanent return may turn out temporary, and vice versa. In the degree that migration decisions are open to future change, so are both considerations and decisions about return migration (Carling and Erdal 2014, pp. 2–3). Similarly, the place of return can be differently construed and have various expressions, from the real to the imagined, the desired to the denied (King and Christou 2011, p. 453). While the earlier migration literature tends to privilege the perspective of immigrants and hence denote return migration as ‘looking back’ to their homeland communities, scholars writing about ‘reverse transnationalism’ shift the perspective to that of returnees ‘looking back’ to left-behind kin in host societies (Reynolds 2011).

Transnational mobilities and return migration  327

Beyond the temporal and spatial variability in physical acts of return, transnational return migration may also be emotionally conflated with reunification with left-behind children in the case of parental migration, or a search for roots, belonging and re-grounding in the case of second (and subsequent) generations of immigrants. By emphasising the interconnectedness and mutability of transnational mobility pathways, transnationalism as an approach draws out the embodied and emotional dimensions of return migration as part and parcel of homecoming (Christou 2011). Just as there is no singular process of return, ‘the processes of homecoming are characterized by considerable complexity and ambivalence’ (Markowitz and Stefansson 2004, p. 4). In this light, scholars have drawn on the term transnational ‘return mobilities’ to embrace a more expansive conceptual terrain offering further elasticity in considering people movements that retain both the transnational and the homecoming elements interchangeably and flexibly. For King and Christou (2011, pp. 460–461), a typology of ‘return mobilities’ can be extended to encompass short-term visits, longer-term return migrations and circulation within transnational social fields; more crucially, they argue that ‘migration’ and ‘return’ are not ‘discrete events’ but ‘ongoing processes of global mobility’ predicated on multi-directionality, multi-destinations, and unplanned detours.

ETHNIC RETURN MIGRATIONS AND HOMELAND VISITS In recent decades, scholars have explored the growing importance and extensive variety of return mobilities to ancestral and parental homelands (King and Christou 2008, 2011; Tsuda 2018; Tsuda and Song 2019). In addition to much work that focuses on first- or 1.5-generation members of the diaspora who return to their natal homelands, there is also increasing interest in second and subsequent generations who engage in ‘ancestral return’ (or ‘diasporic returns’), whether for the long term, or as temporary sojourners, circular migrants or short-term visitors. While the later generations do not technically ‘return to a place from which [they] never came (in terms of birthplace statistics)’ (King et al. 2011, p. 2), they may have grown up ‘within a family socialisation which emphasised ethnic cultural capital and a strong ideology of return’ (Christou and King 2010, p. 639). The increasingly globalised economic and political turmoil of recent decades has led to social and personal uncertainty for many including ethnic minorities in host societies, and this in turn, has propelled growing streams of migrants to return to their ‘ethnic homelands’. Ethnic return migration may also involve migrating from less developed countries to economically more prosperous ancestral homelands in search of jobs and a higher standard of living (Tsuda 2018, p. 103). In other cases, such return movements – what Wessendorf (2007) calls ‘roots migration’ – are motivated by a desire to reconnect with ancestral culture or explore ethnic heritage. Regardless of motivation, a transnationalism approach to ethnic return migration introduces notions of provisionality and flux in approaching return migration not as

328  Handbook on transnationalism

a permanent or final move to the original ethnic homeland, but rather a constitutive element of sustained transnational mobility. Considerations regarding the possibility of return are affected by current conditions in the destination country as well as transnational ties to the country of origin. Mortensen (2014) observes that established legal status at destination in the form of citizenship may paradoxically serve as a trigger for return migration as it presents a safety valve should return migration become unsuccessful. In a related but different vein, Suh (2020) argues that for Korean American ethnic return migrants, the desire to return to their ancestral homeland is closely linked to the formation of an affirmative ethnic identity in the United States. Identification as a model minority ‘not only helped them acculturate into American society, but also often served to jumpstart their interests in and explorations of an abstracted Korea and Korean culture’ (Suh 2020, p. 1083). For male return migrants in particular, ‘American’ status can be harnessed as surplus social capital that can act as a buffer against racial marginalisation and a form of empowerment against otherwise marginalised masculine identities (Suh 2017). Scholars have also drawn on a transnationalism perspective to show that return migration is not always propelled by material considerations but motivated by a complex infrastructure of emotion. As Lee’s (2018) ethnographic study of 1.5 generation Korean New Zealanders reveals, return migrants demonstrate a multifaceted portrait of return motivations that combines feelings of comfort and belongingness with strategic calculations of social and financial benefits. Similarly, Suh (2020, p. 1085) depicts return journeys of Korean Americans primarily as ‘affective quests for cultural exploration and immersion’ while highlighting the significance of ‘personal life events and opportunities, economic or otherwise … in actualizing the “return” desires that individuals already possess’. In Boccagni’s (2011, p. 469) research on transnational migration flows between southern Ecuador and northern Italy, he found that the discourse of return is often lined with ‘evocative and emotional relevance’ as ‘it mirrors the systematic attachment and self-projection of most Ecuadorian immigrants towards their motherland’. For transnational migrants, the ‘myth of return’ functions as ‘a “natural” reference point for their identification and an ultimate aim for their future lives’ (Boccagni 2011, p. 470). The dream of returning is a particularly important element in the construction of a collective diasporic identity, signifying emotional connectivity and a ‘way of belonging’ to a particular group (Wessendorf 2007, p. 1090). In reality, however, return tends to be systematically deferred, and when it does take place, it may be prompted by migration ‘failure’ as much as by the accomplishment of initial migration goals (Boccagni 2011). In this sense, return migration features as a deeply rooted ontological project that helps migrants make sense of migration hardships and endure them better. The ‘myth’ of eventual return serves as a powerful cohesive force that binds together diasporic or ethnic minority communities in confronting the vicissitudes of migrant life (Oeppen 2013). While ancestral return is often mythologised, the actual experience of return may vary. Second- (and subsequent) generation ethnic return migrants – sometimes of ethnic minority status in their country of birth – are often forced to reconsider the

Transnational mobilities and return migration  329

meaning of homeland upon return as previously idealised images of their ancestral home run up against reality (Tsuda 2018). For Japanese-descent nikkeijin from South America, for example, migrating to Japan renders them ‘minorities all over again because of their foreign cultural upbringing, causing some of them to feel that they are a people without a homeland’ (Tsuda 2018, p. 105). In a different example, Christou (2006a) explores the multiple zones of intersection and interaction between ‘home-host’ roles among second-generation Greek-Americans in the ancestral homeland using a transnational lens. By highlighting the role of family dynamics and conflictual processes in shaping acts of return migration as a project of self-deciphering and ‘an experiential reactive to the ethno-national narrative’ (p. 1052), she shows that the return migratory project involves ‘the multiple dynamics between sites of identification and sites of habituation’ (p. 1053). For second-generation Greek-Americans, the politics of inclusion and exclusion encountered in the ancestral homeland generate competing ‘narratives of (be)longing’ and fragmentary discourses of ‘Greekness’, ‘Americanness’ and ‘Europeanness’ in the interactive space of ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries (Christou 2006b, p. 831). In turning to return mobilities in later life among male, second-generation Greek-Americans, Christou (2016, p. 813) shows that homecoming return at this life stage is both transformative and variable: ‘neither fully Greek, nor American but having broken the hyphen’, returnees contend with unsettling or insurmountable ruptures in some cases and cultivate new freedoms in self-actualisation in other cases. Applying the transnationalism optic and recoding return as ‘return mobilities’ has also led scholars to connect short-term homeland visits to the longer prospect of more permanent forms of return migration. By unsettling the immigration/emigration binary that frames traditional migration theories, the transnational framework creates conceptual space ‘to incorporate a whole range of people: permanent settlers in the country of immigration and others who shuttle regularly between places of origin and of temporary overseas residence’ (Sinatti 2011, p. 154). In some cases, periodic visits are preparatory steps to pave the way towards eventual return; in other cases, return visits are part of a transnational lifestyle that can become a substitute for more permanent return migration altogether (Carling and Erdal 2014). Hence, migrants can be transnationals with intentions of return, or returnees who have sustained transnational lives, while homecoming visits can also figure in-between these periods as conduits of staged life events. ‘Return’ has also entered the lexicon of sending state regimes as they seek to proactively engage diasporic or emigrant populations in order to harness business opportunities or leverage the transfer of resources from diaspora communities to their homelands (Ho et al. 2015). These state-promulgated ‘diaspora strategies’ encourage transnational mobility by facilitating short-term visits to the homeland by easing visa schemes and promoting opportunities for trade and investments. The introduction in 2005 of the ‘Overseas Citizenship of India’, for example, ‘provided a mechanism and incentive for Overseas Indians who hold foreign passports to engage in business activities or freely pursue their careers across borders, or to return to India while retaining foreign citizenship’ (Upadhya 2013, p. 147).

330  Handbook on transnationalism

Another compelling angle of research positions homeland visits as ‘a performative act of belonging and (potentially) of researching and discovering one’s roots’ (King et al. 2011, p. 3). Among second- and later generation migrants, homeland visits in the form of ‘ancestral tourism’ – sometimes referred to as ‘roots tourism’ (Basu 2005; Wessendorf 2007) or ‘diaspora tourism’ (Coles and Timothy 2004) – are often motivated by a desire to reconnect with their ancestral roots, or discover family histories and explore genealogies of ‘roots’. In their ‘ethnographies of the new second generation’ among New York’s ethnic minorities, for example, Kasinitz et al. (2004, p. 6) found a growing level of interest connecting with their ancestral homelands. ‘Roots return’ may take the form of actual physical mobility, ranging from highly organised, packaged tours to visit places of special heritage interests, to more personal journeys undertaken by individuals or small family groups embarking on family tree research or visiting ancestral villages. Ancestral tourism – sometimes amounting to a form of secular pilgrimage (Baldassar 2001) – tends to invoke strong emotions such as nostalgia and belonging prior, during and after their visits (Basu 2005; Mehtiyeva and Prince 2020) as generational returnees find themselves negotiating ‘competing generational, ideological and moral reference paths, including those of their parents, grandparents, as well as their own real and imagined perspectives on their multiple homelands’ (King et al. 2011, pp. 2–3, referencing Levitt’s 2009 work). Diaspora tourism experiences also differ due to different migration histories and origins. Araujo (2010) discusses slavery heritage tourism as another form of ‘roots tourism’ for the African diaspora that may provoke a heightened sense of trauma (see also Bruner 1996). More generally, transnational return mobilities of different degrees of transience and permanence often involve the need to (re-)learn more about the ancestral homeland, and this learning process can have a threefold impact: on the one hand, the returnees act as cultural transmitters of knowledge, leading to an intergenerational transfer of knowledge and cultural capital (e.g. Michail and Christou 2016; King et al. 2011); on the other hand, the returnees absorb new experiential knowledge in their quest to learn ‘all things ancestral’ as a means of strengthening their sense of belonging, homing and identity (Christou 2011; Christou and King 2011; Christou 2006a). More importantly, a third set of ground-breaking realisations can emerge when the actual return, once imagined as a glorious ‘homecoming’, in practice turns out to be a devastatingly shocking event of marginalisation, exclusion and despair (cf. King et al. 2014; Christou 2006b; Christou and King 2006). Tsuda (2018) observes that the dislocations and disappointments of ethnic return migration and alienation in the ancestral homeland may strengthen a sense of deterritorialised nationalism and even nostalgia towards the natal homeland. In resisting marginalisation, Brazilian nikkeijin in Japan may choose to express their ‘Brazilian’ culture and foreignness in overt ways to avoid being mistaken as Japanese while demonstrating national allegiance and identification towards Brazil as their ‘true’ homeland (Tsuda 2003). Many eventually return to Brazil, but end up re-migrating to Japan for higher wages and livelihood sustenance, thus initiating a transnational cycle of circular migration. Caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of re-migrations,

Transnational mobilities and return migration  331

some Japanese Brazilians eke out ‘a liminal existence where they are economically marginalised in Brazil and socially marginalised in Japan’ (Tsuda 2018, p. 111). This sense of being ‘in-between’ home and host is also prominent among Ecuadorian returnees from Italy in Boccagni’s (2011, p. 475) study, who struggle with feelings of being trapped between on the one hand, better life opportunities overseas, and on the other, exposure at home to the same difficult circumstances that prompted their initial emigration in the first place. This sense of ‘relative deprivation’ in turn re-catalyses the desire to migrate once more, in order to reclaim the opportunities that immigrant life offers (Boccagni’s 2011, p. 475). Return migration thus features ‘less as a final adjustment than another stage in a continuing itinerary’ (Ley and Kobayashi 2005, pp. 112–13). Indeed, transnational returns can often exacerbate the challenges of mobility as resettlement in the homeland after decades abroad becomes an overwhelming task of self-negotiation and cultural translation. Everyday life can be replete with contradictions that do not cohere with what was conceived as a mythologised and idealised return. When notions of progress and development embraced in the time away become perceived as alien to the homeland, elements of ambivalence and trauma can emerge. Overarching ethnocultural discourses can also frustrate the homecoming. Return may translate into an act of relocation to a homeland that has turned ‘foreign’, result in the failure to adjust to changed practices in the homeland, or become a paradigmatic encounter of marginalisation and exclusion (cf. Christou 2006b). As a result, transnational returns can be mired in terrains of continuous emotional negotiations that in turn create the impulse for new and fluid mobility pathways. Differences in values, practices and lifestyles between ‘host’ versus ‘home’ countries can also become pronounced with return. This too can trigger new mobility projects that encourage returnees to embrace discourses of transnational global lives and mobile futures. In sum, for many who have embarked on pathways of mobility, migration and return migration their experiences are no longer easily distinguishable but become part of the ongoingness of transnational mobility.

RETURN MIGRATION, REINTEGRATION AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY Transnationalism scholars have argued that prospective returnees prepare for their reintegration into ‘home’ societies through strengthening transnational practices by sending remittances, investing in home economies and paying regular visits to their home countries (Cassarino 2004). In Duval’s (2004) study of return visits to the Caribbean, for example, he highlights that periodic visits, as well as other transnational activities, help migrants maintain social connections, which pave the way for eventual return. Similarly, Carling and Pettersen’s (2014) analysis of return migration intentions, which gives weight to the relative balance between integration (into host society) and transnational practices, concludes that the highest odds of planning return are among those who are strongly transnational and weakly integrated.

332  Handbook on transnationalism

In the reverse direction, what has been termed ‘post-return transnationalism’ (Carling and Erdal 2014) continues to matter for cultivating businesses and sustaining livelihoods, for instance when returnees depend on sustaining transnational trade linkages and business collaboration with their former country of residence. For example, Sinatti’s (2019) ethnographic research on return migration, entrepreneurship and development in Senegal reveals that for male return entrepreneurs, business practices are deeply rooted in transnational relationships with the former host country (Italy) in a bi-directional (not unidirectional) flow. Not only do transnational partnerships, with Italians or with other Senegalese migrants based abroad, often enhance the financial basis for investment, returnees are able to draw on innovative practices and new mind-sets learnt abroad to boost their businesses (Sinatti 2019). For these aspiring return businessmen, return migration is a deliberately chosen pathway to enact mobile capability and enhance entrepreneurial capacity. In other words, the process of return is conceived as a ‘new freedom’ to harness transnational connectivity and transferability to enhance personal capability after return. More generally, returnees can leverage transnational knowledge capital in negotiating cultural codes to create personal economic advantage (Christou 2006b), a practice that Wang (2016) refers to as ‘strategic in-betweenness’. As Cassarino (2004) asserts, the differential ability to mobilise resources through transnational linkages makes a difference to post-return experiences. Successful reintegration in home societies depends not only on the intention to return but needs to be combined with adequate resource mobilisation such as the ability to draw on social capital and networks in home and host countries. Conversely, ‘unprepared return with no resource mobilization results in difficult conditions after return and possible re-migration’ (Kleist 2020, p. 273). Focusing on involuntary return, Kleist (2020) distinguishes between three post-return scenarios: continued precariousness where deportees return to the same or worse socio-economic conditions as prior to migration; social and economic regeneration in the case of returnees who are able to reposition themselves as respectable, upwardly mobile persons; and re-migration where post-return uncertainties lead returnees to re-engage migration projects. Transnational activities can thus both support homeward integration or stem from a lack of reintegration, and in this sense transnationalism and integration need not be antithetical (Oeppen 2013). More broadly, this vein of work encourages us to consider return migration as part and parcel of a circular system of mobility and exchange that conjoins ‘migrant transnationalism’ and ‘post-return transnationalism’. Even when return migrants do not initiate further transnational rounds of re-migrations, scholars have pointed out that maintaining various forms of transnational practices can be significant in constructing post-return belonging and facilitating integration in the country of origin. De Bree et al.’s (2010) work on migrants who returned from the Netherlands to northeast Morocco demonstrates important gender and generation dimensions. Among first-generation male returnees, transnational practices not only helped spread the economic risk (e.g. buying Dutch insurance) but also enhanced their local social status (e.g. possessing Dutch citizenship or residency permits). For their female spouses, however, transnational practices were largely

Transnational mobilities and return migration  333

irrelevant in establishing a sense of home, as how ‘home’ tended to be constructed was less dependent on national boundaries and more focused on family relations (De Bree et al. 2010). Among second-generation adolescent returnees, social and economic integration was particularly fraught with difficulties and transnational practices neither solving nor attenuating feelings of being uprooted (De Bree et al. 2010). In addition to the body of work demonstrating the complex links between transnational networks and post-return survival strategies, an important outcome that emerges in the development of return migrants’ transnational identities is the diffusion and exchange of new ideas, values, behaviours and roles as returnees adapt to new cultural communities and experiment with familial roles in transnational spaces. This is best described as ‘social remittances’, a term introduced two decades ago and later revisited by Peggy Levitt (1998; 2001; 2015; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011, 2013; see also Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume) to denote that beyond the materialities of migration where economic capital and transactional practices are circulated between sending and receiving countries, other iterative circulations such as social and cultural capitals, ideas and identities are also exchanged. The literature on social remittances offers a great number of insights into how transnational ties unfold, revealing that the impact of remittances is equally important for those who send them and their reception upon return, as well as for those receiving them and their relations with returnees. Social remittances can have multiplier effects on home societies and this may involve change in communal practices, welfare arrangements and collective projects in the social and political arena, or introduce new business or trade practices in the economic sphere (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou 2017). Distinguishing between individual and collective social remittances, Levitt and Lamba-Nieves (2011, p. 3) make the case that in the latter, returnees ‘communicate in their capacity as members of a hometown association (HTA), political party or church … strongly affect[ing] what organisations do but also how they do it’. An interesting dimension of the work on the collective effect of social remittances and the growth of cultures of migration shows how social values and cultural practices acquired abroad and transmitted homewards can have a transformative effect on attitudes towards migration in places of origin. Suksomboon’s (2008) research on Thai migrant women in the Netherlands, for example, shows that as a result of raksa na (the Thai concept of ‘saving face’), when these women return for home visits or communicate with left-behind family and kin, there is a tendency to focus on successful overseas livelihoods and economic achievements and avoid the hard and gritty realities of migrant life (see also Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou, 2017). This in turns fuels the idea of migration as an aspirational pathway for socio-economic mobility, perpetuating the cycle of migration, ‘successful’ return and increased desire for migration among non-migrants who come to think of transnational migration as a hopeful dream that is within reach. In a parallel vein, Dhungel (2017) discusses the experience of Nepalese young women who went abroad for their education and returned home bearing new skills, knowledge and social norms which they are keen to transfer to others as a means to ‘give back’ to their country upon return. These new attitudes and perspectives of returnees have a multiplier effect in increasing the

334  Handbook on transnationalism

desire to move abroad for higher education among Nepalese youth. Dhungel (2017) also notes that social remittances do not only have positive effects for society and the family; instead, for some returnees, new views and practices acquired from their time overseas have also resulted in conflict-ridden relationships with their family members upon their return. This leads us to consider another important body of work on transnational return and social change that concerns changing gender roles and familial relationships, particularly among transnational migrants whose spouses and/or children are left behind in the country of origin (Hoang and Yeoh 2011; see also Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). In the case of Southeast Asian women who become temporary labour migrants and undertake domestic or care work abroad in wealthier care-deficit economies, the return of breadwinning mothers to their ‘rightful’ place in the domestic sphere is often taken for granted as a restoration of the natural order of things (Yeoh et al. 2020). Even in cases when left-behind fathers have acquitted themselves creditably in caring for their children in the absence of their mothers, homecoming migration is often accompanied by a reversal of gender roles back to the ‘original’ state as ‘remittance heroines’ find themselves re-domesticated (Yeoh et al. 2020). Reversal to what is regarded as normalcy is, however, not necessarily the only pathway towards reintegration: in the case of some women who have successfully accumulated social and economic capital through migration, return may also present alternative pathways of effecting self-transformation to become shop-owners, entrepreneurs and land-owning farmers and avoid complete re-absorption into the domestic sphere (Yeoh et al. 2020). Related scholarship has also shown how transnational returns can have pivotal impacts on how family ties are renegotiated. For example, left-behind children had to confront significant household changes, care rearrangements and often a different disciplinary regime when migrant mothers returned, whether temporarily or permanently, and had to adjust their behaviour accordingly. In Lam and Yeoh’s (2019) work on left-behind children in Southeast Asia, they observe that although most children were usually told to anticipate being reunited with their absent parents, renegotiating relationships with parental figures who had previously been an ‘absent presence’ for a large part of their formative lives required adjustments that ranged from avoidance (‘hiding from’ the return migrant) to being overly sticky (‘always together’). Focusing mainly on the individual scale, another major area of scholarship on return and reintegration foregrounds the question of identity formation and identity politics in the processes of (re-)adaptation to the homeland. Disavowing essentialist and unchanging notions of identity, transnational understandings of identity formation highlight the notion that identities are constantly (re)worked through simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society. For transnational subjects, their identities, behaviour and values are not limited by location and instead they construct and utilise flexible personal and national identities. Return migrants not only have to adapt to a homeland that has undergone sweeping or creeping change, they themselves are likely to have changed as a result of their sojourn abroad. Reintegration

Transnational mobilities and return migration  335

hence involves new ways of crafting new identities and ways of belonging in the process of remaking home (Boccagni, Chapter 9 in this volume). For example, first-generation British Hindu Gujaratis returning to retire in India drew on re-evaluations of their ‘Britishness’ and ‘Indianness’ in order to construct a sense of ‘in-between placeness’ that distinguished them from ‘visitors’ and ‘non-migrant permanent residents’ (Ramji 2006). By intermingling social ideas and cultural patterns drawn from both London and Gujarat, these successful returnees are able to renegotiate a place for themselves by displaying differences in the everyday presentation of self through dress, food and consumption practices while also forming an affinity with transnational returnees from elsewhere including North America and Australia (Ramji 2006). Also highlighting hybrid experiences and cultural crossovers, Chan and Tran’s (2011) study of returning Viet kieu (a popular term for overseas Vietnamese) found that instead of integrating, these returnees found it necessary to set boundaries in order to create their own distinctive ‘cultural territory’ that would produce a differentiated Vietnamese self. This sense of developing a ‘diaspora consciousness’ as a Chinese citizen both ‘here’ and ‘there’ is also evident in Gu and Schweisfurth’s (2015) study of the new transnational identities that Chinese international students form after their return home. On the one hand, a strong sense of being Chinese is not seen as incompatible with, on the other, an active, self-conscious identification with a range of interconnected transnational experiences and networks cultivated during and after their studies abroad (Gu and Schweisfurth 2015). In sum, reintegration into home society often involves the development of transnational identities that fold together past and present trajectories, connectivities and competencies, enabling return migrants to ‘view and live life with a new sense of self at “home” and, as a result, function in ways that continued to distinguish themselves from those around them over time’ (Gu and Schweisfurth 2015, p. 947).

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS Migrants might or might not return to the places they left. Places are not static and neither are relations. There is a particular kind of affective labour that keeps family, kin and the myth of return strongly together as a life project objective despite the distancing migration entails. Return migrants are often agents of change, transformation and development as they become crucial catalysts for renewal in their respective homelands. At the same time, transnational return is also compounded by logistical challenges associated with movement and requiring resource mobilisation. The return migration process itself often incorporates competing and contradictory navigations of the self and society. Transnational returns have gendered and generational dimensions that can have a strong influence on the social and economic fabric of the home country. For home society, such activities span investments in entrepreneurship, contributing to development, and the consumption that occurs through tourism and leisure mobilities of

336  Handbook on transnationalism

returnees and visitors. At the household scale, homecoming migration also ambivalently reconfigures familial roles and relationships. At the same time, the affective complexities that motivate and give meaning to return often involve a mixture of feelings from nostalgia to alienation, and by extension, intense emotions of aspiration, ambivalence, discomfort, frustration and negotiation. By drawing together the material and the emotional as intertwining concerns, transnational return research has also unmasked the messiness of return and reintegration experiences, revealing asymmetrical power entanglements and ethnicised exploitation as return migrants negotiate conflictual desires and antithetical social norms to what the ancestral homeland might maintain. Racialisation at ‘home’ that frames returnees as ‘others’ and their othering on the basis of what is perceived as skewed cultural and normative codes can stimulate a new existential crisis in stasis. As a result, transnational return experiences can re-energise the transnational migratory impulse or propel returnees to continuously negotiate transnational ways of being. In this sense, the act of return is a provisional form of mobility that establishes directionality while triggering a multiplicity of new possibilities and constraints rather than a spatial move back to a desired or destined ‘origin’. In sum, transnational mobilities and returns are fluid and nuanced articulations of staged movement. By underscoring a number of intriguing repertoires in the loop of multiple logics of mobility and unpacking intertwined complexities, this chapter might potentially render paradoxical any clear notion of absolute return.

REFERENCES Araujo, Ana L. (2010), ‘Welcome the diaspora: Slave trade heritage tourism and the public memory of slavery’, Ethnologies (Québec), 32 (2), 145–78. Baldassar, Loretta (2001), Visits Home: Migration Experiences between Italy and Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Basu, Paul (2005), ‘Roots tourism as return movement: Semantics and the Scottish diaspora’, in Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 131–50. Boccagni, Paolo (2011), ‘The framing of return from above and below in Ecuadorian migration: A project, a myth, or a political device?’, Global Networks, 11 (4), 461–80. Bruner, Edward M. (1996), ‘Tourism in Ghana: The representation of slavery and the return of the black diaspora’, American Anthropologist, 98 (2), 290–304. Carling, Jørgen and Marta Bivand Erdal (2014), ‘Return migration and transnationalism: How are the two connected?’, International Migration, 52 (6), 2–12. Carling, Jørgen and Silje V. Pettersen (2014), ‘Return migration intentions in the integration-transnationalism matrix’, International Migration, 52 (6), 13–30. Cassarino, Jean-Pierre (2004), ‘Theorising return migration: The conceptual approach to return migrants revisited’, International Journal of Multicultural Societies, 6 (2), 253–79. Chan, Yuk Wah and Thi Le Thu Tran (2011), ‘Recycling migration and changing nationalisms: The Vietnamese return diaspora and reconstruction of Vietnamese nationhood’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (7), 1101–17.

Transnational mobilities and return migration  337

Christou, Anastasia (2006a), ‘Deciphering diaspora – translating transnationalism: Family dynamics, identity constructions and the legacy of “home” in second-generation Greek-American return migration’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29 (6), 1040–1056. Christou, Anastasia (2006b), ‘American dreams and European nightmares: Experiences and polemics of second-generation Greek-American returning migrants’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32 (5), 831–45. Christou, Anastasia (2011), ‘Narrating lives in (e)motion: Embodiment, belongingness and displacement in diasporic spaces of home and return’, Emotion, Space and Society, 4 (4), 249–57. Christou, Anastasia (2016), ‘Ageing masculinities and the nation: Disrupting boundaries of sexualities, mobilities and identities’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 23 (6), 801–16. Christou, Anastasia and Russell King (2006), ‘Migrants encounter migrants in the city: The changing context of “home” for second-generation Greek-American return migrants’, International, Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30 (4), 816–35. Christou, Anastasia and Russell King (2010), ‘Imagining “home”: Diasporic landscapes of the Greek-German second generation’, Geoforum, 41 (4), 638–46. Christou, Anastasia and Russell King (2011), ‘Gendering diasporic mobilities and emotionalities in Greek-German narratives of home, belonging and return’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 20 (2), 283–315. Coles, Tim and Dallen J. Timothy (2004), ‘“My field is the world”: Conceptualizing diasporas, travel and tourism’, in Tim Coles and Dallen J. Timothy (eds), Tourism, Diasporas and Space, London: Routledge, pp. 1–29. De Bree, June, Tine Davids and Hein De Haas (2010), ‘Post-return experiences and transnational belonging of returned migrants: A Dutch-Moroccan case study’, Global Networks, 10 (4), 489–509. Dhungel, Laxmi (2017), ‘Social remittances and return migration: A study of highly educated returnee women in Nepal’, Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies, 24 (1), 71–87. Duval, David T. (2004) ‘Linking return visits and return migration among Commonwealth Eastern Caribbean migrants in Toronto’, Global Networks, 4 (1), 51–67. Erdal, Marta Bivand, Anum Amjad, Qamar Z. Bodla and Asma Rubab (2016), ‘Going back to Pakistan for education? The interplay of return mobilities, education, and transnational living’, Population, Space and Place, 22 (8), 836–48. Faist, Thomas (1998), ‘Transnational social spaces out of international migration: Evolution, significance, and future prospects’, European Journal of Sociology, 39 (2), 213–47. Gmelch, George (1980), ‘Return migration’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 9 (1), 135–59. Gu, Qing and Michele Schweisfurth (2015), ‘Transnational connections, competences and identities: Experiences of Chinese international students after their return “home”’, British Educational Research Journal, 41 (6), 947–70. Ho, Elaine L., Mark Boyle and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2015), ‘Recasting diaspora strategies through feminist care ethics’, Geoforum, 59, 206–14. Hoang, Lan Anh and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2011), ‘Breadwinning wives and “left-behind” husbands’, Gender & Society, 25 (6), 717–39. Isaakyan, Irina and Anna Triandafyllidou (2017), ‘“Sending so much more than money”: Exploring social remittances and transnational mobility’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (15), 2787–805. Kasinitz, Philip, John H. Mollenkopf and Mary C. Waters (eds) (2004), Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. King, Russell and Anastasia Christou (2008), ‘Cultural geographies of counter-diasporic migration: The second generation returns “home”’, Sussex Migration Working Paper 45, University of Sussex.

338  Handbook on transnationalism

King, Russell and Anastasia Christou (2011), ‘Of counter-diaspora and reverse transnationalism: Return mobilities to and from the ancestral homeland’, Mobilities, 6 (4), 451–66. King, Russell, Anastasia Christou, Ivor Goodson and Janine Teerling (2014), ‘Tales of satisfaction and disillusionment: Second-generation “return” migration to Greece and Cyprus’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 17 (3), 262–97. King, Russell, Anastasia Christou and Janine Teerling (2011), ‘“We took a bath with the chickens”: Memories of childhood visits to the homeland by second‐generation Greek and Greek Cypriot “returnees”’, Global Networks, 11 (1), 1–23. Kleist, Nauja (2020), ‘Trajectories of involuntary return migration to Ghana: Forced relocation processes and post-return life’, Geoforum, 116, 272–81. Lam, Theodora and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2019), ‘Parental migration and disruptions in everyday life: Reactions of left-behind children in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (16), 3085–104. Lee, Jane Y. (2018), Transnational Return Migration of 1.5 Generation Korean New Zealanders: A Quest for Home, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Levitt, Peggy (1998), ‘Social remittances: Migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion’, International Migration Review, 32 (4), 926–48. Levitt, Peggy (2001), The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levitt, Peggy (2009), ‘Roots and routes: Understanding the lives of the second generation transnationally’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35 (7), 1225–42. Levitt, Peggy (2015), Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Levitt, Peggy and Deepak Lamba-Nieves (2011), ‘Social remittances revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (1), 1–22. Levitt, Peggy and Deepak Lamba-Nieves (2013), ‘Rethinking social remittances and the migration-development nexus from the perspective of time’, Migration Letters, 10 (1), 11–22. Ley, David and Audrey Kobayashi (2005), ‘Back to Hong Kong: Return or transnational sojourn?’, Global Networks, 5 (2), 111–27. Long, Lynellyn D. and Ellen Oxfeld (2004), ‘Introduction: An ethnography of return’, in Lynellyn D. Long and Ellen Oxfeld (eds), Coming Home? Refugees, Migrants and Those Who Stayed Behind, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–15. Markowitz, Fran and Anders H. Stefansson (eds) (2004), Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Mehtiyeva, Aydan and Solène Prince (2020), ‘Journeys of research, emotions and belonging: An exploratory analysis of the motivations and experience of ancestral tourists’, Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 20 (1), 85–103. Michail, Domna and Anastasia Christou (2016), ‘East European migrant women in Greece: Intergenerational cultural knowledge transfer and adaptation in a context of crisis’, Südosteuropa: Journal of Politics and Society, 64 (1), 58–78. Mortensen, Elin B. (2014), ‘Not just a personal decision’, African Diaspora, 7 (1), 15–37. Oeppen, Ceri (2013), ‘A stranger at “home”: Interactions between transnational return visits and integration for Afghan-American professionals’, Global Networks, 13 (2), 261–78. Ramji, Hasmita (2006), ‘British Indians “returning home”: An exploration of transnational belongings’, Sociology, 40 (4), 645–62. Reynolds, Tracey (2011), ‘Caribbean second-generation return migration: Transnational family relationships with “left-behind” kin in Britain’, Mobilities, 6 (4), 535–51. Sinatti, Giulia (2011), ‘“Mobile transmigrants” or “unsettled returnees”? Myth of return and permanent resettlement among Senegalese migrants’, Population, Space and Place, 17 (2), 153–66.

Transnational mobilities and return migration  339

Sinatti, Giulia (2019), ‘Return migration, entrepreneurship and development: Contrasting the economic growth perspective of Senegal’s diaspora policy through a migrant-centred approach’, African Studies, 78 (4), 609–23. Suh, Stephen C. (2017), ‘Negotiating masculinity across borders: A transnational examination of Korean American masculinities’, Men and Masculinities, 20 (3), 317–44. Suh, Stephen C. (2020), ‘Racing “return”: The diasporic return of U.S.-raised Korean Americans in racial and ethnic perspective’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43 (6), 1072–90. Suksomboon, Panitee (2008), ‘Remittances and “social remittances”: Their impact on livelihoods of Thai women in the Netherlands and non-migrants in Thailand’, Gender, Technology and Development, 12 (3), 461–82. Tsuda, Takeyuki (2003), Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective, New York: Columbia University Press. Tsuda, Takeyuki (2018), ‘Ethnic return migration in East Asia: Japanese Brazilians in Japan and conceptions of homeland’, in Gracia Liu-Farrer and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds), Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 103–13. Tsuda, Takeyuki and Changzoo Song (2019), ‘The causes of diasporic return: A comparative perspective’, in Takeyuki Tsuda and Changzoo Song (eds), Diasporic Returns to the Ethnic Homeland: The Korean Diaspora in Comparative Perspective, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 17–34. Upadhya, Carol (2013), ‘Return of the global Indian: Software professionals and the worlding of Bangalore’, in Biao Xiang, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Mika Toyota (eds), Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 141–61. Wang, Leslie K. (2016), ‘The benefits of in-betweenness: Return migration of second-generation Chinese American professionals to China’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42 (12), 1941–58. Wessendorf, Susanne (2007), ‘“Roots migrants”: Transnationalism and “return” among second-generation Italians in Switzerland’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33 (7), 1083–102. Xiang, Biao (2013), ‘Introduction: Return and the reordering of transnational mobility in Asia’, in Biao Xiang, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Mika Toyota (eds), Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–20. Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Bittiandra C. Somaiah, Theodora Lam and Kristel F. Acedera (2020), ‘Doing family in “times of migration”: Care temporalities and gender politics in Southeast Asia’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110 (6), 1709–25.

22. Connecting more than the origin and destination: multinational migrations and transnational ties Anju M. Paul

When the concept of ‘transnational migration’ was first coined, Nina Glick Schiller and her colleagues defined it as a ‘process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’ (1995, p. 48; 1992). Even though it was defined as a ‘process of migration’, transnational migration has sometimes been confused as a form of migration, as if it were a category of travel that follows a particular pattern or trajectory. This naming choice has possibly contributed to the rapid deployment of ‘transnational migration’ to describe a wide variety of the relationships and processes that connect migrants to both their origin and destination countries. This proliferation led to a debate in the early 2000s over the extent to which transnational migration is actually prevalent in contemporary immigrant communities around the world (Faist et al. 2013; Levitt 2001; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007; Vertovec 2003, 2004). Critics have argued that transnational migration is not new because immigrants have often remained more connected with their origin countries than was traditionally understood (Portes et al. 1999; Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004; Waldinger 2015). Critics have also argued that transnational migration is largely a first-generation immigrant phenomenon as few children of immigrants display thick social, cultural, political, and economic connections between their new country and the country of their parents. They also claim that transnational migration encourages a methodological nationalism among migration scholars and that the term has been so widely applied to any kind of connection between origin and destination as to become largely meaningless. Despite these criticisms, transnational migration has joined the ranks of ‘keywords’ of migration in the twenty-first century. It sits, together with ‘diaspora’ (Brubaker 2005, 2017) and ‘migration infrastructure’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Lin et al. 2017) as one of those concepts that has been taken up by migration scholars and applied (sometimes indiscriminately and, other times, productively) to a wide range of related phenomena, and spawned multiple conferences, special issues and books including the present handbook. One area where the authors’ original intent has been cast aside in the rapid expansion of transnational migration studies is related to the possibility of temporary migrants engaging in transnational migration. Glick Schiller et al. initially limited the application of the term transnational migration to only people who permanently 340

Connecting more than the origin and destination  341

‘settle and become incorporated in the economy and political institutions, locations, and patterns of daily life of the country in which they reside’ (1995, p. 48). The authors were clear that ‘sojourners’ (including labour migrants on temporary work visas) should not be counted as transmigrants. Accordingly then, a temporary migrant worker working for the same overseas employer for ten years would not qualify as a transmigrant because she has not ‘settle[d]’ or been ‘incorporated’ into her host society. Instead, the case of a Filipino immigrant family in the United States who maintains business, social, and familial ties back in the Philippines, and the cases of Filipino-American cultural organisations who sponsor fiestas in both the United States and the Philippines, and mediate between the governments of both countries, were some of the early examples used to support the idea of transnational migration (see Basch et al. 1994). However, an increasing number of scholars have applied the ‘transnational optic’ (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007) to explore the lives of temporary high- and low-skilled migrants who often reside and work overseas for extended periods of time, while maintaining deep connections with their home country (Hoang and Yeoh 2015; Ali 2011; Collins 2009; Dannecker 2005; Conradson and Latham 2005; Yeoh and Chang 2001; Pastor and Alva 2004). After all, if a transmigrant can be identified on the strength of her transnational practices, then surely temporary labour migrants who engage in transnational householding (see Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume), send financial and social remittances back to their home countries (see Erdal, Chapter 23 in this volume), and sometimes engage in long-distance activism or charitable work, all while living and working in another country, should qualify for the label of transmigrant (see Withers and Piper, Chapter 18 in this volume). This extension of the definition of transnational migration to incorporate additional populations of migrants is one area where the stretching of the concept beyond its original intent has been intellectually productive. But there is another area where the original definition’s potential has actually atrophied over time. This is in the singular focus of the vast majority of transnational migration scholars on connections between an origin and a destination country, ignoring ties which migrants might develop between multiple destinations and an origin. This oversight includes cases where migrants move multiple times across international borders over the course of their migratory lifetimes. Even though the proponents of transnational migration studies pushed social scientists to ‘become “unbound”’ (Faist et al. 2013, p. 13), applications of transnationality still tend to be limited to connections between a single origin and single destination, and only rarely move beyond that particular binational frame. The possibility of ties between two destination countries – as in the case of a migrant who lives first in one overseas destination for several years, and then decides to move to another destination – is rarely studied. The role of additional types of transnational ties in fostering these onward migrations is also under-studied. In this chapter, I put forward the idea of ‘multinational migrations’ as a particular form of migration that lends itself to the development of transnational ties which connect not only the origin and a single destination country. I also speak to the reverse causal flow through which such alternative transnational ties engender mul-

342  Handbook on transnationalism

tinational migrations because of the information, advice, resources, and norms about the relative attractiveness of alternative destinations, that flow from various overseas countries to an individual. In order to achieve these two purposes, I first define multinational migrations and provide case studies of various multinational migrant populations which manifest transnational ties. I distinguish between three different types of transnational ties that go beyond the traditional origin–destination pairing: 1. Transnational dyads that connect two destination countries; 2. Transnational triangles that connect two destinations and the origin country; and 3. Transnational webs that connect multiple members of a single family or other tightly-knit social unit to three or more countries, even if they have not all lived in all of the countries in the web. I then move on to highlight the reverse process where the existence of transnational ties may predate and subsequently encourage the adoption of multinational migrations. In this regard, I attempt to extend the already-extensive literature on transnational migration by highlighting the constraints that come with limiting ourselves to a single-origin/single-destination paradigm.

DEFINING MULTINATIONAL MIGRATIONS Multinational migration is an umbrella term which encompasses ‘the movements of international migrants across more than one overseas destination with significant time spent in each overseas country’ (Paul and Yeoh 2021, p. 3). The definition incorporates the many existing terms – onward, secondary, stepwise, stepping stone, serial, triangular, twice, step-down, cross-wise – which have been coined by scholars at various points in time to describe multiple international moves within a single migratory lifetime (see Aydemir and Robinson 2008; King and Newbold 2007; Tsujimoto 2016; Siu 2004; Bhachu 1985; Takenaka 2007; Paul 2017; Ciobanu 2015). There are various dimensions along which a taxonomy of multinational migrations can be constructed. One would be the directionality of these migration sequences, which could be upward, downward, lateral, circular, or multidirectional. Some individuals engage in ‘stepwise migrations’ that have (or at least aim to have) a clear upward directionality in the manner in which destinations are selected according to the migrants’ personally and socially constructed destination hierarchies (Paul 2011, 2017; Collins 2021; Ziljstra 2020). Other multinational migrants have engaged in a downward trajectory, not out of choice, but because of the nature of their work and visa status which injects significant instability into their contracts and stays in each country (Parreñas et al. 2018). For others, their multinational migrations are more lateral (Ossman 2013; Ciobanu 2015). This includes expatriates who work for multinational corporations and are posted to different country offices every two to three years to build their international experience, and as part of their expectations for career progression (Beaverstock 2002), as well as academic scientists who may

Connecting more than the origin and destination  343

seek training and subsequently research careers in a series of countries (Ackers 2005), but also migrants who may have planned to settle in one overseas country but find themselves moving onward because of ethnic conflict or political unrest in their first destination (Chan 2021). This category also includes undocumented or irregular migrants who move through intermediate countries on the basis of their proximity to each other and not necessarily any personal destination hierarchy (Schapendonk 2010; Hwang 2020). Multinational migrations may also involve circular migrations where migrants live in multiple overseas countries for long periods of time but eventually return to their country of birth, either voluntarily at the end of their working careers in order to retire, or involuntarily because of a contract termination (Thompson 2020; Paul 2017; Amrith 2020). A more hybrid, multidirectional form of multinational migration encompasses two or more of the above directions within its overall trajectory. This migration pattern may follow a snakes-and-ladders style of movement where sometimes the migrant is following an upward or lateral trajectory while, at other times, the migrant is moving downward (Ahrens et al. 2016; Choi 2020), and still other times, the migrant may be cycling back to an overseas migrant hub they had lived in earlier (Paul and Yeoh 2021). Another way in which we can categorise multinational migrations is based on their intentionality. At one end of this spectrum are multinational migration decisions which are very strategic in that they were planned from the outset, either in terms of the specific countries which the migrant would live in and move through, or at least in terms the migrant’s pre-migratory intention to live in more than two countries in their lifetime (Paul 2011; Collins 2021; Ziljstra 2020). At the other end of the spectrum sit multinational migrations that are much more organic in their emergence, with migrants only deciding (with varying degrees of voluntariness) to engage in onward migrations after they have already been overseas for a while and as a result of external events/factors (Paul 2017; Hwang 2020). How the directionality, intentionality, and sheer variety of multinational migrations impact the emergence of new forms of transnational ties is an understudied area, but we can draw some insights from particular case studies, as I discuss below.

MULTINATIONAL MIGRATIONS DRIVING NEW TRANSNATIONAL TIES A wide array of transnational ties can develop as a result of multinational migrations. Pairs of destination countries could be linked together, as in the case where migrants spend a significant amount of time in more than one overseas country. I term these ties ‘transnational dyads’ so as to not exclude the more traditional understanding of transnational ties that connect an origin with a single destination. In other cases, the transnational ties a multinational migrant enjoys are also multinational in that they connect the migrant to their origin country but also to various destination countries. Here, I follow Ilse Van Liempt’s (2011) lead and call these ties ‘transnational triangles’.

344  Handbook on transnationalism

Then there is a third possibility which does not require an individual migrant to move from country to country. Rather they need to be closely connected to relatives or other close contacts from a single network who are dispersed across a range of countries. This ‘transnational web’ can include friend or corporate networks where individual members move to multiple countries but remain in close contact. These new transnational morphologies progress from ‘dyads’ to ‘triangles’ to ‘webs’, and the increasing number of nodes in these transnational forms signal the growing complexity of transnational relations in the twenty-first century. What follows are examples of all three categories of transnational ties. Transnational Dyads Connecting Two Destinations Transnationality has traditionally been defined as linking a migrant’s origin and a destination. This destination could be the first (and perhaps only) overseas country they have lived in, having settled there for an extended period of time (Glick Schiller et al. 1995; Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001; Guarnizo 2003). In other cases, transnational dyads involve the presumed ‘last’ destination which a migrant moves to, as is the case for refugees who may have lived temporarily in a host of transit countries before being given asylum in a ‘permanent’ destination country in which they establish roots even as they maintain links with their origin country (Bloch 2008; Al-Ali et al. 2001). These two transnational dyadic forms are well discussed in the migration literature, and it is only recently that a third form of transnational dyad linking two destinations, rather than an origin with a destination, has been highlighted. Such transnational ties between two destination countries have been observed by Carol Chan (2021) in her study of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs who moved to Santiago, Chile from another Latin American country as a result of racial discrimination or political unrest in their first destination country. These ethnic Chinese multinational migrants maintained limited ties with their origin countries – China or Taiwan – but espoused strong nostalgic connections with their initial Latin American country even as they were actively embedding themselves within the social and economic life of Santiago de Chile. One Chinese-born multinational migrant whom Chan interviewed had previously lived in Lima, Peru and started a small Chinese restaurant there in the late 1980s. In the early 2000s, the migrant moved with her husband to Chile because it was comparatively more stable than Peru at the time. She started a new business in Santiago and gave birth to her second child there. Over time, she built many ties in Chile but she still spoke with longing of Peru, especially its cuisine and her friendship circle with whom she stayed in touch. In another case, Chan describes a Taiwanese interviewee who moved from Buenos Aires to Chile, after spending roughly 20 years in Argentina. By the time of her interview with Chan, she had been living in Santiago for 15 years and now held permanent residency in Chile, ran a successful grocery, and spent her leisure time with her Chilean-born grandchildren. But she continued to visit Buenos Aires regularly to meet old friends, eat Argentinian food, and enjoy the ambience of the city she had fallen in love with in the 1990s. Her nostalgia was directed towards Argentina rather than Taiwan, her

Connecting more than the origin and destination  345

country of birth. In this manner, it is clear from Chan’s accounts that transnational dyads do not need to be limited to those that connect origin with a destination. Along similar lines, Van Liempt (2011) focuses on Somali refugees who first settled in the Netherlands (where there exists a relatively small Somali population) and then chose to move onward to the United Kingdom for a variety of economic, social and political reasons after they secured Dutch citizenship. Van Liempt notes that even though these Somali-Dutch migrants opted to leave the Netherlands, they continued to maintain strong connections with their original country of settlement, visiting two or three times in a single year to see family and friends, and sometimes for work. Migrants with children insisted on teaching their children the Dutch language, favoured Dutch food products, followed Dutch news on TV, and maintained their Dutch citizenship (even when they could have naturalised to British citizenship) out of a sense of loyalty and gratitude to the Netherlands for having initially given them asylum. With respect to their ties to the ‘home country’, Van Liempt writes that younger Dutch Somali migrants in the UK often had conflicted emotions about Somalia. While older migrants spoke with longing about the possibility of returning to Somalia at some point in the future, younger migrants (who had either left Somalia when they were very young, or had been born outside the country) often felt little connection with Somalia and did not consider it their home country. In fact, several young Somalis in the UK spoke to Van Liempt about the Netherlands being their home country, wishing to return to the Netherlands which occupied an idyllic place in their childhood memories. In this manner, Van Liempt describes the existence of a ‘transnational triangle’ connecting the UK, the Netherlands and Somalia across two generations of Somali refugees. I would argue, however, that most of her case study emphasises how a transnational dyad can exist between two destinations (the Netherlands and the UK), and that the relationship these Somali-Dutch refugees have with Somalia does not rise to the level of a true transnational tie. Still, Van Liempt’s concept of a transnational triangle is still perfectly valid, as I discuss next. Transnational Triangles Connecting Two Destinations and the Origin Van Liempt (2011) and Chan (2021) both focus on migrants who had been able to settle in one country and then chose to uproot themselves and resettle in a new country for a variety of push and/or pull factors. In both cases, the transnational ties observed connected two destination countries, leaving the origin country largely out of the picture. However, a truer ‘transnational triangle’ of ties can be found among temporary labour migrants who have lived and/or worked in at least two overseas countries for a significant period of time but have no option of jettisoning their ties to their origin country. This is because their temporary legal status overseas requires them to eventually return home at some point, and their one- or two-year contracts stipulate regular visits back home at the end of each year or each contract. Transnationality is in many ways imposed on these migrants by the guestworker policies which bring them into a host country but restrict them to a temporary visa that can be renewed multiple times.

346  Handbook on transnationalism

This is the case with Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Asian cities. Cross-sectional surveys I conducted with more than 1,000 Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Singapore and Hong Kong revealed that these migrant domestic workers tended to live overseas for extensive periods of time (Paul 2017). The 651 migrant domestic workers surveyed in Singapore had been working overseas for an accumulated average of 10 years, while the 615 migrant domestic workers surveyed in Hong Kong had been overseas for an average of 11 years. During this extended sojourn overseas, the vast majority of these migrant domestic workers had developed deep social ties within their overseas destination, while maintaining ties with their origin country through their annual or biannual visits and regular phone/video-calls and remittances. In destinations like Singapore and Hong Kong, where migrant domestic workers are able to enjoy freedom of movement outside of the workplace and often have a regular (weekly/monthly) rest-day as part of their contracts, these workers are able to develop strong ties with other migrant workers. Lively overseas migrant communities can thus form even if the membership of these communities is always experiencing turnover as a result of the temporary status of their migrant members. Such overseas migrant connections and communities can coalesce around religious, ethnic, social/lifestyle, charitable, educational, professional, or activist lines (Constable 1997, 2009; Parreñas 2015 [2001]; Kelly and Lusis 2006). Migrant domestic workers are also often tightly incorporated into the daily rhythms of their overseas employers’ lives because of the nature of their jobs, and so they build ties with their employers’ familial and social networks too. Over the course of a decade spent overseas, these temporary migrants can thus develop significant networks in their host country, while their temporary migrant status means that they can never completely lose their connection with their origin country. However, migrant domestic workers who have worked in multiple overseas destinations have the opportunity to establish such roots in more than two countries, especially when they spend multiple years working in their stepping-stone destinations before moving on to their end destination. In Hong Kong, half of the Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers surveyed had worked in at least one other overseas destination before their arrival in Hong Kong (Paul 2011, 2017). In Singapore, the prevalence of stepwise international migration was lower, with 21 per cent of Filipino domestic workers and 13 per cent of Indonesian domestic workers surveyed having worked in another destination beforehand. Meanwhile, interviews I conducted with more than 40 Filipino live-in caregivers in Canada revealed that 84 per cent of them had engaged in stepwise international labour migration (Paul 2015, 2017). Filipino migrant domestic workers who had travelled stepwise from Hong Kong and other stepping-stone destinations to Canada had built ties to other migrants as well as non-migrant locals in each destination where they had lived and worked (Paul 2017). They spoke of how they maintained their relationships with family and friends in the Philippines but also with co-ethnic migrant domestic workers as well as former employers in their earlier destinations via Facebook, Skype and other social media apps. Some of these stepwise migrants were actively trying to help contacts

Connecting more than the origin and destination  347

in less desirable destinations move stepwise as well to their current destination, and so were selectively transmitting resources (money, job information, referrals, advice, etc.) to their contacts in these countries (Paul 2013). Such transnational triangles connecting migrants to three countries (including their home country) are not limited to low-wage temporary labour migrants. World Education Services (WES), a non-profit organisation specialising in evaluating foreign academic credentials, reports that in 2017, of the more than 7,000 foreign applicants who used WES to apply for permanent residency in Canada through a high-skilled pathway, almost 30 per cent had studied and/or worked in a second country (other than their country of birth) before applying to immigrate to Canada (Lu and Roy 2017). Of these highly skilled multinational migrants, 43 per cent had only studied and not worked in their second country, with nationals of China, Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan studying in the US, the UK, Australia and France, before applying for permanent residence in Canada. Another 45 per cent of multinational migrants had only worked and not studied in a second country, with nationals of Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Philippines and India working in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Qatar and the US, before applying to Canada. A final 12 per cent of applicants had both studied and worked overseas. These individuals who had pursued a degree and worked in one overseas country before moving on to Canada would therefore be in a position to develop a transnational triangle connecting their country of birth, their country of education/employment and eventually, Canada, their country of permanent residence. Similarly, in my research with Asian-born academic bioscientists, I found that many of these scientists trained and worked in multiple overseas countries (typically in the West) as part of their expected career path (Paul 2022; Paul and Long 2016). While many only trained in the US, a significant minority studied in multiple overseas countries. Several of the scientists I interviewed who pursued their doctoral training in the UK or continental Europe, in particular, chose to pursue postdoctoral training in the US, developing ties to communities of research mentors and collaborators in each location. Interviewees spoke to me of maintaining active research collaborations with scientists they trained under or worked with at different points in their career migrations, sending their current students to these collaborators’ labs, and enjoying regular communications with these scientists. Several of my Asian interviewees had also chosen not to return to their home country even as they returned to Asia, opting instead to settle in Asian countries like Singapore instead, in a process one of them called ‘halfway-return’ (Paul 2022). These multinational migrant scientists thus maintained ties with their origin country in Asia, their current country of residence (Singapore) as well as the country(ies) they had trained in (Paul 2022; Paul and Long 2016). With these and other multinational migrants, there could be significant variation in the composition of their transnational triangles. Their transnational ties to their country of origin could largely be driven by their familial bonds to left-behind relatives (Hoang et al. 2015), or their investments in property or businesses in the home country. In contrast, their transnational connections to earlier destinations could be

348  Handbook on transnationalism

largely nostalgic ties to friends and former colleagues left behind when they moved on. Meanwhile, their ties to their current country of residence and employment could have valence along both social and work dimensions. Transnational Webs Connecting Multiple Countries So far, I have discussed multinational migrants who develop connections to two destination countries and their origin as they move from place to place. However, among origin countries where a culture of diasporic migration exists, it is often the case that different members of the same family may move to different countries, while remaining tightly woven in an intricate ‘transnational web’ of relationships that go beyond a transnational triangle. Key here is the idea that it is a migrant’s network connections, rather than just the migrant, that may disperse to (or originate from) various countries while their relationships with the migrant remain strong. This form of transnationality could thus be experienced by the migrant as a result of the movements of other migrants they are connected with. In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, Charles Tilly’s (1990) argument that it is not people who migrate but rather networks is more true now than ever. If we take the family or other social forms as our unit of analysis, rather than individual migrants, additional instances of multinational migration can be observed and new types of transnational ties can be uncovered (Paul and Yeoh 2020). Along these lines, Francisco-Menchavez (2020) writes about Filipino families who form migrant ‘constellations’ spread across multiple countries. In the case of one Filipino family, the mother worked in Saudi Arabia for eight years as a domestic worker, the oldest sister worked in a variety of countries but eventually settled in Israel, another sister went to Hong Kong, and yet another found work in Ireland. Within this family, the ties that each member of the family had with all other members constituted a transnational web that encompassed countries which certain individual members had never lived or worked in, but which the family unit as a whole had connections with. Various kinds of resources were transmitted through this transnational web and Francisco-Menchavez notes that these ties facilitated the multinational migrations of individual members of the family who received advice and assistance from dispersed family members about where to move next and how. This migration assistance does not only have to involve helping other family members join the migrant in the same overseas destination. In some cases, a migrant might choose to stay in a lower-tier destination while helping younger relatives move stepwise further up the family’s destination ladder. This is what happened with a relatively senior Filipino domestic worker I interviewed in Hong Kong who had effectively become the matriarch of her extended family, helping one of her nieces first find work in Hong Kong, and then helping the niece move stepwise to Canada. She also helped another niece, who was a midwife, pay for overseas work in Dubai, and helped her sister-in-law find a job in Hong Kong (Paul 2017, pp. 268–9). In this manner, the causal relationship between transnational ties and multinational migrations can be bi-directional, with multinational ties within a family context

Connecting more than the origin and destination  349

encouraging the adoption of multinational migrations by individual family members, and vice versa. Thinking beyond blood relations, to other forms of intimate community, we can also consider cross-national migrant couples and the transnational webs such pairings encourage. In Singapore, it is estimated that more than a third of Filipino domestic workers have boyfriends in-country, while this number goes up to almost half among their Indonesian counterparts (Wong et al. 2018). While domestic help is a heavily feminised occupation with the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar dominating the labour supply to this sector, most low-wage male migrant workers in Singapore are employed in the construction and shipping industries and hail from China, India, Bangladesh and Thailand (HOME 2011). This gender imbalance across the nationalities of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore leads to more inter-ethnic patterns in these migrant women workers’ heterosexual romantic relationships, with male partners who are often migrant workers from South Asia. Among the Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers whom Lim and Paul (2021) interviewed who were involved in heterosexual romantic relationships in Singapore, all were in a relationship with male migrant partners from either Bangladesh or India. As a result, for those who were in committed relationships that had the support of both families, they found themselves regularly communicating via social media with each partner’s relatives in their respective home country. One Indonesian-Bangladeshi migrant couple planned to settle down in Surabaya in Indonesia but, while they were still working in Singapore, they made regular video-calls to each other’s families. In this manner, the couple (as a unit) had a web of transnational ties to both Indonesia and Bangladesh but also to Singapore which was their place of work and also the country where they had first met. Individually, they did not have such extensive ties, but they did together when treated as a single unit of analysis. As a couple, they were connected to two origin countries (Indonesia and Bangladesh) as well as to the destination (Singapore) where they had first met. In a similar manner, other migrating social units (such as disparate friend and work networks that go beyond the family) may be embedded in transnational webs that feed information and other resources through nodes which are situated in a wide range of countries.

MULTINATIONAL TIES DRIVING MULTINATIONAL MIGRATIONS It would be a mistake to presume that multinational ties can only follow from multinational migration, or that only existing multinational migrants enjoy multinational ties. Unfortunately, this seems to be the unspoken assumption within many transnational migration studies that focus on the figure of the migrant overseas. Less consideration is given to the non-migrant (or pre-migrant or return migrant) in the origin country who is connected with the overseas migrant. But, as has already been raised earlier in this chapter, the existence of alternative transnational ties that extend

350  Handbook on transnationalism

beyond the typical origin–destination connection, can also drive the adoption of multinational migration. As a case in point, my surveys of Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Singapore and Hong Kong demonstrate that Filipino migrants are more likely to possess a greater number of pre-migration overseas contacts compared to Indonesians (Paul 2019). The modal number of pre-migration overseas contacts for Filipino respondents was three or more, while it was only one for Indonesian respondents. And for those Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers who had had at least two pre-migration overseas network connections, there were differences in the geographic spread of their pre-migration networks. The pre-migration networks of both nationality groups were concentrated in Asia, however Filipino respondents were also connected to migrants in other parts of the world. Just over a quarter of Filipino respondents with pre-migration overseas contacts had had at least one contact in the Middle East, 26.8 per cent had had contacts in North America, 11.9 per cent had had contacts in Europe, and 4.6 per cent in Australasia. In contrast, the only other world region where Indonesian respondents had had a significant pre-migration connection was the Middle East with 8.9 per cent of respondents with overseas connections reporting that they had had at least one overseas contact in that region. Given the importance of pre-migration overseas networks in feeding information about the world at large and shaping prospective migrants’ destination hierarchies, it seems likely that these varying pre-migration ties to various parts of the world would influence the different multinational migration patterns adopted by Indonesian versus Filipino domestic workers. This nationality-linked difference in the geographic spread of their pre-migratory transnational ties can also help explain the greater openness of Filipino domestic workers (in contrast with Indonesian migrant domestic workers) to the idea of stepwise migration to various countries in the West, as well as of settling down overseas (Paul 2017). Even if their pre-migratory transnational ties do not translate into new jobs or tangible assistance, the example set by these overseas network contacts and the aspirations they fuel can create an openness to more work stints in more far-flung destinations. Interactions with earlier cohorts of migrants who had previously engaged in multinational trajectories or knew of successful attempts by others, may foster similar multinational aspirations in subsequent cohorts of migrants and, over time, create a subculture of multinational migration in ‘migration hubs’ (Paul and Yeoh 2020; Hennebry et al. 2014) that parallels the broader culture of migration in the origin country. These earlier multinational migrants sometimes serve as boosters who provide encouragement and concrete assistance; other times, they serve as role models whose specific migration strategies and trajectories are emulated by later migrants. In this manner, mimetic and normative pressures embedded within multinational networks of pre-migrants and existing migrants can encourage a cumulative multinational migration pattern.

Connecting more than the origin and destination  351

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have demonstrated how our understanding of the transnational ties migrants enjoy can be significantly expanded if we consider more complex forms of migration, particularly multinational migrations that go beyond a single-origin/ single destination framework. Rather than limiting ourselves to the narrow study of transnational ties connecting an origin with a destination country, we should take into account transnational dyads connecting two destination countries, transnational triangles connecting two destinations and an origin, and transnational webs that encompass a variety of permutations of multiple origin countries and multiple destinations. It is also useful to keep in mind that the causal relationship between transnational ties and multinational migrations is bi-directional, with each side influencing the development/emergence of the other in a positive feedback loop. All of these insights point to how the full potential of transnational migration studies has not yet been reached despite the rapid growth of this sub-field (see Carling, Chapter 7 in this volume). As globalisation processes ramp up and migration infrastructures also become increasingly ‘multinational’, it behoves us to make our transnational optic truly multinational too.

REFERENCES Ackers, Louise (2005), ‘Moving people and knowledge: Scientific mobility in the European Union’, International Migration, 43 (5), 99–129. Ahrens, Jill, Melissa Kelly and Ilse Van Liempt (2016), ‘Free movement? The onward migration of EU citizens born in Somalia, Iran, and Nigeria’, Population, Space and Place, 22, 84–98. Al-Ali, Nadje, Richard Black and Khalid Koser (2001), ‘Refugees and transnationalism: The experience of Bosnians and Eritreans in Europe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27 (4), 615–34. Ali, Syed (2011), ‘Going and coming and going again: Second-generation migrants in Dubai’, Mobilities, 6 (4), 553–68. Amrith, Megha (2020), ‘Leaving, returning and the linear imagination: Ongoing journeys of Filipina migrant women’, Global Networks. doi:​10​.1111/​glob​.12280. Aydemir, Abdurrahman and Chris Robinson (2008), ‘Global labour markets, return, and onward migration’, Canadian Journal of Economics, 41 (4), 1285–311. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina S. Blanc (1994), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, New York: Routledge. Beaverstock, Jonathan V. (2002), ‘Transnational elites in global cities: British expatriates in Singapore’s financial district’, Geoforum, 33, 525–38. Bhachu, Parminder (1985), Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain, New York: Tavistock. Bloch, Alice (2008), ‘Zimbabweans in Britain: Transnational activities and capabilities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34 (2), 287–305. Brubaker, Rogers (2005), ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (1), 1–19. Brubaker, Rogers (2017), ‘Revisiting the “diaspora” diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (9), 1556–61.

352  Handbook on transnationalism

Chan, Carol (2021), ‘Permanent migrants and temporary citizens: Multinational Chinese mobilities in the Americas’, Global Networks, 21 (1), 64–83. Choi, Carolyn (2020), ‘Peripheral hubs of English education: The emergence of stepdown, crosswise and stepwise educational mobilities in the Asia-Pacific’, Global Networks. doi:​ 10​.1111/​glob​.12307. Ciobanu Ruxandra, O. (2015), ‘Multiple migration flows of Romanians’, Mobilities, 10 (3), 466–85. Collins, Francis L. (2009), ‘Transnationalism unbound: Detailing new subjects, registers and spatialities of cross-border lives’, Geography Compass, 3 (1), 434–58. Collins, Francis L. (2021), ‘“Give me my pathway!”: Multinational migration, transnational skills regimes and migrant subjectification’, Global Networks, 21 (1), 18–39. Conradson, David and Alan Latham (2005), ‘Transnational urbanism: Attending to everyday practices and mobilities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31 (2), 227–33. Constable, Nicole (1997), Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Constable, Nicole (2009), ‘Migrant workers and the many states of protest in Hong Kong’, Critical Asian Studies, 41 (1), 143–64. Dannecker, Petra (2005), ‘Transnational migration and the transformation of gender relations: The case of Bangladeshi labour migrants’, Current Sociology, 53 (4), 655–74. Faist, Thomas, Margit Fauser and Eveline Reisenauer (2013), Transnational Migration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fouron, Georges and Nina Glick Schiller (2001), ‘All in the family: Gender, transnational migration, and the nation‐state’, Identities, 7 (4), 539–82. Francisco-Menchavez, Valerie (2020), ‘All in the family: Transnational families and strategies for stepwise migration’, Geographical Research, 58 (4), 377–87. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1992), ‘Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 645, 1–24. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1995), ‘From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration’, Anthropological Quarterly, 68 (1), 48–63. Guarnizo, Luis E. (2003), ‘The economics of transnational living’, International Migration Review, 37 (3), 666–99. Hennebry, Jenna, Kathryn Kopinak, Rosa M. Soriano Miras, Antonio T. Requena and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (2014), ‘From “Khadema” to “Zemegria”: Morocco as a “migration hub” for the EU’, in Margaret Walton-Roberts and Jenna Hennebry (eds), Territoriality and Migration in the EU Neighbourhood: Spilling over the Wall, International Perspectives on Migration 5, Dordrecht: Springer. Hoang, Lan A., Theodora Lam, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Elspeth Graham (2015), ‘Transnational migration, changing care arrangements and left-behind children’s responses in South-east Asia’, Children’s Geographies, 13 (3), 263–77. Hoang, Lan A. and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds) (2015), Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and the Changing Family in Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME) (2011), The Exploitation of Migrant Chinese Construction Workers in Singapore, Singapore: HOME. Hwang, Maria C. (2020), ‘Navigating global cities in the shadows: Stepdown transient mobility, mobility infrastructure, and multinational sex work in Asia’, Global Networks (forthcoming). Kelly, Philip and Tom Lusis (2006), ‘Migration and the transnational habitus: Evidence from Canada and the Philippines’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38, 831–47.

Connecting more than the origin and destination  353

King, Karen M. and Bruce K. Newbold (2007), ‘Onward emigration to the United States by Canadian emigrants between 1995 and 2000’, International Migration Review, 41 (4), 909–29. Levitt, Peggy (2001), ‘Transnational migration: Taking stock and future directions’, Global Networks, 1 (3), 195–216. Levitt, Peggy and B. Nadya Jaworsky (2007), ‘Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends’, Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 129–56. Lim, Nicole and Anju M. Paul (2021), ‘Stigma on a spectrum: Differentiated stigmatization of migrant domestic workers’ romantic relationships in Singapore’, Gender, Place and Culture, 28 (1), 22–44. Lin, Weiqiang, Johan Lindquist, Biao Xiang and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2017), ‘Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities’, Mobilities, 12 (2), 167–74. Lu, Zhengrong and Megha Roy (2017), ‘Migration paths: How do highly skilled workers make their way to Canada?’, New York: World Education Services. Ossman, Susan (2013), Moving Matters: Paths of Serial Migration, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2015 [2001]), Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel S., Rachel Silvey, Maria C. Hwang and Carolyn A. Choi (2018), ‘Serial labor migration: Precarity and itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers’, International Migration Review, 53 (4), 1230–1258. Pastor, Manuel and Susan Alva (2004), ‘Guest workers and the new transnationalism: possibilities and realities in an age of repression’, Social Justice, 31 (1/2), 92–112. Paul, Anju M. (2011), ‘Stepwise international migration: A multistage migration pattern for the aspiring migrant’, American Journal of Sociology, 116 (6), 1842–86. Paul, Anju M. (2013), ‘Good help is hard to find: The differentiated mobilisation of migrant social capital among Filipino domestic workers’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (5), 719–39. Paul, Anju M. (2015), ‘Capital and mobility in the stepwise international migrations of Filipino migrant domestic workers’, Migration Studies, 3 (3), 438–59. Paul, Anju M. (2017), Multinational Maids: Stepwise Migration in a Global Labor Market, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paul, Anju M. (2019), ‘Unequal networks: Comparing the pre-migration overseas networks of Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers’, Global Networks, 19 (1), 44–65. Paul, Anju M. (2022), Asian Scientists on the Move: Changing Science in a Changing Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paul, Anju M. and Victoria Long (2016), ‘Human-capital strategies to build world-class research universities in Asia: Impact on global flows’, in Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac A. Kamola and Tamron Pietsch (eds), The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global / Transforming the Local, London: Routledge, pp. 130–155. Paul, Anju M. and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2020), ‘Methodological innovations in studying multinational migrations’, Geographical Research, 58 (4), 355–64. Paul, Anju M. and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2021), ‘Studying multinational migrations, speaking back to migration theory’, Global Networks, 21 (1), 3–17. Portes, Alejandro, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt (1999), ‘The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 217–37. Schapendonk, Joris (2010), ‘Staying put in moving sands: The stepwise migration process of sub-Saharan African migrants heading north’, in Ulf Engel and Paul Nugent (eds), Respacing Africa, Leiden: Brill, pp. 113–38.

354  Handbook on transnationalism

Siu, Lok C.D. (2004), ‘Migration stories: Serial migration and the production of home and identity in transnationalism’, in Andrew R. Wilson (ed.), The Chinese in the Caribbean, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, pp. 159–90. Takenaka, Ayumi (2007), ‘Secondary migration: Who re-migrates and why these migrants matter’, Migration Information Source, 26 April. https://​www​.migrationpolicy​.org/​article/​ secondary​-migration​-who​-re​-migrates​-and​-why​-these​-migrants​-matter. Thompson, Maddie (2020), ‘Mental mapping and multinational migrations: A geographical imaginations approach’, Geographical Research, 58 (4), 388–402. Tilly, Charles (1990), ‘Transplanted networks’, in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 79–95. Tsujimoto, Toshiko (2016), ‘Affective friendship that constructs globally spanning transnationalism: The onward migration of Filipino workers from South Korea to Canada’, Mobilities, 11 (2), 323–41. Van Liempt, Ilse (2011), ‘Young Dutch Somalis in the UK: Citizenship, identities and belonging in a transnational triangle’, Mobilities, 6 (4), 569–83. Vertovec, Steven (2003), ‘Migration and other modes of transnationalism: Towards conceptual cross-fertilization’, International Migration Review, 37 (3), 641–65. Vertovec, Steven (2004), ‘Migrant transnationalism and modes of transformation’, International Migration Review, 38 (3), 970–1001. Waldinger, Roger (2015), The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waldinger, Roger and David Fitzgerald (2004), ‘Transnationalism in question’, American Journal of Sociology, 109 (5), 1177–95. Wong, Cara, Toh Ting Wei and Loh Pui Ying (2018), ‘Migrant love: Foreign workers, maids in Singapore overcome odds to find love and marriage’, The Straits Times, 15 July. Xiang, Biao and Johan Lindquist (2014), ‘Migration infrastructure’, International Migration Review, 48 (1), 122–48. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Chang Tou Chuang (2001), ‘Globalising Singapore: Debating transnational flows in the city’, Urban Studies, 38 (7), 1025–44. Ziljstra, Judith (2020), ‘Stepwise migration of Iranian students from Turkey to the West’, Geographical Research, 58 (4), 403–15.

PART IV TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS AND CIRCULATIONS

23. Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development Marta Bivand Erdal

INTRODUCTION: SENDING MONEY BACK HOME Remittances, the money migrants send to family and relatives in places of origin, is the single transnational practice migrants engage in that has received the most scholarly and policy attention (Carling 2008a; Maimbo and Ratha 2005; Ratha 2007). Often referred to as ‘sending money back home’, remittances are the material manifestation of family ties stretched by the geographic distance which migration creates (Horst 2008a; Mazzucato 2008; Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). This chapter addresses the ways in which remittances, as a transnational practice, intersect with development, understood specifically as improving socio-economic conditions in places of origin (de Haas 2005; Skeldon 2014). Sending money back home takes on different forms in practice (Siegel and Lücke 2013). Whereas migrants historically might have sent banknotes in letters to their families (Benton and Liu 2018), today money transfers more often than not happen electronically. Migrants send money using money transfer operators or banks, which may be formal or informal – regular or irregular (Ambrosius and Cuecuecha 2016). In most cases the money is available within minutes upon the receipt of a text message by the receiver, who might either pick up cash or have the money transferred directly into a bank account or use a mobile bank solution (Siegel and Fransen 2013). Money transfer is also big business, with companies like Western Union, MoneyGram and others, operating globally and with substantial profit from selling their remittance-transfer services. A key question, meanwhile, is how to measure migrant remittances, and relatedly, how to define what should count as remittances. If the definition follows the simple idea of ‘migrants sending money back home’, there are at least three potential challenges. First, while migrants send money to relatives in places of origin, there are also financial transfers the other way, referred to as ‘reverse-remittances’ from people in places of origin to migrants (Mazzucato 2011). Should these also figure in accounts and be included in the measurement of international remittances? Second, migrants may not ‘send’ remittances to relatives in places of origin using transfer channels, or even via other people travelling to deliver the money, but might bring the money with them on return visits (Asiedu 2005; Åkesson 2011). In such instances, are these still ‘remittances’? Third, migrants may send money ‘elsewhere’ – to family, relatives or friends who are neither in places of origin, nor even in the country of origin, but in other locations globally (Al-Sharmani 2010; Paul, Chapter 22 in this volume). If 356

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development  357

the money is not in fact sent ‘back home’, but somewhere else within a transnational family network, are these also remittances? In order to measure the volume, locations and directions of flows, quantitative data are necessary. At the macro-level, such data on the inflow of money from abroad is captured by state banks in most countries. However, the three questions above relating to the basic definition of remittances point to some of the difficult choices that have to be made regarding what counts or does not count as remittances. Exactly which inflows are captured, and how these match definitions of migrant remittances, vary. While the volume of registered remittances has grown substantially from the 2000s, it is by now widely acknowledged that part of this growth can be explained by better methods of measuring, while another part of this growth is the result of a shift from informal to formal transfer channels, which means that a greater proportion of remittances get counted in the statistics which are produced by state banks (Clemens and McKenzie 2014). Remittances are a key tenet of migrant transnationalism, not least due to their economic impacts on development in countries of origin. Indeed, at first glance, remittances ‘seem to be a well nigh ideal form of “bottom up” development finance—and perhaps a more viable alternative to classical forms of development aid’ (de Haas 2005, p. 1277). Remittances are, however, first and foremost the private money of individual people, and not ‘development aid’ funds at states’ disposal (Horst et al. 2014). Furthermore, as de Haas (2005) also underscores, while there is little doubt about the fact that remittances provide a lifeline and contribute to improved living conditions for millions of families around the world, the relationship between remittances, migration and development is complex. I therefore start with a reflection on this crucial connection between remittances and the migration–development nexus, and discuss the ways in which migrant transnationalism, including but not limited to remittances, connects with debates on the migration–development nexus. Following this, I turn to the issue of migrant remittances and why transaction costs matter. The final section of this chapter considers seven ways in which migrants – through their transnational practices – might engage in development in their places of origin.

MIGRANT TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE MIGRATION– DEVELOPMENT NEXUS Debates on the migration–development nexus have been ongoing for the past two decades, accompanied by the increased recognition that views on how migration and development are connected are also affected by changing policy concerns and perspectives (de Haas 2010; Gamlen 2014b; Sørensen 2012). Interest in the fundamental question of how spatial mobility interacts with, or even contributes to the production of, upward or downward social mobility, is of course longstanding (Goodwin-White 2016; Yankson et al. 2017). Indeed, a ‘basic assumption in classic migration studies is that a search for better or more secure livelihoods is the main cause of migration’

358  Handbook on transnationalism

(Sørensen 2012, p. 63), and as such migration and development (broadly conceived) are inextricably linked – empirically and theoretically. From the 1990s, and through the 2000s especially, the transnational turn in migration studies contributed to a lens which encompasses simultaneously the contexts of origin and destination, and which acknowledges their mutual connections, produced by migrants and their relatives (Fouron and Schiller 2001; Levitt 2001). In other words, the development of a transnational lens on international migration began to provide an approach which allows for the analytical inclusion of simultaneity across space and time and of multi-sitedness (Horst 2006; Mazzucato 2009). Such a transnational lens crucially destabilises sedentary assumptions of development studies, where migration and mobility more often than not were seen as exceptions to an assumed sedentary norm that functions as a precondition for socio-economic development. The adoption of a transnational perspective in studying many aspects of international migration highlighted different connections among both people and places in countries of origin and of settlement. Following two decades of research on transnational social fields, efforts to build theories underscored the pressing need to acknowledge that mobility and migration are endogenous to social change (Bakewell 2010). This matters in relation to development, as the sedentary bias which implicitly sees mobility as an anomaly to fix has persisted despite copious opposing empirical evidence (Hammond 1999; Kibreab 1999; Malkki 1992). Migrants’ transnational ties with countries of origin are ingrained dimensions of migrants’ everyday life, constitutive of transnational social fields that connect and affect people and communities ‘here’ and ‘there’, and are one among several factors in producing (or resisting) change in both places of origin, and indeed of reception and settlement. As analysis of migrants’ transnational engagements increased, this spurred critical scrutiny of how transnational the average migrant really was (Waldinger 2008). Development, as a set of issues connecting countries of origin and settlement, became an area of growing interest. Interest in migrant remittances as part of migrant transnational practices is one dimension of this, and the dimension which has spurred the most attention from the global development community, including from economists. This interest, pointedly focused primarily on remittances and sometimes referred to ‘the migration–development mantra’ (Kapur 2005), reflected a swing towards optimism in the migration and development pendulum (Gamlen 2014b). Meanwhile, the perspective taken increasingly by individual states, connecting migration to security, markedly tilts how connections with development are seen (Sørensen 2012).

MIGRANT REMITTANCES: WHY TRANSACTION COSTS MATTER As discussed earlier, remittances typically refer to the money which migrants send back to families in places of origin (Ratha et al. 2016). The private monetary transfers happen both nationally and internationally. The volume of international remittances,

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development  359

not least from countries in Europe or North America to countries in Asia and Africa, is significant. To illustrate, commonly the value of international remittances is estimated to be about three times the volume of overseas development aid (ODA) globally. A further illustration points to the wide-ranging network effects of remittances, where estimates suggest that as many as one in nine people globally are supported by remittances sent by migrants.1 In the past two decades, interest in migrant remittances and their association with development in countries of origin has grown (Hansen 2012; Kapur 2005). On the one hand, this is connected with increasing emphasis on accurate recording of monetary transfers, which has helped make visible the volumes of remittances being transferred (Carling 2008a). On the other hand, it is also connected with attention to money being transferred to and between criminal and terrorist networks, most notably following the terrorist attacks that took place in the United States in September 2001, which resulted in wide ranging action against informal money transfer operators (Horst et al. 2014). It is worth noting here that as money for – and indeed from – criminal or terrorist activities can be transferred via mechanisms which are both formal and informal, it is not the formality or informality of the transfer channel that decides whether or not such funds are connected with illegal activity. Meanwhile, in the wake of 2001, a focus on combating the funding of terrorism, as well as more generally combating money laundering, has led to growing regulatory control over money transfer operations internationally (Passas 2006). For migrants sending remittances, there are two contrasting effects. First, increased regulatory control over money transfer operations has arguably been key to the decrease in transaction costs, as transparency and competition have grown (Freund and Spatafora 2008). This is a favourable change, and as I return to, crucial to future prospects of increasing the development effects of remittances. Second, the increased focus on the money transfer operators overall has led to suspicion of informal operators, most notably those using traditional modes of transferring value and settling transactions using trade connections and established networks across time and space. These are known as hawala (in the Horn of Africa) or hundi (in South Asia) (Ratha 2007). Such models of monetary transfer have been in operation for a long time and continue to operate, especially in contexts where the formal banking system is less established, or less trusted. Increasingly, such informal money transfer systems also use Internet and mobile technologies. In practice, today, the operations of global money transfer operators, such as Western Union or MoneyGram, are largely comparable to those of informal money transfer operators working in the Horn of Africa, where all actors are subject to the same systematic controls regarding money laundering and suspicion of funding terrorist organisations. Globally, for migrants who send remittances to family, friends and causes they care about in places of origin, both effects matter. Increased scrutiny and assumptions connecting remittances to criminal activity have fed into suspicion about migrants’ transnational ties more generally, reflecting fears over dual loyalties and allegations of insufficient commitment to societies of settlement (Horst et al. 2014). The reduction of transaction costs is, by contrast, a win-win scenario for migrants. Migrants’

360  Handbook on transnationalism

who send remittances can either spend less money on the operation, with receivers getting the same amounts as previously; or spend the same amount, with receivers getting more money. Therefore, transaction costs have become an important issue in discussions over increasing the development effects of remittances (Ahmed et al. 2020). The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals refer specifically to the need to cut remittance transaction costs, which has been echoed in the Global Compact for Migration. The average cost of sending remittances globally is estimated to be about 10 per cent of each transaction. However, this average conceals huge variation, regionally and in relation to specific ‘remittance corridors’. While some of the most important (in terms of volumes) remittance corridors have low transfer costs, such as US to Mexico (4.22 per cent), UAE to India (3.45 per cent) or Hong Kong to China (5 per cent), transfer costs especially for remittances sent to sub-Saharan African countries are often higher, in the range of 8–17 per cent depending on whether banks or money transfer operators are used, and whether recipients receive cash or use bank accounts or mobile banking solutions.2 Current efforts to reduce transaction costs (and increase transparency) in the international remittance market aims to see average transaction costs at 3 per cent of transfer amounts globally, with no corridors above 5 per cent. Thus, while a technical financial issue, remittance transaction costs are a key dimension of how migrants’ transnational practices affect development in places of origin, and beyond (Ahmed et al. 2020). In the next section, I elaborate on the ways in which migrant transnationalism – through the specific practices and ties of migrants – connects with development in countries of origin. How (and Why) Migrants Engage in Development in Countries of Origin With reference to the migration–development mantra (Hansen 2012; Kapur 2005), and to migrants’ transnational practices, it is worth stating the obvious: namely, that for most migrants, their primary interest and motivation in sustaining transnational ties is closely linked to maintaining interpersonal links with their loved ones. Hence, migrant transnationalism is at the outset a condition of the stretching of human relations across space, and not a development tool. Nevertheless, there are specific ways in which migrant transnationalism does connect with and have impacts on processes of development, understood as socio-economic improvement, in contexts of origin. I discuss seven dimensions of migrant transnationalism, touching on how (and why) migrants engage in development in countries of origin. 1. Remittances as private transfers The reasons why migrants send remittances are personal and private, and far removed from national development strategies, as they are embedded in familial networks of obligations, expectations and emotions (Carling 2014; Cliggett 2005; Erdal 2012; McKay 2007). Nevertheless, remittances are important beyond the families for whom they are vital, whether as the main source of income, as a lifeline in times

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development  361

of crisis, or as a way of increasing opportunities by improving access to health care, education or investment in livelihoods (Eversole and Johnson 2014). Indeed, many countries have active policies to encourage remittance-sending, e.g. by ensuring the provision of competitive remittances services, including through the formal banking system (Gamlen 2014a). Remittances – at a macroeconomic national level – boost countries’ financial robustness, as they contribute to the foreign exchange reserves, and to the volume of financial flows in banking systems. By implication, remittances, as money which enters the national economy from the outside, contribute to opportunities for dynamism in the economy, and in many countries surpass the volumes of foreign direct investment (Clemens and McKenzie 2014). Meanwhile, as remittances are private transfers between individuals, it is worth dwelling on the ways in which remittances are engrained within interpersonal relationships (Åkesson 2011). This might act as a life-line in circumstances of conflict or uncertainty, when migrants experience ‘the early-morning phone call’ asking for help (Lindley 2010) from relatives experiencing crisis situations. However, more often than not, the dynamics of remittances might be better understood within the broader frame of migration as an investment, for families, households and individuals (Clemens and Ogden 2014). Such family investments are embedded within interpersonal relationships, where economic, emotional as well as social dynamics are at play, which is always the context within which migrants’ reasons for sending remittances are set (McKay 2007). 2. Social remittances The potential for migrants to effect change in places of origin starts before migration takes place, as considerations of opportunities beyond the local already impact how local opportunities are seen. The term social remittances, however, refers to changes which migration may lead to, as ideas, practices and values, from different places, are brought into conversation, resulting from migrants’ transnational ties back to places of origin (Levitt 1998; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2010). Similar to remittances, social remittances should not be understood simply as something migrants ‘send back’, but rather as processes of exchange, embedded within social networks (Paasche 2016). In some instances, migrants actively seek to effect particular forms of change, understood as improvement. This could relate to particular cultural practices (e.g. female genital mutilation) or social differentiation (e.g. discrimination based on caste) (Daehnhardt 2019; Diabate and Mesplé-Somps 2019). Debates about social remittances often foreground two types of important challenges. First, it is inherently hard to measure social remittances in meaningful and robust ways, as social remittances feed into and are part of social change, which is affected not only by migration, but also the broader dynamics of globalisation. Because the two – migration and globalisation – also affect one another, it is close to impossible to pinpoint a cause-and-effect relationship between social remittances and particular forms of change. Second, the notion of migrants’ ‘sending back’ particular ideas or values to communities of origin, has rightly been criticised for

362  Handbook on transnationalism

(perhaps inadvertently) reifying notions of migrant destinations (assumed to be in the Global North) as places from which to take ideas, and migrant origins (assumed to be in the Global South) as places to which ideas need to be introduced (Boccagni and Decimo 2013; Grabowska et al. 2017; Grabowska and Garapich 2016). Nevertheless, it remains beyond doubt that migrants’ transnational connections with people and places ‘back home’ also entail the transfer of information, awareness, or knowledge about practices and realities in countries of immigration (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou 2016; Nowicka and Šerbedžija 2016). 3. Return migration In the context of migration and development, return migration is often seen as a vehicle for development in contexts of origin (Black and King 2004; Sinatti 2014; Van Houte and Davids 2008). Returning migrants may contribute to development in contexts of origin in many ways, including through remittances and social remittances, as well as diaspora development engagements (see later). The assumption is that upon return, migrants may invest in contexts of origin, and through this contribute to increasing livelihood opportunities and economic growth, not just for themselves, but broadly within their own communities (Cassarino 2004). This is exemplified by return migrants’ entrepreneurship activities, where they explicitly or implicitly draw on their transnational ties with migrant and non-migrant networks in the countries they used to live in prior to return (Black and Castaldo 2009). Return migration draws on the transnational ties sustained throughout periods of absence, where the transnational relations which have been maintained are necessary in order for return migrants to settle back into communities of origin (Sinatti 2011). Meanwhile, return migration, especially after longer periods away, may lead to integration difficulties back into communities of origin: despite linguistic and cultural familiarity, return may be experienced as challenging in ways similar to those of integration in places of settlement (Oeppen 2013). Return migration and migrant transnationalism are hence connected in at least two ways. First, ‘transnationalism interacts with return intentions, actual plans for return migration, post-return experiences, and future remigration’ (Carling and Erdal 2014, p. 10). Second, return migration contributes to producing and maintaining different forms of transnationalism – including what may be termed ‘reverse transnationalism’ (return migrants keeping in touch with communities they lived in abroad) or ‘split-household transnationalism’ (where parts of a household remain abroad, while other parts return to origin) (Harpviken 2014; Iaria 2014). Gender and remittances 4. Why and how migrants engage transnationally with people in places of origin differs, not least depending on gender, age and family roles (King et al. 2006). Remittances are both sent and received by women, as well as by men. In some migration contexts, women and men may migrate to different destinations to undertake different kinds of work – for example, women as domestic and care workers and men for construction work – but share similar remittance-obligations (Hoang and Yeoh 2015; King et al.

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development  363

2013). By contrast, in other contexts, only men or only women may migrate and thus send remittances. Finally, in many places migrant families may send remittances to relatives, based on a more or less shared understanding of distribution of such funds between receivers of remittances (Erdal 2012). Examining remittances with a gendered lens helps shed light on aspects of remittance-sending and remittance-receiving, which are often deeply ingrained within migration processes, and foreground power asymmetries. Such power asymmetries could pertain to transnational marriages, intimacy and care (Collantes 2016; Shaw and Charsley 2006; Yeoh et al. 2013; Zhang, Chapter 20 in this volume), but also reflect common asymmetries within transnational social fields (Carling 2008b). A further dimension of gender and remittances relates to the potential impact which remittances, as set within the broader context of migration and transnational practices, hold for affecting gender relations (King et al. 2013). For instance, in contexts where households are generally male-headed, how does the migration of the head of household impact on the division of labour and gender roles in the household? Research from the Pakistani context suggests that the impacts of migration and remittance-receipt over time affect norms and expectations, also in the realm of gender roles and relations – such as lowering degree of acceptance of domestic violence among women in remittance-receiving households (Mitra et al. 2021). 5. Collective remittances and diaspora development engagements Home-town associations (HTAs) and diaspora organisations more broadly have increasingly come into focus as important ways in which migrants actively engage transnationally in development efforts in areas of origin (Mazzucato and Kabki 2009; Mercer et al. 2009; Pries and Bohlen, Chapter 10 in this volume). Diaspora development engagements involve collective mobilisations, where the boundary between individual and family remittances, and collective remittances, is not clear-cut (Goldring 2004). A key example of a diaspora-development programme is the Tres por Uno programme in Mexico, where the Mexican state (at federal, regional and local levels) supports development projects with three dollars, for each dollar migrant organisations donate (Lopez 2011; Smyth 2017). Migrants’ transnational development engagements in areas of origin may be motivated by crisis or humanitarian disasters, but usually are more long-term and low-key efforts linked to a sense of duty or a sense of fairness in contributing back – as a debt to be repaid (Page and Mercer 2012; Sana 2005). For many migrants, transnational engagements are also about doing one’s bit to help contribute to improvements and effect positive social change in the area of origin. The types of efforts migrant organisations contribute to span the full range of development needs, but are often focused on health and education provision, as well as vocation and other livelihoods-oriented training and investment (Espinosa 2015; Ngomba 2012). As with all development efforts, diaspora contributions also come with specific sets of ‘ties attached’; for example, diaspora members may stop by to visit diaspora-development projects while on holiday in places of origin, contributing to a different form of monitoring as compared to other development circles (Brinkerhoff 2012).

364  Handbook on transnationalism

6. Transnational political engagement and ‘political remittances’ Migrants’ transnational political engagement may be seen as a contribution to development in countries of origin, but whether or not it is a contribution, or should be seen as such, is an empirical as well as a normative question. In relation to transnational political engagement in conflict settings, migrants’ involvement has rightly been described as potentially constituting both ‘peace building’ and ‘war mongering’ or indeed, anything in between (Brinkerhoff 2011; Horst 2008b; Orjuela 2008). Such differences in perspectives on the nature and value of migrants’ transnational political engagements also reflect that these engagements may be politicised, even in cases when they are not (primarily) political engagements, such as when providing aid in crisis in a separatist region (Koser 2003; Østergaard-Nielsen 2003). Voting in country of origin elections and engagement in party politics are the most explicitly political forms of transnational engagements (Collyer 2013; Escobar et al. 2014). These phenomena have been explored both from the perspective of migrants, and in terms of the roles which exterior votes have in national elections. At a more institutional level, states’ diaspora policies often encompass remittance incentives, property ownership and investment facilitation, visa-free travel or dual citizenship regulation, as well as the enfranchisement of citizens living abroad (Gamlen 2014a). The term ‘political remittances’ has been used to refer to political transfers from migrants, in the form of voting, or through expressed views or modes of debate with counterparts in countries of origin (Krawatzek and Müller-Funk 2020). As with ‘social remittances’, the term ‘political remittances’ suffers both from the oversimplified notion that migrants ‘send back’ political values, in a one-directional manner, and from the normative assumption that countries of settlement represent progress, whereas countries of origin somehow do not. 7. How religion matters Migrants’ transnational ties may also be of a religious nature. Sometimes, religious motivations may be important in remittance-sending, whether to individuals or as collective transnational engagements (Erdal and Borchgrevink 2017). When motivations for sending remittances are explored, these are often operationalised as altruistic, selfish, or a mix of both (Fokkema et al. 2013). In the case of migrants who are Muslim, Islamic charity is often stretched across international borders, and becomes transnational Islamic charity (Borchgrevink and Erdal 2017; Unheim and Rowlands 2012). The Islamic charitable practice of ‘zakat’ or annual alms giving on the basis of an individual’s accumulated assets, in the context of international migration, usually involves a transnational dimension. Migrants from a range of different faiths often find formal and informal faith-based networks in countries of settlement of value both for issues to do with life abroad and as natural settings in which to organise transnationally for development and emergency assistance purposes. In these cases, church, temple, or mosque-based networks may operate in modes which are similar to those of HTAs (discussed above) (Borchgrevink and Erdal 2017). Similar to the case of political transnational engagements, whether or not migrants’ transnational religious engagements are – or

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development  365

are seen as – contributions to development in countries of origin, is both an empirical question, and one of perspective, political or in terms of values. Nevertheless, it is beyond any doubt that religion plays a role in many cases of migrants’ transnational engagements in countries of origin, and is interconnected with social, cultural, and political dimensions of migrant transnationalism (Nowicka and Šerbedžija 2016; Pasura 2012; Pasura, Chapter 17 in this volume).

CONCLUSION: REMITTANCES AS SOCIAL PRACTICES Migrant transnationalism, somewhat awkwardly, places migrants in an agentic role while rendering migrants’ relatives in contexts of origin as more passive, as the framework puts more emphasis on ‘migrants’ (Dahinden 2016). Nevertheless, attention to migrant transnationalism provides an optic through which to study practices and ties which reflect sustained human interaction over time and across space. Understanding remittance behaviour benefits from careful analysis of transnational relationships and the interactions between people across transnational social fields (Levitt and Schiller 2004; Åkesson 2011). At the same time, it needs to be remembered that the impacts of internal remittances on development in migrant areas of origin are significant (King and Skeldon 2010). Thus, there are good reasons to seek to engage perspectives that combine internal with international migration as regards remittances. Remittances, as a key transnational practice, may affect development in countries of origin, not least in economic terms. Accordingly, a holistic perspective is necessary in order to capture the motivations for sending and receiving remittances, the costs of remittance transfer, and the potential for change associated with remittances. In the 2010s, there was an increasing acknowledgement of the dynamics of remittances as social practices (Carling 2014; Erdal 2014; Rahman and Fee 2012; Yeoh et al. 2013). The most radical implication of this approach is that anything transnational migrants engage in ought to be studied via the prism of monetary transfers, that is, understood as economic exchanges that are inevitably social by nature. Such a move would perhaps render terms like social remittances or political remittances superfluous. However, a more tempered view might be to suggest that remittances are always – albeit in differing ways – more than the money migrants send back home, and that indeed, it is through understanding economic exchanges and relationships that we can make better sense of migrants’ social practices across space and time.

NOTES 1. 2.

See https://​www​.un​.org/​development/​desa/​en/​news/​population/​remittances​-matter​.html (accessed 30 March 2020). See http://​w ww​. finsmes​. com/​2 020/​0 7/​t he​- worlds​- most​- important​- remittance​ -corridors​. html; https://​m edium​. com/​@​t elcoin/​r ipe​- for​- disruption​- sub​- saharan​

366  Handbook on transnationalism

-africas​-outrageously​-expensive​-remittance​-corridors​-353726c0f6d8 (accessed 7 August 2020). Remittance transfer costs are calculated based on the cost of sending 200 USD.

REFERENCES Ahmed, Junaid, Mazhar Mughal and Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso (2020), ‘Sending money home: Transaction cost and remittances to developing countries’, Center for European Governance and Economic Development Research, Discussion Papers 387. Åkesson, Lisa (2011), ‘Remittances and relationships: Exchange in Cape Verdean transnational families’, Ethnos, 76 (3), 326–47. Al-Sharmani, Mulki (2010), ‘Transnational family networks in the Somali diaspora in Egypt: Women’s roles and differentiated experiences’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17 (4), 499–518. Ambrosius, Christian and Alfredo Cuecuecha (2016), ‘Remittances and the use of formal and informal financial services’, World Development, 77, 80–98. Asiedu, Alex (2005), ‘Some benefits of migrants’ return visits to Ghana’, Population, Space and Place, 11 (1), 1–11. Bakewell, Oliver (2010), ‘Some reflections on structure and agency in migration theory’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (10), 1689–708. Benton, Gregor and Hong Liu (2018), Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Black, Richard and Adriana Castaldo (2009), ‘Return migration and entrepreneurship in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire: The role of capital transfers’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 100 (1), 44–58. Black, Richard and Russell King (2004), ‘Editorial introduction: Migration, return and development in West Africa’, Population, Space and Place, 10 (2), 75–83. Boccagni, Paolo and Francesca Decimo (2013), ‘Editorial: Mapping social remittances’, Migration Letters, 10 (1), 1–10. Borchgrevink, Kaja and Marta Bivand Erdal (2017), ‘With faith in development: Organising transnational Islamic charity’, Progress in Development Studies, 17 (3), 214–28. Brinkerhoff, Jennifer M. (2011), ‘Diasporas and conflict societies: Conflict entrepreneurs, competing interests or contributors to stability and development?’, Conflict, Security & Development, 11 (2), 115–43. Brinkerhoff, Jennifer M. (2012), ‘Creating an enabling environment for diasporas’ participation in homeland development’, International Migration, 50 (1), 75–95. Carling, Jørgen (2008a), ‘The determinants of migrant remittances’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 24 (3), 582–99. Carling, Jørgen (2008b), ‘The human dynamics of migrant transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31 (8), 1452–77. Carling, Jørgen (2014), ‘Scripting remittances: Making sense of money transfers in transnational relationships’, International Migration Review, 48 (1), 218–62. Carling, Jørgen and Marta Bivand Erdal (2014), ‘Return migration and transnationalism: How are the two connected?’, International Migration, 52 (6), 2–12. Cassarino, Jean-Pierre (2004), ‘Theorising return migration: The conceptual approach to return migrants revisited’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 6 (2), 253–79. Clemens, Michael A. and David McKenzie (2014), ‘Why don’t remittances appear to affect growth?’, The Economic Journal, 128 (612), F179–F209. Clemens, Michael A. and Timothy Ogden (2014), ‘Migration as a strategy for household finance: A research agenda on remittances, payments, and development’, CGD Working Paper 354, Washington, DC: Center for Global Development. Cliggett, Lisa (2005), ‘Remitting the gift: Zambian mobility and anthropological insights for migration studies’, Population, Space and Place, 11 (1), 35–48.

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development  367

Collantes, Christiane F. (2016), ‘Reproductive dilemmas, labour and remittances: Gender and intimacies in Cavite, Philippines’, South East Asia Research, 24 (1), 77–97. Collyer, Michael (2013), ‘A geography of extra territorial citizenship: Explanations of external voting’, Migration Studies, 2 (1), 55–72. Daehnhardt, Madleina (2019), Migration, Development and Social Change in the Himalayas: An Ethnographic Village Study, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Dahinden, Janine (2016), ‘A plea for the “de-migranticization” of research on migration and integration’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 (13), 2207–25. de Haas, Hein (2005), ‘International migration, remittances and development: Myths and facts’, Third World Quarterly, 26 (8), 1269–84. de Haas, Hein (2010), ‘Migration and development: A theoretical perspective’, International Migration Review, 44 (1), 227–64. Diabate, Idrissa and Sandrine Mesplé-Somps (2019), ‘Female genital mutilation and migration in Mali: Do return migrants transfer social norms?’, Journal of Population Economics, 32 (4), 1125–70. Erdal, Marta Bivand (2012), ‘Who is the money for? Remittances within and beyond the household in Pakistan’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 21 (4), 437–57. Erdal, Marta Bivand (2014), ‘The social dynamics of remittance-receiving in Pakistan: Agency and opportunity among non-migrants in a transnational social field’, in Md Mizanur Rahman, Tan Tai Yong and Ahsan Ullah (eds), Migrant Remittances in South Asia: Social, Economic and Political Implications, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 115–34. Erdal, Marta Bivand and Kaja Borchgrevink (2017), ‘Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals’, Global Networks, 17 (1), 130–146. Escobar, Cristina, Renelinda Arana and James A. McCann (2014), ‘Expatriate voting and migrants’ place of residence: Explaining transnational participation in Colombian elections’, Migration Studies, 3 (1), 1–31. Espinosa, Shirlita A. (2015), ‘Diaspora philanthropy: The making of a new development aid?’, Migration and Development, 5 (3), 1–17. Eversole, Robyn and Mary Johnson (2014), ‘Migrant remittances and household development: An anthropological analysis’, Development Studies Research, 1 (1), 1–15. Fokkema, Tineke, Eralba Cela and Elena Ambrosetti (2013), ‘Giving from the heart or from the ego? Motives behind remittances of the second generation in Europe’, International Migration Review, 47 (3), 539–72. Fouron, Georges and Nina Glick Schiller (2001), ‘All in the family: Gender, transnational migration, and the nation‐state’, Identities, 7 (4), 539–82. Freund, Caroline and Nikola Spatafora (2008), ‘Remittances, transaction costs, and informality’, Journal of Development Economics, 86 (2), 356–66. Gamlen, Alan (2014a), ‘Diaspora institutions and diaspora governance’, International Migration Review, 48 (1), 180–217. Gamlen, Alan (2014b), ‘The new migration-and-development pessimism’, Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 581–97. Goldring, Luin (2004), ‘Family and collective remittances to Mexico: A multi-dimensional typology’, Development and Change, 35 (4), 799–840. Goodwin-White, Jamie (2016), ‘Is social mobility spatial? Characteristics of immigrant metros and second generation outcomes: 1940–1970 and 1970–2000’, Population, Space and Place, 22 (8), 807–22. Grabowska, Izabela and Michał P. Garapich (2016), ‘Social remittances and intra-EU mobility: Non-financial transfers between U.K. and Poland’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42 (13), 2146–62. Grabowska, Izabela, Michał P. Garapich, Ewa Jaźwińska and Agnieszka Radziwinowiczówna (2017), ‘Introduction: Social remittances and “hand-made” change by migrants’, in Izabela Grabowska, Michal P. Garapich, Ewa Jaźwińska and Agnieszka Radziwinowiczówna

368  Handbook on transnationalism

(eds), Migrants as Agents of Change: Social Remittances in an Enlarged European Union, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–10. Hammond, Laura (1999), ‘Examining the discourse of repatriation: Towards a more proactive theory of return migration’, in Richard Black and Khalid Koser (eds), The End of the Refugee Cycle? Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 227–44. Hansen, Peter (2012), ‘Revising the remittance mantra: A study of migration-development policy formation in Tanzania’, International Migration, 50 (3), 77–91. Harpviken, Kristian B. (2014), ‘Split return: Transnational household strategies in Afghan Repatriation’, International Migration, 52 (6), 51–71. Hoang, Lan A. and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds) (2015), Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and the Changing Family in Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Horst, Cindy (2006), Transnational Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab Camps of Kenya, New York: Berghahn Books. Horst, Cindy (2008a), ‘The role of remittances in the transnational livelihood strategies of Somalis’, in Ton van Naerssen, Ernst Spaan and Annelis Zoomers (eds), Global Migration and Development, New York: Routledge, pp. 91–108. Horst, Cindy (2008b), ‘The transnational political engagements of refugees: Remittance sending practices amongst Somalis in Norway’, Conflict, Security & Development, 8 (3), 317–39. Horst, Cindy, Marta Bivand Erdal, Jørgen Carling and Karin Afeef (2014), ‘Private money, public scrutiny? Contrasting perspectives on remittances’, Global Networks, 14 (4), 514–32. Iaria, Vanessa (2014), ‘Post‐return transnationalism and the Iraqi displacement in Syria and Jordan’, International Migration, 52 (6), 43–56. Isaakyan, Irina and Anna Triandafyllidou (2016), ‘“Sending so much more than money”: Exploring social remittances and transnational mobility’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (15), 1–19. Kapur, Davesh (2005), ‘Remittances: The new development mantra?’, in Samuel M. Maimbo and Dilip Ratha (eds), Remittances: Development Impact and Future Prospects, Washington, DC: The World Bank, pp. 332–60. Kibreab, Gaim (1999), ‘Revisiting the debate on people, place, identity and displacement’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 12 (4), 384–410. King, Russell, Mirela Dalipaj and Nicola Mai (2006), ‘Gendering migration and remittances: Evidence from London and northern Albania’, Population, Space and Place, 12 (6), 409–34. King, Russell, Diana Mata-Codesal and Julie Vullnetari (2013), ‘Migration, development, gender and the “black box” of remittances: Comparative findings from Albania and Ecuador’, Journal of Comparative Migration Studies, 1 (1), 69–96. King, Russel and Ronald Skeldon (2010), ‘“Mind the gap!” Integrating approaches to internal and international migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (10), 1619–46. Koser, Khalid (2003), ‘Long-distance nationalism and the responsible state: The case of Eritrea’, in Eva Østergaard-Nielsen (ed.), International Migration and Sending Countries: Perceptions, Policies and Transnational Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–84. Krawatzek, Félix and Lea Müller-Funk (2020), ‘Two centuries of flows between “here” and “there”: Political remittances and their transformative potential’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46 (6), 1003–24. Levitt, Peggy (1998), ‘Social remittances: Migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion’, International Migration Review, 32 (4), 926–48. Levitt, Peggy (2001), ‘Transnational migration: Taking stock and future directions’, Global Networks, 1 (3), 195–216.

Migrant transnationalism, remittances and development  369

Levitt, Peggy and Nina Glick Schiller (2004), ‘Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society’, International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002–39. Levitt, Peggy and Deepak Lamba-Nieves (2010), ‘Social remittances revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (1), 1–22. Lindley, Anna (2010), The Early Morning Phone Call: Somali Refugees’ Remittances, New York: Berghahn Books. Lopez, Sarah L. (2011), ‘The remittance landscape: Space, architecture, and society in emigrant Mexico’, DPhil dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Maimbo, Samuel M. and Dilip Ratha (eds) (2005), Remittances: Development Impact and Future Prospects, Washington, DC: The World Bank. Malkki, Liisa (1992), ‘National geographic: The rooting of peoples and the territorialisation of national identity among scholars and refugees’, Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 22–44. Mazzucato, Valentina (2008), ‘The double engagement: Transnationalism and integration. Ghanaian migrants’ lives between Ghana and the Netherlands’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34 (2), 199–216. Mazzucato, Valentina (2009), ‘Bridging boundaries with a transnational research approach: A simultaneous matched sample methodology’, in Marc-Anthony Falzon (ed.), Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 215–32. Mazzucato, Valentina (2011), ‘Reverse remittances in the migration-development nexus: Two-way flows between Ghana and the Netherlands’, Population, Space and Place, 17 (5), 454–68. Mazzucato, Valentina and Mirjam Kabki (2009), ‘Small is beautiful: The micro-politics of transnational relationships between Ghanaian hometown associations and communities back home’, Global Networks, 9 (2), 227–51. McKay, Deirdre (2007), “Sending dollars shows feeling”: Emotions and economies in Filipino migration’, Mobilities, 2 (2), 175–94. Mercer, Claire, Ben Page and Martin Evans (2009), ‘Unsettling connections: Transnational networks, development and African home town associations’, Global Networks, 9 (2), 141–61. Mitra, Aniruddha, James T. Bang and Faisal Abbas (2021), ‘Do remittances reduce women’s acceptance of domestic violence? Evidence from Pakistan’, World Development, 138, 105149. Ngomba, Teke (2012), ‘Beyond family remittances: Assessing the prospects of alternative approaches to “remittances for development” in Africa’, International Migration, 50 (s1), e177–e195. Nowicka, Magdalena and Vojin Šerbedžija (eds) (2016), Migration and Social Remittances in a Global Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Oeppen, Ceri (2013), ‘A stranger at “home”: Interactions between transnational return visits and integration for Afghan refugees’, Global Networks, 13 (2), 261–78. Orjuela, Camilla (2008), ‘Distant warriors, distant peace workers? Multiple diaspora roles in Sri Lanka’s violent conflict’, Global Networks, 8 (4), 436–52. Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva (2003), ‘International migration and sending countries: Key issues and themes’, in Eva Østergaard-Nielsen (ed.), International Migration and Sending Countries: Perceptions, Policies and Transnational Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–30. Paasche, E. (2016), ‘A conceptual and empirical critique of “social remittances”: Iraqi Kurdish migrants narrate resistance’, in Magdalena Nowicka and Vojin Šerbedžija (eds), Migration and Social Remittances in a Global Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 121–41. Page, Ben and Claire Mercer (2012), ‘Why do people do stuff? Reconceptualizing remittance behaviour in diaspora-development research and policy’, Progress in Development Studies, 12 (1), 1–18.

370  Handbook on transnationalism

Passas, Nikos (2006), ‘Fighting terror with error: The counter-productive regulation of informal value transfers’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 45 (4–5), 315–36. Pasura, Dominic (2012), ‘Religious transnationalism: The case of Zimbabwean Catholics in Britain’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 42 (1), 26–53. Rahman, Md Mizanur and Lian Kwen Fee (2012), ‘Towards a sociology of migrant remittances in Asia: Conceptual and methodological challenges’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (4), 689–706. Ratha, Dilip (2007), ‘Leveraging remittances for development’, https://​www​.migrationpolicy​ .org/​research/​leveraging​-remittances​-development. Ratha, Dilip, Sonia Plaza and Ervin Dervisevic (2016), Migration and Remittances Factbook 2016: 3rd Edition, Washington, DC: The World Bank. Sana, Mariano (2005), ‘Buying membership in the transnational community: Migrant remittances, social status, and assimilation’, Population, Research and Policy Review, 24, 231–61. Shaw, Alison and Katharine Charsley (2006), ‘Rishtas: Adding emotion to strategy in understanding British Pakistani transnational marriages’, Global Networks, 6 (4), 405–21. Siegel, Melissa and Sonja Fransen (2013), ‘New technologies in remittance sending: Opportunities for mobile remittances in Africa’, African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 5 (5), 423–38. Siegel, Melissa and Matthias Lücke (2013), ‘Migrant transnationalism and the choice of transfer channels for remittances: The case of Moldova’, Global Networks, 13 (1), 120–141. Sinatti, Giulia (2011), ‘“Mobile transmigrants” or “unsettled returnees”? Myth of return and permanent resettlement among Senegalese migrants’, Population, Space and Place, 17 (2), 153–66. Sinatti, Giulia (2014), ‘Return migration as a win-win-win scenario? Visions of return among Senegalese migrants, the state of origin and receiving countries’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38 (2), 1–15. Skeldon, Ronald (2014), Migration and Development: A Global Perspective, London and New York: Routledge. Smyth, Araby (2017), ‘Re-reading remittances through solidarity: Mexican hometown associations in New York City’, Geoforum, 85, 12–19. Sørensen, Ninna N. (2012), ‘Revisiting the migration–development nexus: From social networks and remittances to markets for migration control’, International Migration, 50 (3), 61–76. Unheim, Per and Dane Rowlands (2012), ‘Micro-level determinants of remittances from recent migrants to Canada’, International Migration, 50 (4), 124–39. van Houte, Marieke and Tine Davids (2008), ‘Development and return migration: From policy panacea to migrant perspective sustainability’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (7), 1411–29. Waldinger, Roger (2008), ‘Between “here” and “there”: Immigrant cross-border activities and loyalties’, International Migration Review, 42 (1), 3–29. Yankson, Paul W.K., Katherine V. Gough, James Esson and Ebenezer F. Amankwaa (2017), ‘Spatial and social transformations in a secondary city: The role of mobility in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana’, Danish Journal of Geography, 117 (2), 82–92. Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Chee Heng Leng, Vu T.K. Dung and Cheng Yi’en (2013), ‘Between two families: The social meaning of remittances for Vietnamese marriage migrants in Singapore’, Global Networks, 13 (4), 441–58

24. Communications technologies and transnational networks Jolynna Sinanan and Heather A. Horst

INTRODUCTION Experiences of migration and the creation and maintenance of transnational networks have arguably become more diverse with the advent of digital technologies. In this chapter, we present a concise summary of the literature that has informed the way we think about the relationship between communications technologies and their impact on transnational networks. Rapid transformations in the cost, ease of access and the increase in digital literacies alongside shifting mobility regimes and migration policies over the past twenty years has had the effect that today, mobile, digital and social media communication technologies are inseparable from routines of transnational life. As other chapters in this volume have discussed, communications technologies have become imbricated with longstanding themes in migration studies from different disciplinary perspectives, including notions of home and belonging, affect and emotions, activism and political engagement, maintaining family relationships and the circulation of care. There is a substantial body of literature that discusses media and migration: media representations of migrants, how migrants consume media such as television, news and films, how they relate to media in the region they have migrated from and where they are now living and how consuming media from their countries of origin shapes their desire to return (Sun 2002; Morley 2000; Andersson et al. 2010; Brinkerhoff 2009; Chin 2016; Hiller and Franz 2004; Pierre-Louis 2002). Uses of digital media and communication technologies range from seeking information and coordination before and during relocation to facilitating maintenance and performance of identity online and forms of activism (Dekker and Engbersen 2014; Madianou 2019; Andersson 2019). This chapter focuses on communications practices, or how technologies are a key part of transnational networks that shape migrant experiences of family and other social networks. The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first, we outline scholarship that has focused on communications technologies prior to the ubiquity of digital media. In particular, we examine how this body of literature has considered the impact of what can be described as more traditional forms of communication: phone calls, letters and audio cassettes in relation to the maintenance and transformation of transnational networks. A significant theme in this stream of scholarship has focused on transnational families and the strategies and making do practices for ‘being together’ and retaining ‘familyhood’ (Baldassar and Merla 2014; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Madianou 2017; Wallace 2002). We draw out insights provided by scholars who have examined 371

372  Handbook on transnationalism

communications technologies that illustrate the impact of expense, distance and long periods of time between communication within transnational relationships. In the second section, we trace the impact of social and digital media in communication within transnational networks. Several authors who have contributed to this body of literature have focused on transnational families and the efforts that are invested into family practices as issues of cost and access to communications technologies have reduced. We introduce how the notions of family and belonging extended to the relationship to migrants’ countries of origins and how the relationship to home can result in engaging with transnational political and social movements. From these perspectives, communication practices have intensified diaspora movements associated with political change. And within scholarship on digital media and transnational networks, ethnographic studies have made significant contributions to capture the everyday routines, practices and experiences associated with integrating digital media into transnational familyhood. We argue that resulting theorisations that have emerged from the last decade of ethnographic research in media and migration such as polymedia environments (Madianou and Miller 2012) have provided nuanced insights for better understanding the role of communications technologies in transnational life. As a theory that has emerged from ethnographic inquiry, polymedia has informed transformations in how home and the extended networks beyond the household are considered in migration scholarship. As we discuss further, as issues of access and cost have decreased, attention to cultural and social implications of digital media practices has increased. As a result, the role of communications technologies in transnational relationships is no longer evaluated as simply positive or negative; multiple complexities of ambivalent feelings, shifts in obligation and future orientations that are part of migrant experiences are now widely recognised as being inextricable from digital media practices. The third section of this chapter draws on our own ethnographic research in communications technologies and transnational networks in the Caribbean context. In her extended research in Jamaica with Miller, Horst argued that the ways in which Jamaicans used cell phones built upon previous modes of socially and culturally inflected modes of communication (Horst and Miller 2005, 2006). In their research as part of the global comparative project on uses of social media, Sinanan and Miller examined the role of digital visual communication and the impact of images circulated over Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (Miller and Sinanan 2017; Sinanan 2017, 2019). Combining over twenty years of experience in the Jamaican context and ten years of experience in the Trinidadian context, we reflect on our research on cellular, mobile and social media technologies in transnational relationships.

COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES PRIOR TO DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA Prior to the ubiquity of low-cost modes of digital communications, communications within transnational networks, and particularly within immediate and extended

Communications technologies and transnational networks  373

families, were part of the wider means of exchange. Regions with long histories of labour migration such as the Caribbean and the Philippines have seen significant transformations in technologies for care and communication (see Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume for a more detailed discussion on care within transnational networks). The provision of goods in the form of barrels or care packages containing consumer items sent to children by their migrant mothers illustrated strategies to convey affective care through gifts when parents were not able to make frequent return visits (Crawford 2003). Others have emphasised the ease of monetary transfers through remittances and their ‘development potential’ (Conway et al. 2012). Remittances have long been recognised for their value as dispersed resources not only for immediate family members but also for their flow-on effect to wider family and community networks (Conway et al. 2012). Transnational mothering has received the most attention in migration scholarship as the primary set of relations affected by migration and where exchange, sending of goods and letters have been examined as a practice to overcome time and distance of separation (see Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). Studies conducted by Olwig (1999, 2012) and Parreñas (2005) for example, note the burdens of transnational mothering and the challenges of mothering at a distance, prior to the ubiquity of digital media, and emphasise the feelings associated with separation such as guilt and longing, and how they transform over time (see Wilding and Baldassar, Chapter 6 in this volume and Baldassar 2015). Peng and Wong (2013) emphasise that sending letters and audio cassette recordings were more popular than making expensive international calls, although the main drawback was that these modes of communication did not provide real-time contact or a sense of co-presence. Arguably, voice and video calls, exchanging images over digital platforms and instant messaging have retained the social and affective characteristics from these previous forms of exchange. Influential scholars in processes of globalisation from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s have documented the impacts of what were considered emerging technologies on migrant experiences. In a key volume on the cultural dimensions of globalisation, Appadurai (1996, p. 6) argues: The images, scripts, models, and narratives that come through mass mediation (in its realistic and fictional modes) make the difference between migration today and in the past. Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who choose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new envi­ronments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space.

As one of the first communications technologies, letter writing has played a significant role in retaining connections with ‘home’, particularly in creating a sense of lived or imagined community or in strengthening family and extended networks (Ballantyne and Burke 2017; Borges and Cancian 2016). The role of the audio cassette has been recognised for its value in parenting at a distance (Madianou and Miller 2012). Yet, beyond a form of dyadic communication, audio cassettes have

374  Handbook on transnationalism

also enabled affiliations to diasporic religious networks, such as tapes of al-Jazeera broadcasts carried in luggage between Oman, Syria, Egypt and the wider Muslim world (Eickelman 1999). Further, Richman and Rey (2009) argue that audio cassettes have transformed Haitian religious communities. Influenced by a history of social, economic and political subjugation and reproduced by the development of Creole in response to French as the dominant colonial language, audio cassette recordings circulated from Haiti to Haitians in the United States feature religious rituals where recordings are perceived as more spiritually powerful by virtue of having been performed in Haiti. More recently, digital media and streaming through platforms such as YouTube have facilitated low-cost connections to regional media in real-time. In early studies of the impact of ICTs (information and communications technologies) on transnational networks, migration scholars focused on the power dimensions influencing the use of technology. Wilding (2006) argues that the Internet and different forms of communications are used differently across gender and cultural groups, while Parreñas (2005) argues that experiences of transnational communication are shaped by existing social inequalities such as class, gender and being rurally or urban-based. One of Vertovec’s (2004, p. 220) key contributions to media and migration studies is his argument that low-cost telephone calls have transformed transnational processes and experiences, impacting domestic and community life, intergenerational and gender relations, religious and cultural practices and financial resources for development in migrants’ home communities. Challenges of affordability and digital literacy have largely been overcome with the advent of smartphones. For some households, the migration of a family member might mean the acquisition of a new laptop (Baldassar 2016). Yet for others, smartphones, with the affordability of data or WiFi plans and easy-to-use social media apps and platforms, have meant that integrating digital communications into everyday life has become much easier. These new, technologically enabled forms of connectedness have alleviated feelings of homesickness, dislocation or isolation and facilitated feelings of belonging (Bacigalupe and Lambe 2011). Smartphones have also facilitated forms of ‘connected presence’ for different kinds of groups separated by distance. In his review on communications technologies and social networks, Licoppe (2004, p. 136) argues that communications technologies provide ‘connected presence’, a continuous stream of mediated interactions that become ‘connected relationships’ in which the boundaries between absence and presence become blurred. Scholars drawing on Licoppe’s early arguments on the impact of ICTs discuss how digital media creates ephemeral and constantly available modes of communication (Alinejad 2019). Marino (2015, p. 6) builds on this idea by introducing the notion of ‘digital togetherness’, which captures ‘a specific sense of belonging and identity that is based on sharing personal and private experiences, such as being online, being Italian, speaking the same language, and considering themselves detached from a country that left little other choice but leaving’.

Communications technologies and transnational networks  375

COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES AND TRANSNATIONAL POLITICAL AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Themes of belonging and identity extend beyond experiences of households and feelings of home to sentiments associated with wider orientations towards engaging with events and concerns within countries of origins. Ties of family obligation and reciprocity that structure the lives of transnational migrants might also extend to countries of origin as homeland and nation. Schiller and Fouron (1999) make the explicit argument that for Haitian immigrants, the relationship to Haiti is an extension of the relationship to family. Their focus on public acts, rather than private sentiments examines the interconnection between personal and political engagements, where political commentary and activism are used to participate in processes of social reproduction of nationhood. Parham (2004) builds on Haitian transnational political participation by describing how Internet technologies have intensified deliberative political action, where Haitians residing in the US used Internet discussion boards in the early 2000s to remain active in critically discussing political events and outcomes in Haiti. She argues that these forums became key sites ‘for dispersed national groups to exercise civic skills by engaging in analysis of community issues’ (Parham, 2004, p. 213). Communications technologies become implicated in transnational social movements and political engagement in three key ways: visibility, mobilisation and organisation. Over the last decade, scholarship that has examined the role of communications technologies in political activism has generally agreed that digital media enhances already existing social movement networks. Contributing to regional political culture might be highly intertwined with migration and mobility, compelling rethinking of regional processes and relations. Burrell’s study of Ghanaian youth and Internet cafés (2009) revealed that engaging with global connections and making new contacts encouraged aspirations to move abroad, rejecting the constraints of Ghanaian society. For more recently democratised African states for example, Bernal (2006) argues that the Internet was instrumental in forging Eritrea’s identity of national independence. Eritreans abroad enacted ‘emotional citizenship’, seeing themselves as involved with national politics although they no longer lived there (Bernal, 2006, p. 164). Eritrean migrants harnessed their position of living away from the country, creating and commentating on websites free from censorship or fear of political repression to participate in ‘homeland politics’. The role of digital technologies varies from being significant in political discussion to compelling collective action. Mercea (2012, p. 164) summarises the relationship between online communication and offline participation in activism as ‘digital prefigurative participation’, where media coverage of a political event impacts upon transnational public opinion to compel motivation and organisation of protests within a region. Goldstein and Rotich (2010) chronicle the 2007­–2008 post-election crisis in Kenya amidst allegations of electoral manipulation and inciting of violence by the ruling party. Kenyans in Nairobi and living

376  Handbook on transnationalism

abroad launched a website as part of an online campaign to draw global attention and challenge mainstream Kenyan media representations. Configurations of SMS and social media platforms (Twitter and Facebook) have attracted much scholarly attention for their role in regional experiences of the Arab Spring, or Arab Uprisings in the early 2010s (Gerbaudo 2012; Tufekci and Wilson 2012). Facebook pages, Twitter, blogs and posts by ‘citizen journalists’ provided commentary and viewpoints that countered the narratives that appeared in state media of repressive regimes. The circulation of news, images and fact checking by transnational networks abroad legitimised movements and mobilised activists and dissidents to organise mass gatherings and protests to demand more democratic transparency (Alaimo 2015; Arafa and Armstrong 2016; Kumar 2018; Moss, 2016). Civic engagement for mobilisation and organisation during crises extend to responding to natural disasters. McKay and Perez (2019) outline ‘citizen aid’, a coordination of efforts by Philippine transnational networks to raise and disseminate funds to meet community needs following Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. However, equally important to large-scale social movements, often, political engagement relates to issues felt more immediately by individuals. Dalgas (2016) discusses Filipino au pairs in Denmark and argues that mainstream media often portrays them as victims, with low level skills and opportunity for mobility. The au pairs in her study counter these images by posting on Facebook to their extended networks in the Philippines, emphasising lifestyle and travel but also the benefits of sacrificing time spent raising their own children to migrate abroad by highlighting the lifestyle benefits to their own families at home. Social media platforms such as Facebook also facilitate new forms of identification and engaging with everyday political concerns. De Bruijn and Nyamnjoh (2009) argue that societies that are considered marginal can actively influence shaping of social relations in terms of continuities and discontinuities. An example from the Pacific Islands is how indigenous Fijians from the island of Rotuma challenge being considered marginal to mainlander Fijians by using social media for cultural revival for Rotumans in Fiji and those who have migrated to Australia or New Zealand (Titifanue et al. 2018). This section has given a brief overview of recent scholarship in transnational political and social movements. The section that follows focuses on more immediate social relationships drawing on a theorisation of polymedia environments.

POLYMEDIA ENVIRONMENTS AND TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS Madianou and Miller’s (2012) notion of polymedia captures the emotional dimensions of transnational media practices. Cross-cultural illustrations of polymedia environments in family relationships have accepted the basis of the premise that as issues of cost and access reduce, issues of choice to navigate social relationships increase. The result is that individuals navigate an integrated media environment: choices for communication within social relationships become consequential, where

Communications technologies and transnational networks  377

each medium is selected in relation to other media that could have been used (de Bruin 2019, p. 481). Within polymedia environments, the emphasis shifts from technological affordances to managing relationships. Email, for example, is preferred for formal exchanges and logistical organisation such as trip planning as opposed to text messages or chat-based platforms that tend to be used for details of financial transactions or gossip (McKay 2018, p. 137). Since the introduction of the term, a significant amount of literature expanding on or exemplifying polymedia environments has tended to focus on communication between family members (Cabalquinto 2018; McKay 2018; Mintarsih 2019; Winarnita 2019; Hsu 2021). An emerging body of scholarship has examined polymedia in relation to a range of transnational experiences beyond the sphere of the family. Social media platforms, from facilitating more closed groups over WhatsApp to a semi-public field such as Facebook, create different degrees of ‘networked privacy’ (Marwick and boyd 2014). In her study of absent, or ‘left behind’ children in the Philippines that builds on her previous ethnographic research on mothering and migration, McKay (2018) argues that posting images of transnational family practices (events, meals or celebrations) on Facebook also expresses a desire to communicate transnational family experiences to wider networks. As a result, these highly visible images and conversations transform norms around expectations and aspirations for upward mobility to wider networks, or they reshape understandings of belonging or wider social norms (see Nedelcu 2013). Wang (2016) makes a similar observation in her study of factory workers who have migrated from rural areas to industrial cities in China. She describes a new generation of rural migrants for whom migration means ‘to see the outside world, where social media platforms WeChat and QQ are less of a bridge that connects young workers with those they have left behind in villages and more of a projector which illuminates ideals of modern living to which they aspire’ (Wang 2016, p. 2). Importantly, Wang’s study is situated within regional or intrastate studies of migration, where experiences of migration might not be characterised by cultural differences across national borders but where long distances between workers and their wider networks shape their experiences of mobility, and where polymedia environments are inextricable from everyday life. Wang further argues that what has become apparent with factory workers’ uses of smartphones is that a kind of ‘dual migration’ has occurred. Workers typically live in overcrowded and under-resourced accommodation facilities and their time spent on mobile phones after work hours counters the laborious conditions of factory work. Rural migrants instead live in an anticipated future through their media practices; they give meaning to their work through aspirations for consumer lifestyles facilitated by their income generated in the problematic present (Wang 2016, p. 187). By contrast, Ballantyne and Burke (2017) take a life course approach to argue that polymedia has different impacts on ‘going home’ for older Irish migrants. ‘Leaving home’ refers to the immediate aftermath of migrating as a young adult, being ‘at home’ coincides with mature adulthood and the practicalities of maintaining work and raising families, and ‘going home’ is characterised by a desire to connect with

378  Handbook on transnationalism

origins (Ballantyne and Burke 2017, p. 12). In these later years, ‘going home’ is experienced through polymedia connections with networks in Ireland and accessing Irish news, culture and sport online, when ‘leaving home’ and being ‘at home’ were experienced in a pre-digital era. The relationship between home and media has been explored in depth in media studies (see Morley 2000; Hartmann 2013). Ballantyne and Burke (2017, p. 11) draw on Antonsich’s (2010, p. 646) definition of the notion of belonging: ‘to belong means to find a place where an individual can feel “at home”’. They examine the implications of polymedia for Rapport and Dawson’s earlier observation that for transnational migrants, the personal narration of identity is ‘carried around in one’s head’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998, p. 27, quoted by Ballantyne and Burke 2017, p. 11). Ballantyne and Burke’s study shows that for Irish migrants living in Melbourne, Australia, beyond remaining in contact with personal networks, polymedia also keeps them connected to Ireland, Irish communities and Irish culture in more general and diffuse ways, such as accessing web-based newspapers for news, culture and sport (Ballantyne and Burke 2017). In de Bruin’s (2019) study of New Zealand migrants in Australia, he expands the concept of polymedia to cover a wide range of media that migrants engage with. He argues that within these wider transnational networks, polymedia relates to maintaining social relationships with those ‘at home’, but also pursuing vocational or media interests such as music or sports. These interests then become common points of reference or topics that can be shared as text conversation, web or video links within social networks. In comparison with the significant body of scholarship on digital media, polymedia and smartphones in transnational families and extended networks, there is far less on the role of communications technologies for friendships. As part of the experience of being ‘connected migrants’, digital media facilitates the ‘portability of the networks of belonging’ (Diminescu 2008, p. 573; Leurs and Ponzanesi 2018, p. 5). For international students as transient migrants, friendship networks provide instrumental means of support without necessarily incurring feelings of ambivalence and obligation associated with family networks (see Waters and Leung, Chapter 15 in this volume; Liu-Farrer, Chapter 19 in this volume; and Baldassar 2015). Studies on Chinese international students emphasise an immersive social media milieu, where Chinese social media platforms QQ and WeChat become all-encompassing social environments, as the US-based platform Facebook is blocked by the mainland Chinese government and WhatsApp is unpopular. Consequently, Chinese students living abroad experience digital boundaries or segregation which results in different digital practices that orientate students to their networks in China (Martin and Rizvi 2014; Peng 2016; Hjorth and Arnold 2012). Similarly, in her work on international students and digital media, Gomes (2016) outlines how friendships in the digital environment provide anchoring to ‘home’ for students during their overseas experience. International students feel connected with the friends they left behind not necessarily through direct messaging but by ‘lurking’ (Gomes 2016). Here, students scroll through their social media contacts’ photographs and posts in order to keep up to date, not only with what their friends do but also

Communications technologies and transnational networks  379

with local events and concerns in ‘almost’ real time, emphasising feelings of being connected while separated by distance. With polymedia environments, Madianou (2016) has argued that the convergence of technologies creates a new form of mediated co-presence – ambient co-presence, which connotes the intense awareness of distant others made possible through the ubiquity of digital media. Constant contact and the frequency of interactions through banter, chatting, posting and commenting on images posted to Facebook or sent over WhatsApp positively acknowledge the importance of relationships, even when the exchanges themselves might not be about anything of importance (see Horst and Miller 2005; Ivana 2018). Mascheroni and Vincent (2016, p. 322) observe that increased modes of communication afforded by digital media can generally provide feelings of proximity and intimacy, but ‘anytime, anywhere’ accessibility can also produce feelings of anxiety. As one participant in Sinanan’s study of Facebook in Trinidad neatly summarises, ‘Just because I have an account, it doesn’t mean I am accountable’. As noted in other chapters in this volume, digital media and the ability to maintain relationships across distance has become an important means for ‘caring’: expressing affection and concern for family members and meeting care obligations (see Baldassar and Wilding, Chapter 25 in this volume; Wilding and Baldassar 2018; McKay 2007). Further, exchanging images through mobile and social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have become more apparent in everyday routines (Robertson et al. 2016; Felton 2014). An emerging body of scholarship has started to consider with more depth, the implications of the circulation of images between transnational family and friendship networks (Robertson et al. 2016). Through allowing constant ‘portability of care’ and ‘portability of networks’ (Baldassar 2016; Felton 2014), smartphones with affordances of built-in cameras have transformed personal digital photography. The circulation of images resembles other forms of gift giving with the intention to acknowledge relationships, where digital photographs function as communicative objects. Scholars in media such as Villi (2012, p. 42) liken camera phone photography to ‘visual chitchat’, ‘visual small-talk’ and ‘pictorial conversation’. Such an effect of communicating the mundane and everyday facilitates feelings of ‘intimate visual co-presence’ (Ito and Okabe, 2005) or ‘distant closeness’ (Van House, 2007). For example, digital visual communication has received recent attention as an aspect of polymedia environments. The more public uses of Facebook, where images might be displayed to a wider audience, project positive ideals of familyhood. Family events are documented through genres of images such as food or holidays (Miller and Sinanan 2017; Sinanan 2019). Closed family groups over WhatsApp might be a repository to exchange images but chat functions might also reveal the tensions between family ideals and practices; tensions that are more typical of family life where members live in close proximity to one another. For transnational families who have experienced disruption, the circulation of images might play a more significant role. Robertson et al. (2016) argue that prolonged periods of separation are a result of shifting migration policies and heavily impact on refugees, for instance.

380  Handbook on transnationalism

For displaced migrants, the circulation of images over platforms such as Facebook can facilitate a ‘family imaginary’. The family imaginary created and maintained by images posted on social media platforms provides an important means to sustain a sense of familyhood through periods of separation. Transnational refugee networks, as distinct from other transnational families and networks, constitute an important area of research needing further attention in regard to digital visual and other kinds of media communications practices. This overview of the transformations of communications technologies in transnational relationships has presented some of the key concepts that have emerged in media and migration scholarship over the past twenty years. From ‘connected presence’ to ‘polymedia environments’, there has been a significant shift in focus from considering the impact of cost, access, distance and time on maintaining communication to the experiences of maintaining and managing relationships. In our final section, we locate digital practices within culturally specific modes of conducting relationships. Our discussion of cell phones and social media relates to the Caribbean, where most individuals would have at least one family member, friend or acquaintances living overseas. This allows us to illustrate our argument that what is experienced is not communications technologies themselves, but an ‘immediately cultural inflected genre of usage’ (Horst and Miller 2013, p. 29).

CARIBBEAN MIGRATION AND MEDIA LANDSCAPES In one of the first studies of mobile communications within a specific cultural context, Horst’s early work in Jamaica revealed the central importance of the cell phone to transnational kin networks and sustaining a remittance economy (Horst and Miller 2006, p. 10). Kinship ties were important networks to facilitate migration, but what cell phones enabled, a phenomenon Horst and Miller have termed ‘link up’, is the frequent checking in with distant as well as close connections to express a continued relationship that may be drawn upon later. Building an extensive network of potential connections saved as phone numbers on one’s phone means that one also has an extended network of ‘links’: potential support and resources. Developing friends or friends of family living ‘in foreign’ (overseas) could be valuable for ‘making do’ (getting by) or finding information and other connections. These networks could involve Jamaicans moving abroad and drawing on existing connections to find work, or they could take the form of intimate social relationships. Horst gives the example of Lisa, a single mother whose aspirations were to settle down with a husband who ideally worked internationally. In the meantime, she remained in a relationship with a German boyfriend whom she had not seen in a year, but continued to keep in regular contact on her cell phone and who was sending money for her and her son via Western Union (Horst 2006b). While this example emphasises strategies for making ends meet and coping facilitated by inexpensive cellular technology to secure transnational support, in other instances, phone calls could pose significant challenges to migration experiences at different life stages.

Communications technologies and transnational networks  381

Building on a previous study of transnationalism and return migration (Horst 2006a; 2006b), Horst (2007) focused on a subcategory of Jamaican migration, that of retirees who had lived in the US or the UK between the 1960s and 1980s and who had returned to Jamaica in their older age. Their aspirations associated with working abroad were to return to a more comfortable life and home relative to local standards, while actual experiences were often characterised by marginalisation, working in menial jobs for lower pay than British or Americans. However, as the example of Sister T illustrates, returning home can increase circumstances of isolation and dislocation, rather than alleviating them. Horst describes that Sister T was in her 60s when she returned to Jamaica after having lived in the UK and having raised her family in the US. Instead of integrating into neighbourhood life with those she would have grown up with through church and visiting friends and extended family, she still spends several months of the year in the US. When she is at home, Sister T keeps to herself and speaks to her children in the US every day, sometimes more than once; her sister says that ‘she hasn’t even given Jamaica a chance’ (Horst 2007, p. 74). Horst concludes that the imaginations and aspirations of home that have sustained living abroad may be incongruent to the experience of returning home, which can be exacerbated by communications technologies. Telecommunications company Digicel was instrumental in the rapid uptake of cell phones for low-income Jamaicans. By contrast, despite being a wealthier country, Trinidad had a higher uptake of laptops and desktop computers in comparison to mobile phones. By investing in the Internet and subsidising the costs of computers for public sector workers and later, one-laptop-per-child initiatives, Trinidad experienced a rapid adoption of the Internet and then later, social media. In contrast to scholarship of early ICT diffusion as a globalised technology in the 1990s, Miller and Slater’s (2000) earlier account of Internet adoption in Trinidad argued that the Internet was the most nationalistic medium Trinidadians had engaged with. Theorising the Internet as ‘expansive realisation’, they argue that the Internet was effectively a Trinidadian technology that allowed Trinidadians the means to realise themselves and the distinctiveness of their culture in ways they had not been able to before. At the time, Trinidadians in Trinidad and abroad used chat and ICQ to perform ‘Trini-ness’ (well-understood tropes in Trinidadian culture) and to appropriate these new digital spaces into ‘Trini’ locations (Miller and Slater 2000, p. 95). Just over a decade later, uses of webcam and social media retain some of these cultural inflections while other digital practices build upon earlier social forms of communication. Trinidadians used the term ‘liming’ to express the idea of hanging out together. It now connotes any kind of enjoyable time spent together, but historically was a performative, street-based form of male sociality (Lieber 1981). Colin was a 22-year-old Trinidadian working in IT support. One of his close friends from university had moved to Tampa in Florida and only visited Trinidad once a year. When they were housemates together, they would often go out with other friends, where one of the key aspects of liming was a performative, masculine form of banter, where clever word-play and humour is part of the competitive spectacle of socialising between

382  Handbook on transnationalism

men. Webcam became a central part of maintaining his friendship with his old housemate precisely because Colin could now see himself while talking with his friend. Conversation as performance, enhanced by the affordances of Skype allowed Colin to shift from making his friend laugh to ‘I’m very serious right now’ (when he is offering advice). Similarly, for Ann, who was in her 40s, the configurations of Facebook, Messenger and Skype could be drawn on to provide support for her friend Stacey, who was also in her 40s and was living in New York. Stacey had then recently separated from her boyfriend and the father of her daughter. Ann worked in a shop in a semi-urban town where she would pass the time of day when there were few customers by scrolling on Facebook or chatting on Skype. Because of the time difference, she could often talk to Stacey in New York after she returned home from work. Their Skype conversations were more like digital confessionals. Ann recounted how Stacey would ‘cry a lot’ and she would say ‘I can’t you know, send a hug, but I can encourage you to do better’. And in the days following their Skype conversations, Ann would post images to Ann’s Facebook wall of memes and Hallmark card-style images of flowers and captions such as ‘Thinking of you’, ‘just so she knows I’m there for her’. In these brief examples, visuality is crucial to evoking the feelings of the sociality of transnational friendships and illustrate the creative efforts invested in maintaining these friendships.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have presented an overview of the literature that has shaped critical understanding of the relationship between communications technologies and experiences of transnational relationships. By focusing on practices, we have engaged in a dialogue of how digital landscapes intersect with longstanding themes in migration scholarship such as notions of home and belonging, affect and emotions, maintaining family relationships and the circulation of care. We have highlighted how the pre-digital era was characterised by forms of communication that built on the exchange or circulation of goods between transnational families. More recently, polymedia environments have illustrated the intersection of media, relationships, emotions and their social consequences. In their initial provocations to thinking about the impact of communication technologies on transnational networks, Panagakos and Horst (2006, p. 111) ask ‘What happens to transnational social relations when less is left to the imagination? Does reporting the banal happenings of everyday life create a welcome sense of co-presence or is this constant potential for involvement perceived as surveillance from afar?’ We now have a range of scholarship that explores the preferences for some types of technologies over others. Some might desire forms of media that are more expressive through affordances that provide the capacity for visual, oral, aural and other sensory experiences that more effectively enable co-presence (Panagakos and Horst 2006; Ling 2004). For others, the same affordances might be too expressive which exacerbates the feelings

Communications technologies and transnational networks  383

of separation by distance and ambivalence towards not only technologies but the relationships and locations in which they are embedded.

REFERENCES Alaimo, Kara (2015), ‘How the Facebook Arabic page “We are all Khaled Said” helped promote the Egyptian revolution’, Social Media + Society, 1 (2), 2056305115604854. Alinejad, Donya (2019), ‘Careful co-presence: The transnational mediation of emotional intimacy’, Social Media + Society, 5 (2), 1–11. Andersson, Kerstin B. (2019), ‘Digital diasporas: An overview of the research areas of migration and new media through a narrative literature review’, Human Technology, 15 (2), 142–80. Andersson, Matilda, Marie Gillespie and Hugh Mackay (2010), ‘Mapping digital diasporas @ BBC world service: Users and uses of the Persian and Arabic websites’, Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication, 3 (2), 256–78. Antonsich, Marco (2010), ‘Searching for belonging: An analytical framework’, Geography Compass, 4 (6), 644–59. Appadurai, Arjun (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arafa, Mohamed and Crystal Armstrong (2016), ‘“Facebook to mobilize, Twitter to coordinate protests, and YouTube to tell the world”: New media, cyberactivism, and the Arab Spring’, Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 10 (1), 73–102. Bacigalupe, Gonzalo and Susan Lambe (2011), ‘Virtualizing intimacy: Information communication technologies and transnational families in therapy’, Family Process, 50 (1), 12–26. Baldassar, Lorretta (2015), ‘Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in migration and transnational caregiving’, Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 81–9. Baldassar, Lorretta (2016), ‘Mobilities and communication technologies: Transforming care in family life’, in Majella Kilkey and Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck (eds), Family Life in an Age of Migration and Mobility: Global Perspectives through the Life Course, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 19–42. Baldassar, Lorretta and Laura Merla (eds) (2014), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge. Ballantyne, Glenda and Liam Burke (2017), ‘“People live in their heads a lot”: Polymedia, life course, and meanings of home among Melbourne’s older Irish community’, Transnational Social Review, 7 (1), 10–24. Bernal, Victoria (2006), ‘Diaspora, cyberspace and political imagination: The Eritrean diaspora online’, Global Networks, 6 (2), 161–79. Borges, Marcelo J. and Sonia Cancian (2016), ‘Reconsidering the migrant letter: From the experience of migrants to the language of migrants’, The History of the Family, 21 (3), 281–90. Brinkerhoff, Jennifer M. (2009), Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryceson, Deborah F. and Ulla Vuorela (eds) (2002), The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks, Oxford: Berg. Burrell, Jenna (2009), ‘Could connectivity replace mobility? An analysis of Internet café use patterns in Accra, Ghana’, in Mirjam de Bruijn and Francis Nyamnjoh (eds), Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa, Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Publishers and Leiden: African Studies Centre, pp. 151–69.

384  Handbook on transnationalism

Cabalquinto, Earvin C.B. (2018), ‘“We’re not only here but we’re there in spirit”: Asymmetrical mobile intimacy and the transnational Filipino family’, Mobile Media & Communication, 6 (1), 37–52. Chin, Esther (2016), Migration, Media and Global-Local Spaces, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Conway, Dennis, Robert B. Potter and Godfrey St. Bernard (2012), ‘Diaspora return of transnational migrants to Trinidad and Tobago: The additional contributions of social remittances’, International Development Planning Review, 34 (2), 189–209. Crawford, Charmaine (2003), ‘Sending love in a barrel: The making of transnational Caribbean families in Canada’, Canadian Woman Studies, 22 (3–4), 104–10. Dalgas, Karina M. (2016), ‘Au pairs on Facebook: Ethnographic use of social media in politicised fields’, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 6 (3), 175–82. de Bruijn, Mirjam and Francis Nyamnjoh (eds) (2009), Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa, Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Publishers and Leiden: African Studies Centre. de Bruin, Joost (2019), ‘New Zealand migrants, polymedia and the ambivalences of staying in touch’, Convergence, 25 (3), 479–95. Dekker, Rianne and Godfried Engbersen (2014), ‘How social media transform migrant networks and facilitate migration’, Global Networks, 14 (4), 401–18. Diminescu, Dana (2008), ‘The connected migrant: An epistemological manifesto’, Social Science Information, 47 (4), 565–79. Eickelman, Dale F. (1999), ‘The coming transformation of the Muslim world’, Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs, 3 (3), 78–81. Felton, Emma (2014), ‘A/effective connections: Mobility, technology and well-being’, Emotion, Space and Society, 13, 9–15. Gerbaudo, Paolo (2012), Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, London: Pluto Press. Goldstein, Joshua and Juliana Rotich (2010), ‘Digitally networked technology in Kenya’s 2007–08 post-election crisis’, in Sokari Ekine (ed.), SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa, Cape Town: Fahamu/Pambazuka, pp. 124–37. Gomes, Catherine (2016), Transient Mobility and Middle Class Identity: Media and Migration in Australia and Singapore, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hartmann, Maren (2013), ‘From domestication to mediated mobilism’, Mobile Media & Communication, 1 (1), 42–9. Hiller, Harry H. and Tara M. Franz (2004), ‘New ties, old ties and lost ties: The use of the internet in diaspora’, New Media & Society, 6 (6), 731–52. Hjorth, Larissa and Michael Arnold (2012), ‘Home and away: A case study of students and social media in Shanghai’, in Pui-lam Law (ed.), New Connectivities in China, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 171–82. Horst, Heather A. (2006a), ‘Building home: being and becoming a returned resident’, in D. E. Plaza and F. Henry (eds), Returning to the Source: The Final Stage of the Caribbean Migration Circuit, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, pp. 123–44. Horst, Heather A. (2006b), ‘The blessings and burdens of communication: Cell phones in Jamaican transnational social fields’, Global Networks, 6 (2), 143–59. Horst, Heather A. (2007), ‘“You can’t be two places at once”: Rethinking transnationalism through Jamaican return migration’, Identities, 14 (1–2), 63–83. Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller (2005), ‘From kinship to link-up: Cell phones and social networking in Jamaica’, Current Anthropology, 46 (5), 755–78. Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller (eds) (2006), The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication, Oxford: Berg. Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller (eds) (2013), Digital Anthropology, London: Bloomsbury.

Communications technologies and transnational networks  385

Hsu, Jaime (2021), ‘Filial technologies: Transnational daughterhood and polymedia environments in transnational Taiwanese families’, Information, Communication & Society, 24 (4), 507–22. Ito, Mizuko and Daisuke Okabe (2005), ‘Intimate visual co-presence’, Position Paper for the Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Tokyo, 11–14 September. Ivana, Greti-Iulia (2018), Social Ties in Online Networking, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kumar, Priya (2018), ‘Rerouting the narrative: Mapping the online identity politics of the Tamil and Palestinian diaspora’, Social Media + Society, 4 (1), 2056305118764429. Leurs, Koen and Sandra Ponzanesi (2018), ‘Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitanization’, Popular Communication, 16 (1), 4–20. Licoppe, Christian (2004), ‘“Connected” presence: The emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (1), 135–56. Lieber, Michael (1981), Street Life: Afro-American Culture in Urban Trinidad, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall. Ling, Richard (2004), The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Madianou, Mirca (2016), ‘Ambient co‐presence: Transnational family practices in polymedia environments’, Global Networks, 16 (2), 183–201. Madianou, Mirca (2017), ‘“Doing family” at a distance: Transnational family practices in polymedia environments’, in Larissa Hjorth, Heather A. Horst, Anne Galloway and Genevieve Bell (eds), The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, New York: Routledge, pp. 102–10. Madianou, Mirca (2019), ‘Migration, transnational families, and new communication technologies’, in Jessica Retis and Roza Tsagaousianou (eds), The Handbook of Diasporas, Media and Culture, London: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 577–90. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller (2012), Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, London: Routledge. Marino, Sara (2015), ‘Making space, making place: Digital togetherness and the redefinition of migrant identities online’, Social Media + Society, 1 (2), 1–9. Martin, Fran and Fazal Rizvi (2014), ‘Making Melbourne: Digital connectivity and international students’ experience of locality’, Media, Culture & Society, 36 (7), 1016–31. Marwick, Alice E. and danah boyd (2014), ‘Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media’, New Media & Society, 16 (7), 1051–67. Mascheroni, Giovanna and Jane Vincent (2016), ‘Perpetual contact as a communicative affordance: Opportunities, constraints, and emotions’, Mobile Media & Communication, 4 (3), 310–326. McKay, Deirdre (2007), ‘“Sending dollars shows feeling”: Emotions and economies in Filipino migration’, Mobilities, 2 (2), 175–94. McKay, Deirdre (2018), ‘Sent home: Mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia’, Global Networks, 18 (1), 133–50. McKay, Deirdre and Padmapani Perez (2019), ‘Citizen aid, social media and brokerage after disaster’, Third World Quarterly, 40 (10), 1903–20. Mercea, Dan (2012), ‘Digital prefigurative participation: The entwinement of online communication and offline participation in protest events’, New Media & Society, 14 (1), 153–69. Miller, Daniel and Jolynna Sinanan (2017), Visualising Facebook: A Comparative Approach, London: UCL Press. Miller, Daniel and Don Slater (2000), The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Oxford: Berg. Mintarsih, Adriana R. (2019), ‘Facebook, polymedia, social capital, and a digital family of Indonesian migrant domestic workers: A case study of the Voice of Singapore’s invisible hands’, Migration, Mobility & Displacement, 4 (1), 65–83.

386  Handbook on transnationalism

Morley, David (2000), Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity, London and New York: Routledge. Moss, Dana M. (2016), ‘Transnational repression, diaspora mobilization, and the case of the Arab Spring’, Social Problems, 63 (4), 480–498. Nedelcu, Mihaela (2013), ‘(Re)thinking transnationalism and integration in the digital era: A shift towards cosmopolitanism in the study of international migrations’, in Ola Söderström, Shalini Randeira, Didier Ruedin, Gianni D’Amato and Francesco Panese (eds), Critical Mobilities, Oxford: EPFL Press, pp. 177–99. Olwig, Karen F. (1999), ‘Narratives of the children left behind: Home and identity in globalised Caribbean families’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 25 (2), 267–84. Olwig, Karen F. (2012), ‘The care chain, children’s mobility and the Caribbean migration tradition’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38 (6), 933–52. Panagakos, Anastasia N. and Heather A. Horst (2006), ‘Return to Cyberia: Technology and the social worlds of transnational migrants’, Global Networks, 6 (2), 109–24. Parham, Angel A. (2004), ‘Diaspora, community and communication: Internet use in transnational Haiti’, Global Networks, 4 (2), 199–217. Parreñas, Rhacel (2005), ‘Long distance intimacy: Class, gender and intergenerational relations between mothers and children in Filipino transnational families’, Global Networks, 5 (4), 317–36. Peng, Yinni (2016), ‘Student migration and polymedia: Mainland Chinese students’ communication media use in Hong Kong’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42 (14), 2395–412. Peng, Yinni and Odalia M.H. Wong (2013), ‘Diversified transnational mothering via telecommunication: Intensive, collaborative, and passive’, Gender & Society, 27 (4), 491–513. Pierre-Louis, François (2002), ‘Can hometown associations foster democratic change in Haiti?’, Journal of Haitian Studies, 8 (2), 127–45. Rapport, Nigel and Andrew Dawson (eds) (1998), Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement, Oxford: Berg. Richman, Karen and Terry Rey (2009), ‘Congregating by cassette’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12 (1), 53–70. Robertson, Zoe, Raelene Wilding and Sandra Gifford (2016), ‘Mediating the family imaginary: Young people negotiating absence in transnational refugee families’, Global Networks, 16 (2), 219–36. Schiller, Nina G. and Georges E. Fouron (1999), ‘Terrains of blood and nation: Haitian transnational social fields’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 340–366. Sinanan, Jolynna (2017), Social Media in Trinidad: Values and Visibility, London: UCL Press. Sinanan, Jolynna (2019), ‘Visualising intimacies: The circulation of digital images in the Trinidadian context’, Emotion, Space and Society, 31, 93–101. Sun, Wanning (2002), Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Titifanue, Jason, Rufino Robert Varea, Renata Varea, Romitesh Kant and Glen Finau (2018), ‘Digital diaspora, reinvigorating Indigenous identity and online activism: Social media and the reorientation of Rotuman identity’, Media International Australia, 169 (1), 32–42. Tufekci, Zeynep and Christopher Wilson (2012), ‘Social media and the decision to participate in political protest: Observations from Tahrir Square’, Journal of Communication, 62 (2), 363–79. Van House, Nancy A. (2007), ‘Flickr and public image-sharing: Distant closeness and photo exhibition’, CHI’07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM Press, pp. 2717–22. Vertovec, Steven (2004), ‘Cheap calls: The social glue of migrant transnationalism’, Global Networks, 4 (2), 219–24.

Communications technologies and transnational networks  387

Villi, Mikko (2012), ‘Visual chitchat: The use of camera phones in visual interpersonal communication’, Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 3 (1), 39–54. Wallace, Claire (2002), ‘Opening and closing borders: Migration and mobility in East-Central Europe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28 (4), 603–25. Wang, Xinyuan (2016), Social Media in Industrial China, London: UCL Press. Wilding, Raelene (2006), ‘“Virtual” intimacies? Families communicating across transnational contexts’, Global Networks, 6 (2), 125–42. Wilding, Raelene and Lorretta Baldassar (2018), ‘Ageing, migration and new media: The significance of transnational care’, Journal of Sociology, 54 (2), 226–35. Winarnita, Monika (2019), ‘Introduction to this Special Issue on Multimedia, Mobility and the Digital Southeast Asian Family’s Polymedia Experiences’, Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 4 (1), 1–5.

25. Transnationalism and care circulation: mobility, caregiving, and the technologies that shape them Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding

INTRODUCTION Our lives are increasingly transnational in the sense that our families, friendships, communities and work relations often include people who are geographically ‘local’, living in the same place as we are, as well as people who are geographically ‘distant’, living across state, regional and national borders. As a result, we are each involved, to varying degrees, in maintaining meaningful relationships across distance. This is no easy task, in particular meeting the obligations that characterise kinship and friendship, which feature the reciprocal exchange of care. This chapter examines the role of care in sustaining transnational lives, and the conceptual and methodological challenges in researching the relationship between mobility and caregiving, and the technologies that shape them. To begin, we need to understand the drivers of transnational life, which comprise several interrelated factors. First is the increasing migration and mobility that characterises our world. Given a combination of affordable air travel, migration and mobility schemes, and a host of motivations that create push and full factors, more and more people aspire to be on the move. This movement creates a diversity of family and support network formations in a range of contexts that produce different care needs and care flows, but which invariably result in the circulation of care between family across distance. Both the capacity and obligation to provide care, as well as the need to receive care, are informed by family and life course stages, type of migration, access to resources, and so on. Second, it is arguably easier today to contemplate moving because of our greatly increased capacity to stay in touch with, care for, and receive care, from our loved ones and support networks across distance. Thus, mobility opportunities are fuelled and facilitated by the revolution in information and communication technologies (ICTs) (see also Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). The resulting polymedia environments (Madianou and Miller 2012) allow us, for the first time in history, to access a range of opportunities to stay connected using diverse platforms, in both synchronous and asynchronous time. This includes people who do not move but who are members of transnational networks of family, friendship and work relations that require us to live our lives both on- and offline. 388

Transnationalism and care circulation  389

Third, somewhat ironically, this mobility and polymedia access is also increasingly impacted by so-called ‘immobility regimes’ (Merla et al. 2020), comprising the policies and drivers that limit the mobility of certain people, leaving them ‘stuck’ in time and place. For example, migration programmes increasingly feature temporary visa options that often create precarious and uncertain settlement prospects (e.g. Strauss and McGrath 2017; see also Withers and Piper, Chapter 18 in this volume). Thus, not being able to move can be as much a driver of transnational life as mobility itself. Consider the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, unfolding at the time of writing this chapter, which has limited the mobility of many, and, driven by a need to conduct more of our caring and working lives online, increased our reliance on technologies. Here, the role of ICTs and the digital citizenship that governs them becomes critical to our ability to care for ourselves and each other (Baldassar et al. 2016). Ironically, the requirements of immobilisation and physical distancing in many ways mirror the impacts of mobility on our ability to exchange care. For scholars of transnationalism, these dramatic developments in the way we conduct our lives raise particular challenges for how we research and understand care. In what follows, we explore these challenges by examining how best to conceptualise care in the context of transnational lives, including who cares, when, how and why. This is a deeply contentious theoretical question, because care has long been defined as immutably tied to physical proximity; you need to be there to care. Indeed, care is not usually defined as portable or mobile, but is rather implicitly conceptualised as located within physically proximate family and support network relationships. Gender and culture, and the way they impact access to the time and technologies of caregiving are identified as critical. We conclude by exploring care circulation and digital kinning as useful heuristic tools to challenge our deeply held normative understanding of caregiving as synonymous with physical co-presence.

WHAT IS CARE? CONCEPTUALISING CARE In English language dictionaries, care is identified as both a noun and a verb. It refers on the one hand to the provision of something beneficial, including close attention and consideration. On the other hand, it can refer to feelings of concern, interest or attachment. Thus, we can speak of ‘caring for’ someone or something, in the sense of looking after and tending, as well as ‘caring about’ someone or something, in the sense of having feelings and concern about their well-being, if not love for them (Kittay 2001). Care is best understood as intrinsically relational, co-produced by both the recipient and provider and embedded in networks of relationships (Tronto 1987). Thus, care involves both care giver and care recipient, each holding their own perspective on the same actions or feelings of care (see also Wilding and Baldassar, Chapter 6 in this volume). The notion of ‘caringscapes’ (Bowlby 2012) helps to give a metaphorical expression to the multi-perspectival nature of care. As with a landscape, what is seen, felt and experienced in a caringscape depends on the positionality of the observer or

390  Handbook on transnationalism

participant in relation to that care, within a specific moment of time and space. This can result in contradictory outcomes: for example, a care giver might feel obligated and resentful about giving care, even as the recipient of that care might feel equally obligated and resentful in receiving that care. Yet, the caregiving persists. This sense of obligation – both to receive and to deliver care – highlights another important dimension of care: that our social roles, gendered and generational subjectivities, histories of relationship and social and cultural norms shape our engagement in the giving and receiving of care and support (Finch and Groves 1983; Finch and Mason 1993; Baldassar et al. 2007). It is also critically important to understand how care is often ‘naturalised’ as ‘women’s work’, through its strong association with the family and with social reproduction. Care and caregiving activities are deeply gendered; including raising and nurturing children, tending to the needs of older adults and dependants, maintaining the household and performing emotional labour in intimate relationships (e.g. Finch and Groves 1983; Graham 1991; Mol et al. 2010). Whether care work is formal and paid or informal and unpaid, it is predominantly performed by women. It is also routinely devalued. This is evident, for example, in the discursive and emotional labour that women and men perform to ensure that women’s much heavier burden of domestic labour and childcare is dismissed as equivalent to men’s much smaller contributions (van Hooff 2011). It is also evident in the low rates of pay allocated to aged care, childcare, and disability care workers in most economies (e.g. Hussein 2017; Duffy 2011). In spite of the low financial remuneration and low status of care work, women continue to perform this labour willingly and in large numbers. While the feminist ethics of care literature (Tronto 1993) challenges the assumption that women are naturally good at caring (highlighting the specialist knowledge and expertise required to become a good carer, including attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness), it appears that across all cultures, ‘good women’ are defined by their willingness and capacity to care for others. This is often explained as the result of women embracing the affirmation of feminine subjectivities that such work supports. They are expected to, and often do, engage in the ‘logics of care’ by taking actions that improve the lives of others (Mol et al. 2010).

WHO CARES? THE RISE OF MIGRANT CARE WORKERS The capacity to provide care and the ability to access care are also deeply shaped by larger social structures. This has been highlighted by the growing care deficit that is a widely acknowledged outcome of women’s increasing participation in the labour force (Yeoh et al 1999). In many wealthier countries, the primary response has been the importing of care labour from poorer nations (see also Withers and Piper, Chapter 18 in this volume). For example, women from the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Myanmar travel on short- and long-term contracts to work in domestic service, aged care, childcare and health care in nations such as Hong Kong,

Transnationalism and care circulation  391

Singapore, the USA, UK and Italy (e.g. Parreñas 2001; Gamburd 2000; Yeoh et al. 1999). This relocating of women from one country to another to perform care work not only releases women in wealthier countries to enter well paid employment, but also allows men in those countries to avoid accepting greater responsibility for social reproduction within their households, families and communities (Hochschild 2000). There are also two other outcomes of this practice. First, migration has become increasingly feminised as international labour markets demand female care workers rather than male construction workers (de Haas et al. 2019). Second, the importing of women to perform care work in wealthier nations has created growing numbers of transnational families, with the wives and mothers who would normally perform care work in poorer nations now required to do so from a distance (e.g. Hoang and Yeoh 2012, see also Yeoh et al., Chapter 12 in this volume). The dramatic rise in female domestic migrant care labour points to another underlying assumption about care: that it requires proximity in order to be performed effectively. Care work is typically understood to require actions that are intimate, hands-on and practical in nature, necessitating physical co-presence, for example, to feed an ageing parent, wash a baby or clean a house. It is also assumed that physical co-presence is required in order for children to be raised and socialised optimally in loving family households. The relocation of mothers and wives away from poorer nations has thus been defined as a global care chain, in which care, in the form of the emigrant worker, travels along the chain in one direction, and money from their wages, in the form of remittances, travels ‘back home’ in the opposite direction. Hochschild (2003) famously defined this as the ‘love for gold’ exchange, which has also been characterised as a global care drain, in which children in wealthier nations are able to access even greater quantities of love and care, whilst those in poorer countries are left with less (Isaksen et al. 2008; Yeates 2012). Rooted in a labour market perspective, the notion of care chains draws on a political economy framework that defines care as embodied in the migrant domestic worker, foregrounding the materiality and corporeality of care. In this conceptualisation, care needs are understood as both the key push factor, in the form of money to support migrant families back home, and the key pull factor, in the form of the much-needed care labour to support the families of the migrant employers. The care chains framework has been critiqued for its focus on this two-way care exchange along a chain comprising employer–migrant–dependants, and has inspired a number of conceptual developments to incorporate more complex contexts of care: for example, Douglass’s (2006) notion of ‘global householding’, and Evers et al.’s (1994) notion of the ‘care diamond’, which locate care at the intersection of families, states and markets. In addition to the evident inequalities in the global exchange of migrant care labour for money, and the complex interplay between households and larger economic and social systems, there is a simultaneous set of care practices taking place between migrants and their left-behind families involving the exchange of love and support, as well as emotional and practical care. These patterns of care exchange require us to interrogate how caregiving can actually take place across distance as well as

392  Handbook on transnationalism

how households can be tied together across time and place. This leads us to explore a hitherto under-examined characteristic of care: its portability (Huang et al. 2012).

HOW DO WE CARE ACROSS DISTANCE? THE PORTABILITY OF CARE How do people exchange care in transnational families? As already noted, this question challenges our deeply held normative and ontological understanding of caregiving as synonymous with physical co-presence. Understanding how care can take place across distance requires us to shift our conceptualisation of care as a set of practices embedded within proximate relationships and households to comprehend how it also takes place beyond them. Here, Di Leonardo’s (1987) notion of kin work is particularly useful, allowing an emphasis on the role of care practices in supporting and maintaining kin ties across and between households, including ones that are not proximate. The notion of kin work draws our attention to the way practices of caregiving can tie families and households together. Unlike proximate families, transnational families need to exchange care across distance and national borders, and they do this by employing whatever technologies – travel and communication – are available to them. However, just suggesting that care and caregiving can take place across distance is to raise the hypothesis that care can be ontologically separated from physical co-presence, which is a deeply disruptive epistemological proposition. In our research examining transnational families and aged care, we have argued that all family caregiving (both proximate and distant) is mediated by a dialectic comprising the capacity (ability, opportunity), the culturally informed sense of obligation and the negotiated family commitments of individual members to provide care within family networks that are influenced by broader social and political contexts (Baldassar et al. 2007). Building on Finch and Mason’s (1993) analysis of family obligations in proximate families, we identified that the same patterns of care are also relevant to transnational families, including the provision of five main types of support: moral and emotional, practical, personal, financial and accommodation. We also found that transnational families quickly establish patterns of care exchange and communication that are routine, ritual and crisis, each with attendant moral obligations and particular uses of technologies. Routine care is closely associated with ‘caring about’. It is characterised by the regular small actions that family members take towards each other to show that they care. This can include being present on social media on a daily basis in order to exchange family information as it happens. Ritual care is characterised by the sending of gifts and good wishes for celebrations such as birthdays and making the effort to visit each other for important anniversaries and events. Crisis care is the willingness of family and friends to step in and provide immediate support in a time of heightened need, such as childbirth, illness or death. In proximate families and support networks, the circulation of care through these three modes is simultaneous and rarely recognised. It is simply accepted as part of the ebb and flow of daily

Transnationalism and care circulation  393

life across the life course. In transnational families and support networks, on the other hand, such care requires additional effort and planning to be maintained. For example, responding to illness might require several days of travel to bridge the distance, sending a birthday card or gift requires forward planning to account for long-distance postage delays, and everyday routine expressions of care rely entirely on the use of ICTs. Thus, for transnational families, both borders and distance are significant, as are the technologies for crossing them (see also Sinanan and Horst, Chapter 24 in this volume). With the expansion of affordable ICTs and travel, transnational family members in recent decades have developed strategies to facilitate the portability of care through daily text messages, regular email, video calls and online posts. Visits home (at least, pre-pandemic) have become annual or biennial events that often involve the second and third generations (Baldassar 2011). One of the most striking findings of our research has been the transformation of the experience of migration as a result of new communication technologies. Prior to the polymedia revolution, migration often resulted in a contraction in family networks, with migrants relying heavily on the flow of information through key family members, in particular mothers. However, new media now support the expansion of kinship networks to incorporate various and extended family members from around the world who participate in multiple and criss-crossing sets of relations in complex networks of connection (Baldassar 2017). Thus, the conditions of polymedia have, for the first time in history, given people the choice about how and when to be in touch across distance, rendering such choices primarily moral, rather than economic (Madianou and Miller 2012). While in the past it was perfectly acceptable to be in touch with distant kin by occasional letters and very infrequent phone calls, in the polymedia present it is expected that communication and care circulation across the family network will be more frequent. In our interrogation of the relationship between care and distance, we rely on a broad understanding of the way care is exchanged in family life, noting that it includes both proximate and distant carers, as well as formal and informal care. The exchange of care in transnational families is seen here to be networked and also inherently reciprocal and asymmetrical, governed by the ‘norm of generalised reciprocity’. This care is given and returned at different times and to varying degrees across the life course, within family and support networks in which capacity, obligation and demand for care are all fluid and changing. In this way, the care is best described as circulating among family members over time as well as distance. In what follows, we draw on a growing literature that examines how care is circulated across distance, as well as reflecting on the strengths and limits of this approach.

WHEN AND WHY DO WE CARE? CARE CIRCULATION While transnational care is identified as not requiring physical proximity (Baldassar et al. 2016; Milligan and Wiles 2010), many of the other features of care remain relevant. For example, care remains a largely gendered activity embedded in gendered

394  Handbook on transnationalism

norms and roles. It is also located within histories of relationships and within unequal capacities and obligations of care providers and care receivers. However, in the transnational context, caregiving becomes further complicated by the different state regimes within which care provider and care recipient are located. The circulation of care across transnational families and global households must necessarily navigate multiple legal, regulatory, policy, social and cultural contexts. Care circulation is thus defined as ‘the reciprocal, multidirectional and asymmetrical exchange of care that fluctuates over the life course within transnational family networks subject to the political, economic, cultural and social contexts of both sending and receiving areas’ (Baldassar and Merla 2014, p. 22). Transnational family networks are often involved in several sending and receiving areas, with family members continuing to engage in care exchange despite their dispersal across several nations. In these families, much as in proximate ones, care circulates in patterns of generalised reciprocity that respond to the different circumstances of each member in the network, and also adapt to the life course moments of those members. The focus on care circulation provides a useful methodological tool, because by following/tracing the exchange of care it captures all the actors (relations and practices) involved in transnational lives – both local and distant – as well as the full extent of the care activity, including practical, emotional and symbolic, that defines their membership in a family or support network. Thus, in introducing this concept, Baldassar and Merla (2014) point to a notion of care that does not assume a dyadic exchange between a singular care recipient and care provider. Rather, they emphasise the location of care circulation within broader networks of exchange and embedded within institutional regimes, all of which change over time (Tronto 2016). For example, a mother who is a care provider to her children at one stage in the family life course might later become the recipient of care from those children when the relations of dependency have shifted. Care and support can also travel in multiple directions simultaneously. Thus, for example, an adult migrant daughter might provide financial support to her distant mother, who at the same time provides daily care for her young children in her absence. In this way, the notion of care circulation complements and extends the care chains labour market focus on a two-way care exchange of love for money (Lutz 2018) by highlighting a broader set of care practices involving a wider network of care actors. Rather than conceptualising the portability of care as the movement of bodies resulting in a deficit of care from one household in order to meet the care needs in another household, a care circulation approach emphasises how the exchange of care across distance, governed by the moral economies of families, facilitates social reproduction across national borders. Importantly, not all members of a transnational family can or must be mobile in order for care to circulate. Indeed, it is essential not to naturalise mobility, or to assume that engagement in generalised reciprocity will ultimately ‘balance out’ the circulation of care to ensure that all participants receive and provide in equal measures (Tronto 2016). Rather, a care circulation framework enables an evaluation of the differences in power and resources that shape the interconnected lives of

Transnationalism and care circulation  395

family members. Oso (2016) further argues that the circulation of care might be conceptualised as a resource (or type of capital) that impacts the quality of life and social mobility trajectories of transnational families. This resource is invested in unequally by family members, with kin making decisions that do not equally benefit all members. This adds nuance to the care chains tendency to see the rich families of the North in care surplus and the poor families of the South in care deficit, which sets up a dichotomy between caregiving and receiving (Kofman 2012). Instead, the framework of care circulation helps to capture the asymmetries of care experienced by transnational families, who are differentially positioned in relation to various socio-economic, educational and cultural opportunities, and in relation to their ethnic and religious identities. As Laura Merla (2014) has demonstrated, three main factors shape the engagement of transnational families in the circulation of care: mobility, communication and finances. These capabilities are impacted by the institutional contexts of both home and destination countries, in particular the ‘regimes’ of migration, welfare, gendered care and working-time. These regimes are in turn influenced by the norms and values that define the moral role of individuals within the family, and in particular, the division of caregiving practices. These structural factors are mediated by individual family and social capital and are often in tension, particularly when the norms and values of the receiving society challenge and reshape migrants’ ideas around expectations and obligations to participate in the circulation of care. Like Merla (2014), Boccagni (2014) and Bryceson (2019) emphasise the impact of state immigration policies on the division of care and welfare, noting a tension between increasingly centralised state policies and the decentralised strategies of transnational families. The starkest differences are arguably found between ‘undocumented’ and ‘legitimate’ migrants, with the former facing much greater challenges in providing and receiving care as they are denied citizenship, work in illegal casualised jobs and do not have access to social services. Not surprisingly then, in the care circulation literature, gender, power and access feature as key themes. Gender, Power and Care Circulation Studies that apply a care circulation framework have highlighted the underlying and continuing sense of obligation to care that sustains transnational family relations, even when care does not appear to be the overt goal. It is these obligations that are particularly gendered, and also influenced by generation and family role (e.g. Bélanger 2016; De Silva 2018). For example, in Ariza’s (2014) analysis of Mexican immigrants in New York and Madrid, she found that whilst they did not migrate with the explicit aim of improving the well-being of their families in their country of origin, due to normative beliefs about the role of migrant daughters, this became an assumed part of their practice. Care provision continued over the life course, even though the type of care exchanged changed over time as the migrants themselves aged and their kin moved through different stages of family life (see also Horn, Chapter 5 in this volume).

396  Handbook on transnationalism

The obligation to care is sometimes also accompanied by an obligation to receive unwanted care. For example, Serra Mingot (2020) shares the story of a brother living abroad providing financial support to his sister for a highly specific objective: to provide her with the fertility treatment that he considered to be a ‘crucial need’. His sister, as the care recipient, considered this support to be a burden. However, the gendered norms and distance meant that she felt obligated to receive his unwanted care. This example helps to highlight that what is not done is just as important as what is done. The sister enacts care for her distant brother by receiving his care without complaint, her tolerance of his preferences ensuring that the family remains intact and that conflict is avoided. This example also highlights the socio-economic imbalance in power that can result when family members who provide money also seek to exert control over how that money is used. In another case, a set of brothers in the UK worried about their sister’s capacity to take care of her children in the Netherlands, reasoning that she and her disabled daughter would be better placed to receive care by moving to the UK (Serra Mingot 2020). However, the sister worried that this offer to support her migration would come with other commitments that would distract her from her main care priority – her disabled daughter. By convincing her brothers it would be best for her to remain in the Netherlands, she used physical distance as a strategy to avoid unwanted care. She navigated a delicate balance between being far enough away to retain control over her own life, whilst also being close enough to receive care and support from kin should the need arise. The role of distance in reshaping gendered and generational power relations is also evident in accounts of transnational parenting. When parents travel overseas to work, they trust that the carer installed in the home of their children will facilitate their preferences in childrearing practices. However, there is no guarantee that this will occur. While some caregivers take on this role voluntarily, others may be thrust into it against their will, or be forced to care in difficult situations giving rise to reservations (Dankyi et al. 2017). At the same time, parental authority is often reduced in transnational settings, displaced by the proximate caregiver’s preferences and practices, which can lead to problems such as lack of discipline and poor academic performance (Ariza 2014). For example, grandparent care can become a source of tension if the desirable care, in the form of babysitting and childcare, turns into conflict over preferred childrearing practices (Souralová and Žáková 2019). Such tensions can manifest within the parent–child relationship, too. In order to be effective, transnational parents rely heavily on the proximate caregiver’s facilitation of their role as parent – a subtle form of care that is not just about meeting physical or even emotional needs, but is also about protecting the identity of the parent. The flow of support and resources from the home country to the migrant is predominantly overlooked in analyses of global care chains, but such ‘reverse remittances’ (Mazzucato 2011) become highlighted through the lens of care circulation. For example, Palash and Baby‐Collin (2019) analyse the experiences of Ecuadorians whose families span Spain, England and Ecuador, demonstrating that the financial support provided by families ‘back home’ can be crucial in supporting migrant kin with their initial migration and during periods of unemployment, particularly as state

Transnationalism and care circulation  397

welfare support for migrant workers is rare. The role of parents, grandparents and siblings have all emerged as important, including providing money transfers to pay for living expenses or assisting with managing bureaucratic concerns. Such support features as part of the generalised reciprocity across the transnational family network, with care being circulated according to need and opportunity across the life course (Liu 2016; Ciobanu et al. 2017; Zickgraf 2017). The reciprocity within transnational families is a form of social protection and a source of family welfare that protects members across time and distance (Földes and Savu 2018). The absence of welfare support and also the loss of direct opportunities to perform gendered and generational roles are just some of the sources of insecurity that must be managed by migrants within transnational families. As Boccagni (2014) argues, the care needs of migrant workers are often overlooked. His study demonstrates that many migrant women frame their needs in relation to providing care to ‘others’; portraying a self-reliant image with few needs apart from ‘to get a job … and be healthy’ (Boccagni 2014, p. 226). What remains unacknowledged is that the burden of care work for the migrant mother includes not just earning an income and caring for children from a distance, but also navigating physical borders and the virtual sphere to do so. This highlights the gendered burden of care placed on women who provide paid caregiving in one country, whilst simultaneously directing care back to their own family in the home country, in both cases with little support from either state. Thus, Boccagni’s work highlights the gap in policy around caring for the migrant carers, and the role the state should play, including public support and social welfare for migrants, as well as facilitating access to psychosocial support and – increasingly importantly – access to communication technologies that might reduce the burden of long-distance care. Technologies of Care Circulation: Digital Kinning As demonstrated above, the circulation of care increasingly relies on a polymedia environment that creates both the opportunity and obligation for ongoing communication and support within the transnational family network. New technologies such as SMS, WhatsApp (Ahlin 2020) and WeChat have emerged as key to facilitating communication and managing care, including in complex multi-generational family networks dispersed across locations (Madianou 2012; Share et al. 2018; Baldassar et al. 2016; Wilding et al. 2020). Transnational families are transforming in response to the structural factors that influence the circulation of care, and also the infrastructural developments that determine the level of communication available across borders. But, importantly, transnational families remain reliant for their survival on the willingness of family members to share news about their lives, respond to requirements for care, and accept care when it is offered, even when such care does not take preferred forms or modes (Horn 2017). In an effort to capture the intrinsically interconnected role and mode of these practices of care and support across distance we have introduced the term, ‘digital kinning’ (Baldassar and Wilding 2020) to emphasise how the circulation of care

398  Handbook on transnationalism

in transnational families not only relies on, but is embedded in, and shaped by the diverse uses of an expanding network of communication technologies. We define digital kinning as comprising the inherently relational practices and processes of caring across distance through the use of new technologies, which constitute, build and maintain kinship relations (Baldassar and Wilding 2020). What this concept helps to emphasise is the capacity of everyday practices of care exchange using new media to not only maintain, but also to create new family and support networks. As Bryceson (2019, p. 3052) notes, transnational family care regimes not only change over time in response to life cycle stages, they also need to be provisioned with ‘replacement carers’, including ‘family or non-family members serving in that capacity on a short or long-term basis, including peripatetic nuclear or extended family members, friends and family members’. It is generally assumed that replacement carers are proximate and face-to-face, precisely because they are replacing kin who are physically absent. However, what we have discovered in our most recent research is that carers – both local and distant – can be co-opted into kin and support networks through online digital kinning practices. Importantly, these care exchanges often rely on forms of private and public support including volunteer workers, community groups, paid carers and so on. It is through the routine, ritual and crisis patterns of care exchange online that these support networks are brought into being, including the creation of new network members. We use the concept of kinning to emphasise these processes of becoming kin, not on the basis of biological ties, but on the basis of what is done, performed and exchanged (Howell 2007). Souralová (2019) was the first to explore kinning processes in transnational families, when she detailed the way Czech nannies became members of Vietnamese migrant families through their care giving. We use the concept to highlight the way care circulation across distance not only mitigates against the risk that migration disconnects people from their social networks, but can also expand those networks (Baldassar and Wilding 2020). We use the term ‘digital’ to highlight how the role of the Internet has become central to the ability to be cared for and to care for others. This includes, in some cases, relationships that are constituted entirely and solely by digital means: for example, the experience of grandparents who have grown too old or frail to travel and must rely on digital kinning practices to stay connected to their distant loved ones. The activity and effort involved in making and maintaining kin-like relations of support have been argued to contribute to the conditions of ‘digital kinship’ (Sinanan and Hjorth, 2018) and ‘connected presence’ across distance (e.g. Baldassar et al. 2016; McKay 2012; Nishitani 2020). That is, digital kinning practices enable those who are geographically distant to use the ‘connected presence’ facilitated by communication technologies to participate intrinsically in each other’s existence, developing a ‘mutuality of being’, and safeguarding their socially and culturally relational selves (Sahlins 2011). Furthermore, the use of new media to build social support networks is most effective when embedded in relationships of reciprocity, through kinning processes. Our research shows that people with limited digital citizenship, like older adults, are more likely to engage in digital practices when facilitated by

Transnationalism and care circulation  399

trusted support networks (Baldassar and Wilding 2020; Wilding and Baldassar 2018; Millard et al. 2018). Like Di Leonardo’s (1987) notion of ‘kin work’, digital kinning emphasises the role of digital care practices in supporting and maintaining kin ties across and between households. For some individuals, in particular older adults, these digital kinning practices often require facilitation by others, emphasising their social relational nature. For example, grandparents often require their adult children or grandchildren to manage and set up their digital access for them, so they can see their Facebook feed automatically just by turning on their phone, or by having their video calls routinely organised for them by carers. Here, the notion of digital kinning is useful in highlighting how the maintenance of a mutuality of being across distance is a process of negotiation that requires knowledge, effort and resources. These digital kinning practices and processes have been made even more evident during the current pandemic under social distancing regimes. In the absence of physically co-present forms of care exchange, people must try to meet their care needs and obligations through virtual means.

CONCLUSION A focus on care circulation foregrounds the way that care circulates in uneven and asymmetrical ways, through family and other support networks (Baldassar et al. 2007; Baldassar and Merla 2014). Care circulation is an important methodological tool, not only in identifying care practices as a way to examine the portability of care, but also in identifying the agency of both migrant and non-migrant actors in transnational families across the life course. The circulation and reciprocal exchange of caregiving across distance in transnational family relationships demands the use of ICTs and social media platforms available to network members (albeit with varying degrees and different types of individual access and capabilities). The potential provided by a polymedia environment and the distant care uses for which it is employed by network members can deliver a variety of effective forms of co-presence, experienced as a sense of ‘being there’ for each other, despite distance, including through processes and practices of digital kinning (Baldassar and Wilding 2020). The resultant human–technology interaction underlines and emphasises the importance of human relations to the material world, of both technologies and non-human actors, and the need to connect the social with the material (Gille 2012). But more than this, the technologies themselves have a vibrancy, to use Bennett’s (2009) thesis, which adds not only an additional layer of meaning – but also of materiality (thingy-ness) – to deal with (Baldassar 2016). Carsten (2020, p. 332) recently argued that kinship can ‘be viewed as a set of relationships, practices, ideas, and values that link people in time and space, and whose affective qualities readily attach themselves to particular kinds of objects and material stuff’. The concepts of care circulation and digital kinning help to highlight both the portability of care and the processes and practices of kinship, illuminating the way both care and kinship can become embedded in the

400  Handbook on transnationalism

material and immaterial ‘stuff’ of technologies, which have become fundamental features of our transnational lives.

REFERENCES Ahlin, Tanja (2020), ‘Frequent callers: “Good care” with ICTs in Indian transnational families’, Medical Anthropology, 39 (1), 69–82. Ariza, Marina (2014), ‘Care circulation, absence and affect in transnational families’, in Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla (eds), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge, pp. 94–114. Baldassar, Loretta (2011), ‘Italian migrants in Australia and their relationship to Italy: Return visits, transnational caregiving and the second generation’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 20 (2), 255–82. Baldassar, Loretta (2016), ‘De-demonising distance in mobile family lives: Co-presence, care circulation and polymedia as vibrant matter’, Global Networks, 16, 145–63. Baldassar, Loretta (2017), ‘Transformations in transnational ageing: A century of caring among Italians in Australia’, in Parin Dossa and Cati Coe (eds), Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 120–138. Baldassar, Loretta, Cora Baldock and Raelene Wilding (2007), Families Caring Across Borders: Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldassar, Loretta and Laura Merla (eds) (2014), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge. Baldassar, Loretta, Mihaela Nedelcu, Laura Merla and Raelene Wilding (2016), ‘ICT‐based co‐presence in transnational families and communities’, Global Networks, 16 (2), 133–44. Baldassar, Loretta and Raelene Wilding (2020), ‘Migration, aging, and digital kinning: The role of distant care support networks in experiences of aging well’, The Gerontologist, 60 (2), 313–21. Bélanger, Danièle (2016), ‘Marriage migration, single men, and social reproduction in migrants’ communities of origin in Vietnam’, Critical Asian Studies, 48 (4), 494–510. Bennett, Jane (2009), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boccagni, Paolo (2014), ‘Caring about migrant workers: From private obligations to transnational social welfare?’, Critical Social Policy, 34 (2), 221–40. Bowlby, Sophie (2012), ‘Recognising the time-space dimensions of care’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44 (9), 2101–18. Bryceson, Deborah (2019), ‘Transnational families negotiating migration and care life cycles across nation-state borders’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (16), 3042–64. Carsten, Janet (2020), ‘Imagining and living new worlds: The dynamics of kinship in contexts of mobility and migration’, Ethnography, 21 (3), 319–34. Ciobanu, Ruxandra O., Tineke Fokkema and Mihaela Nedelcu (2017), ‘Ageing as a migrant: Vulnerabilities, agency and policy implications’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43 (2), 164–81. Dankyi, Ernestina, Valentina Mazzucato and Takyiwaa Manuh (2017), ‘Reciprocity in global social protection: Providing care for migrants’ children’, Oxford Development Studies: Transnational Social Protection, 45 (1), 80–95. De Haas, Hein, Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller (2019), The Age of Migration (6th edition), London: Red Globe Press.

Transnationalism and care circulation  401

De Silva, Menusha (2018), ‘Making the emotional connection: Transnational eldercare circulation within Sri Lankan-Australian transnational families’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25 (1), 88–103. Di Leonardo, Micaela (1987), ‘The female world of cards and holidays: Women, families, and the work of kinship’, Signs, 12 (3), 440–453. Douglass, Mike (2006), ‘Global householding in Pacific Asia’, International Development Planning Review, 28 (4), 421–45. Duffy, Mingnon (2011), Making Care Count, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Evers, Adalbert, Maarja Pijl and Clare Ungerson (eds) (1994), Payments for Care: A Comparative Overview, Aldershot: Avebury. Finch, Janet and Dulcie Groves (eds) (1983), A Labour of Love, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Finch, Janet and Jennifer Mason (1993), Negotiating Family Responsibilities, London: Routledge. Földes, Ionuț and Veronica Savu (2018), ‘Family practices across generations and national borders’, Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, 63 (2), 143–79. Gamburd, Michele R. (2000), The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gille, Zsuzsa (2012), ‘Global ethnography 2.0: From methodological nationalism to methodological materialism’, in Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist and Nina Glick Schiller (eds), Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 107–26. Graham, Hilary (1991), ‘The concept of caring in feminist research’, Sociology, 25 (1), 61–78. Hoang, Lan Anh and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2012), ‘Sustaining families across transnational spaces: Vietnamese migrant parents and their left-behind children’, Asian Studies Review, 36 (3), 307–25. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2000), ‘Global care chains and emotional surplus value’, in Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 130–146. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2003), ‘Love and gold’, in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie R. Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, London: Granta Books, pp. 15–30. Horn, Vincent (2017), ‘Cross-border mobility and long-distance communication as modes of care circulation’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43 (2), 303–20. Howell, Signe (2007), The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective, New York: Berghahn Books. Huang, Shirlena, Leng Leng Thang and Mika Toyota (2012), ‘Transnational mobilities for care: Rethinking the dynamics of care in Asia’, Global Networks, 12 (2), 129–34. Hussein, Shereen (2017), ‘“We don’t do it for the money”: The scale and reasons of poverty-pay among frontline long-term care workers in England’, Health and Social Care in the Community, 25 (6), 1817–26. Isaksen, Lise W., Sambasivan U. Devi and Arlie R. Hochschild (2008), ‘Global care crisis: A problem of capital, care chain, or commons?’, American Behavioral Scientist, 52 (3), 405–25. Kittay, Eva F. (2001), ‘When caring is just and justice is caring’, Public Culture, 13, 557–79. Kofman, Eleonore (2012), ‘Rethinking care through social reproduction: Articulating circuits of migration’, Social Politics, 19 (1), 142–62. Liu, Jieyu (2016), ‘Ageing in rural China: Migration and care circulation’, The Journal of Chinese Sociology, 3 (1), 1–19. Lutz, Helma (2018), ‘Care migration: The connectivity between care chains, care circulation and transnational social inequality’, Current Sociology, 66 (4), 577–89.

402  Handbook on transnationalism

Madianou, Mirca (2012), ‘Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood’, Global Networks, 12 (3), 277–95. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller (2012), Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, Abingdon: Routledge. Mazzucato, Valentina (2011), ‘Reverse remittances in the migration–development nexus’, Population, Space and Place, 17 (5), 454–68. McKay, Deirdre (2012), Global Filipinos: Migrants’ Lives in the Virtual Village, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merla, Laura (2014), ‘A macro perspective on transnational families and care circulation: Situating capacity, obligation and family commitments’, in Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla (eds), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, New York: Routledge, pp. 115–29. Merla, Laura, Majella Kilkey and Loretta Baldassar (2020), ‘Examining transnational care circulation trajectories within immobilizing regimes of migration: Implications for proximate care’, Journal of Family Research, 32 (3), 514–36. Millard, Adele, Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding (2018), ‘The significance of digital citizenship in the well-being of older migrants’, Public Health, 158, 144–8. Milligan, Christine and Janine Wiles (2010), ‘Landscapes of care’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (6), 736–54. Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser and Jeannette Pols (eds) (2010), Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, Bielefeld: Transcript. Nishitani, Makiko (2020), Desire, Obligation and Familial Love: Mothers, Daughters and Communication Technology in the Tongan Diaspora, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Oso, Laura (2016), ‘Comment 1: Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus through the “care circulation” approach’, Papers: Revista de Sociologia, 101 (2), 259–64. Palash, Polina and Virginie Baby‐Collin (2019), ‘The other side of need: Reverse economic flows ensuring migrants’ transnational social protection’, Population, Space and Place, 25 (5), 1–10. Parreñas, Rhacel S. (2001), Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sahlins, Marshall (2011), ‘What kinship is (part one)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17, 2–19. Serra Mingot, Ester (2020), ‘The gendered burden of transnational care-receiving: Sudanese families across the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan’, Gender, Place & Culture, 27 (4), 546–67. Share, Michelle, Cayla Williams and Liz Kerrins (2018), ‘Displaying and performing: Polish transnational families in Ireland Skyping grandparents in Poland’, New Media & Society, 20 (8), 3011–28. Sinanan, Jolynna and Larissa Hjorth (2018), ‘Careful families and care as “kinwork”: An intergenerational study of families and digital media use in Melbourne, Australia’, in B. Barbosa Neves and C. Casimiro (eds), Connecting Families? Information and Communication Technologies, Generations and the Life Course, Cambridge: Policy Press, pp. 181–200. Souralová, Adéla (2019), ‘Transnational grandchildhood: Negotiating intergenerational grandchild–grandparent ties across borders’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (13), 2447–67. Souralová, Adéla and Michaela Žáková (2019), ‘“Everybody takes care of everybody”: Care circulation and care relations in three-generation cohabitation’, Journal of Family Issues, 40 (17), 2628–57. Strauss, Kendra and Siobhán McGrath (2017), ‘Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations’, Geoforum, 78, 199–208. Tronto, Joan (1987), ‘Beyond gender difference to a theory of care’, Signs, 12 (4), 644–63.

Transnationalism and care circulation  403

Tronto, Joan (1993), Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Psychology Press. Tronto, Joan (2016), ‘Comment 2: Transnational care: Family Life and Complexities of Circulation and Citizenship’, Papers: Revista de Sociologia, 101 (2), 265–9. van Hooff, Jenny H. (2011), ‘Rationalising inequality: Heterosexual couple explanations and justifications for the division of housework along traditionally gendered lines’, Journal of Gender Studies, 20 (1), 19–30. Wilding, Raelene and Loretta Baldassar (2018), ‘Ageing, migration and new media: The significance of transnational care’, Journal of Sociology, 54 (2), 226–35. Wilding, Raelene, Loretta Baldassar, Shashini Gamage, Shane Worrell and Samiro Mohamud (2020), ‘Digital media and the affective economies of transnational families’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23 (5), 639–55. Yeates, Nicola (2012), ‘Global care chains: A state‐of‐the‐art review and future directions in care transnationalization research’, Global Networks, 12 (2), 135–54. Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Shirlena Huang and Joaquin Gonzalez (1999), ‘Migrant female domestic workers: Debating the economic, social and political impacts in Singapore’, International Migration Review, 33 (1), 114–36. Zickgraf, Caroline (2017), ‘Transnational ageing and the “zero generation”: The role of Moroccan migrants’ parents in care circulation’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43 (2), 321–37.

26. Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages Jacob R. Thomas and Min Zhou

Ethnic entrepreneurship is a longstanding area of inquiry in migration studies. As entrepreneurs of ethnic minority status are disproportionately foreign-born, there is a high degree of overlap between ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship. Since the publication of Ivan Light’s seminal work Ethnic Enterprise in America in 1972, researchers have continued to inquire into why immigrant minorities are generally more likely than native minorities to be self-employed, why some immigrant groups are more likely than other immigrant groups to be entrepreneurial, and whether entrepreneurship is taken up by immigrant or ethnic minorities as a forced choice for economic survival or an effective means for socioeconomic mobility. Empirical research finds that immigrant or ethnic minorities often enter self-employment not only as an adaptive strategy to overcome structural disadvantages and blocked mobility associated with immigrant or racial minority status but also as an effective alternative pathway to intergenerational mobility (Light 1972; Min 1988; Waldinger et al. 1990; Zhou 1992). Over the past four decades, many concepts and theories have been developed, and subsequently challenged and revised, to provide fuller accounts of the phenomenon (Light et al. 1994; Waldinger et al. 1990). However, past theories and empirical research presupposed a national context within which the structure of opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurship and economic mobility for immigrant groups emerged (Zhou 2004). Research on the impact of ethnic entrepreneurship is often limited to individual mobility and overlooks the role of community building and the transnational linkages of locally lodged immigrant businesses (You and Zhou 2019; Zhou and Cho 2010). Since the mid-1990s, researchers have begun to think beyond the constraints of existing theories by adopting a transnational perspective in understanding the causes and consequences of ethnic entrepreneurship (Brzozowski et al. 2014; Chen and Tan 2009; Drori et al. 2010; Kyle 1999; Light et al. 2002; Portes et al. 2002; Saxenian 1996, 2005; Yeung 2004; You and Zhou 2019; Zhou and Liu 2015). Following this line of work, we focus on examining how ethnic entrepreneurship is affected by immigrant transnationalism and how transnational entrepreneurship in turn affects diasporic integration in migrant-receiving countries. In doing so, we first critically assess the conventional concept of the ethnic economy. We then examine new concepts, models, and empirical research to identify key mechanisms by which ethnic entrepreneurs traverse national borders and assess the main effects of transnational entrepreneurship on diasporic community building. 404

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  405

THE ETHNIC ECONOMY AND ITS VARIANTS The classical concept of the ethnic economy broadly includes any self-employed immigrants or ethnic group members, as well as the employees of immigrant or ethnic backgrounds who are concentrated in particular occupational or industrial niches (Light and Karageorgis 1994; Waldinger 1994). There are two key characteristics of the ethnic economy concept: one is the ethnic group’s maintenance of “a controlling ownership stake” and its coethnic labor force, including unpaid family labor; and the other is the ethnic group’s control over employment networks, which allows the channeling of coethnic members into non-coethnic firms and even the public sector in the mainstream labor market (Light and Karageorgis 1994, p. 648). The dual characteristics – coethnic ownership and coethnic control over employment networks – mean that the formation of an ethnic economy is not necessarily related to the intensity of ethnicity, neither requiring coethnicity nor a shared “ethnic cultural ambience” within a business or among owners and workers (Light and Karageorgis 1994, p. 649). The ethnic economy thus encompasses all ethnically owned or ethnically controlled enterprises regardless of location, whether in ethnic enclaves or as part of the mainstream economy. From this conceptual perspective, any ethnic group that is known to have a higher-than-average rate of self-employment – such as Jewish, Iranian, Cuban, Korean, or Chinese – would be associated with an ethnic economy. Other ethnic groups typically characterized by a low rate of self-employment, but with control over recruitment networks – such as African-Americans, Mexicans and Filipinos – may also be considered to have an ethnic economy. For example, the Dalit in India, the Baraku in Japan, and black Africans in South Africa who have historically been marginalized and residentially segregated, and therefore tend to dominate important but “unattractive” occupations like feces disposal, leather tanning, and mining (Dana 2007). Thus, an ethnic economy includes almost any type of business under the ethnic umbrella. Such a broad conception makes operationalization convenient, as the ethnic economy may be defined by either the coethnicity of owners and coworkers, or coethnicity of supervisors and coworkers without considering ownership (Zhou 2004). Worth noting are two important variants – the middleman-minority economy and the ethnic enclave economy. The middleman-minority economy is made up of ethnic businesses that are located in poor urban neighborhoods. Middleman-minority business owners do not share the same racial or ethnic identity with that of their customers residing in these socially marginalized neighborhoods. These business owners commonly occupy industrial or occupational niches – often in the retail trade or low-end services – that are abandoned by business owners belonging to the majority ethnic group. They are mostly sojourners, interested in making a quick profit from their portable businesses which are easily convertible into liquid assets and then reinvested elsewhere (Bonacich 1973). While the middleman-minority economy emphasizes the location of the business, the ethnic enclave economy has several unique traits. First, the ethnic group involved must have a sizable entrepreneurial class, i.e. higher-than-average rates of

406  Handbook on transnationalism

self-employment. Second, there must be a geographic concentration of businesses, usually located in an ethnically identifiable enclave from which entrepreneurs can gain access to ethnic resources (e.g. credit and information), coethnic consumers, and coethnic labor supplies (Portes and Manning 1986; Zhou 2004). Third, the business clustering entails a high level of diversity, including not just retail or niches shunned by the native majority group but also a wide variety of economic activities common in the general economy, like high-end professional services and production. Fourth, coethnicity epitomizes the relationships between entrepreneurs and their workers and, to a lesser extent, between patrons and clients. While it is common for ethnic minority groups to be associated with their own ethnic economies and middleman-minority entrepreneurs, this should not be equated with the presence of ethnic enclave economies. The existing literature on ethnic entrepreneurship reports mixed findings about its impacts. This is largely due to the conceptual confusion and inconsistent operationalization of key concepts. For example, some researchers collapse qualitatively different concepts like “middleman-minority economy,” and “ethnic enclave economy,” or mix them up with “ethnic economy,” which is a broader phenomenon. This ignores the analytical distinction between middleman-minority entrepreneurs and ethnic enclave entrepreneurs, which is sociologically meaningful as economic transactions of these two types of entrepreneurs are conditioned by different social structures and social relations. Middleman-minority entrepreneurs often operate at the interface between the elite and underprivileged segments of society. They are not rooted in the community in which they conduct economic activities and have few cultural or symbolic ties to the people with whom they do business, and thus have little interest or desire in investing in community development and relationship building in their business locales. As a result, their middleman status, coupled with their outsider status, makes them vulnerable to interethnic hostility and tension (Min 1996). For example, the impassive facial expression of Korean shop owners in a Latino neighborhood, exacerbated by their lack of English proficiency, may be interpreted as hostile and even racist by their Latino customers. In contrast, ethnic enclave entrepreneurs – even though they may not live in the ethnic enclave – relate to their coethnic workers and customers in culturally familiar ways. Therefore, their business transactions generally transcend contractual monetary bonds and are instead based on commonly accepted norms of reciprocity (Zhou 1992). In this context, the same facial expression exhibited by Korean shop owners would be accepted matter-of-factly by their Korean customers in Koreatown. Additionally, a common language often eases potential anxiety and hostility in interpersonal interaction. These Korean business owners and their coethnic customers are also likely to belong to the same church and/ or ethnic organization in Koreatown (Zhou 2004). It should be noted that many ethnic entrepreneurs can be ethnic enclave entrepreneurs and middleman-minority entrepreneurs simultaneously or in the same locale. For example, a Korean immigrant running a business in Los Angeles’ Koreatown is an ethnic enclave entrepreneur relative to his or her Korean coethnics who live there. But relative to the Latino residents

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  407

who constitute the majority of residents in Koreatown, he or she is just one of many middleman-minority entrepreneurs. The concept of ethnic enclave economy works better in explaining variation in diasporic community development. Central to the concept of the ethnic enclave economy is the idea that the ethnic enclave facilitates community building and the accumulation of ethnic capital for social mobility. By emphasizing not only the coethnicity of owners and customers but also the ethnic boundedness in terms of both location and social relations, the ethnic enclave economy is more than just a shelter for the disadvantaged who are forced to take on self-employment or marginal waged work in a small business; rather, the ethnic enclave possesses the potential to develop a distinctive structure of economic opportunities as a feasible and effective alternative path to upward social mobility (Zhou 1992). As a special case of the ethnic economy, the ethnic enclave economy is distinguishable from middleman-minority entrepreneurship in that it is rooted in an ethnic community governed by bounded solidarity and enforceable trust – mechanisms of support and control necessary for economic life in the community and for reinforcing norms and values and sanctioning forbidden behavior (Portes and Zhou 1992). Zhou and Cho (2010) find that ethnic entrepreneurship has a significantly positive effect on community building at two levels. At the institutional level, ethnic businesses themselves can provide locally rooted social structures while stimulating the development of non-profit ethnic institutions (Pries and Bohlen, Chapter 10 in this volume). Thus, the development of an enclave economy increases the level of “institutional completeness” in an ethnic community, which in turn incentivizes more diverse community investment (Breton 1964). Moreover, the social organization and presence of an enclave economy not only influences economic life, but also develops a unique ethnic environment, creating spaces for social interaction among coethnics, and to a lesser extent, non-coethnics across class boundaries. At the individual level, interpersonal relationships are structured through institutional participation, which serve to establish or rebuild social ties and social capital, facilitate information flow, and reinforce community prescribed goals, values, norms, and practices. Thus, a strong ethnic enclave economy can help develop a wider variety of organizational contexts, allowing coethnic members in and out of the ethnic enclave to participate simultaneously in multiple institutions. Such cross-organizational and cross-class participation in the ethnic community not only strengthens the interconnectedness of coethnic institutions, but also further broadens the basis for social interaction with both residents and suburbanites who share the same ethnicity (Zhou and Cho 2010). From this conceptual standpoint, the presence and strength of the ethnic enclave economy as a specific type of ethnic economy explains variation in community building among different ethnic groups. The ethnic group with a stronger ethnic enclave economy not only possesses more group-based ethnic resources but also has greater capacity to generate ethnic resources compared to other ethnic groups without well-developed ethnic enclave economies. Recent research has also begun to pay attention to the development of ethnic entrepreneurship beyond the ethnic enclave and in sectors of the mainstream economy less

408  Handbook on transnationalism

occupied by immigrants, like healthcare. For example, Nazareno et al. (2018) found that Filipina immigrants, recruited to the United States healthcare facilities as nurses, had a competitive advantage to becoming private sector substitutes for welfare service providers in the public sector. US cuts in welfare programs caused massive closures and/or federal underfunding of public hospitals and community health and mental health services. Immigrant entrepreneurs – particularly immigrant Filipina women – stepped in to meet the health and long-term care needs of those pushed out of the welfare system by providing low-cost housing, custodial care, and medical services in the private sector. In this case, the shrinking of the welfare state created a unique opportunity for immigrant entrepreneurs – particularly Filipinas given their technical skills, years of working in the US healthcare system, and proficiency in English. Nonetheless, it remains to be explained why some ethnic groups have managed to grow their own ethnic economies (including ethnic enclave economies and/or middleman-minority entrepreneurship) but others have not. The literature points to two sets of interacting factors that have significant impacts: preexisting diasporic group formation, which is affected by the group’s initial sojourning orientation and subsequently social exclusion (Bonacich 1973), and immigrant selectivity, which entails the injection of human and financial resources and production of ethnic capital into diasporic development (Zhou and Lin 2005). One key factor – previously underexamined but attracting greater attention in recent years – is the transnational dimension of ethnic entrepreneurship. This is a point to which we now turn.

TRANSNATIONAL LINKAGES In ethnic entrepreneurship studies, distinct group traits, cultural values and behavioral norms (Light 1972), transferable job skills, employment information and networks, proficiency in the dominant language, and attitudinal and institutional discrimination (e.g. the glass ceiling barrier) are often viewed as key determinants which interact to block immigrants’ access to jobs in the host-society’s mainstream labor market, compelling them to pursue entrepreneurship as a better alternative (Light 1972; Min 1988; Waldinger et al. 1990). A mixed embeddedness model has been developed to take into account the causal effects of multi-level structural factors: individual human capital and ethnic social capital at the micro level, access to and growth potential of market opportunities in the local economy at the meso level, and two central but inadequately appreciated factors at the macro level – the intrinsically hostile market environment and state regulatory regime (Kloosterman et al. 1999; Rath and Kloosterman 2000). In a comparative study, Baycan-Levent and Nijkamp (2009) found that the timing of immigration, the state’s policy, macro-economic structure, and local labor market conditions were influential in stimulating migrant entrepreneurship in Europe. For example, in Southern European countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, lax state regulations, the expansion of the service sector in the economy, and prevalence of informal economic activities in the local labor market prompted

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  409

migrant entrepreneurship. In contrast, in Northern European countries like Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK where the market is more mature and economic activities more highly regulated by the state, migrant entrepreneurship was taken up as a means for survival or a forced alternative to unemployment. Prior to the mid-1990s, research on ethnic entrepreneurship has generally focused on migrant-receiving countries where ethnic or immigrant entrepreneurship takes form and thrives, as the majority of ethnic businesses are small in scale and locally lodged (Nazareno et al. 2018; You and Zhou 2019). Such a focus weakens the explanatory power of existing theories, as it does not take into account that migrant-sending countries can limit opportunities of immigrant entrepreneurs while also ignoring the fact that immigrant entrepreneurs are proactively searching for resources and opportunities beyond local and national boundaries. In the contemporary globalized world with its accelerated migration of people, capital, goods and ideas across nation-state borders, immigrant entrepreneurship has grown, and become increasingly visible not only in traditional niches populated by small businesses but also in the high-tech sector and high-end professional service sector of the mainstream economy in migrant-receiving countries like the US (Hart and Acs 2011; Gold 1997; Saxenian 1996, 2005). Since the mid-1990s, more researchers of immigrant entrepreneurship have begun to explore transnational linkages (Kyle 1999; Portes et al. 2002). In a 2004 review essay on the state of the field, Zhou pointed out that transnationalism was likely to give rise to new structures and forces that determine ethnic entrepreneurship. Zhou argued that understanding the levels of scale (Xiang, Chapter 3 in this volume) and formality of these various types of transnational economic activities required a new perspective that goes beyond a focus on the host country. Zhou further noted that the home country’s perspective in terms of state policies and national/ regional economic development, as well as the entrepreneur’s ethnic networks and social ties to the home country, significantly affected opportunity structures unique to national-origin groups and determined who would be engaged in what type of transnational activities (Yeung 2004; Zhou 2004; Zhou and Liu 2015). Even as the term “transnational entrepreneurship” gains popular currency in tandem with the acceleration of globalization and international migration, we should not uncritically use the concept without articulating what it adds to existing scholarship. In migration studies, transnational entrepreneurship refers to a phenomenon anchored by immigrant business owners who travel abroad, particularly to their home countries, at least twice a year for business, and rely on regular contact with home countries, or other foreign countries, for their business success (Portes et al. 2002; Pruthi and Mitra 2020; Zhou and Liu 2015). Transnational entrepreneurs not only maintain business-related linkages with their home countries but also with host countries and diasporic communities. Such linkages enhance their ability to creatively and efficiently exploit their resources (Drori et al. 2010; Yeung 2004). This concept makes a significant theoretical advance by identifying how immigrant entrepreneurs possibly connect to two or more social environments across national borders and how they actively seek opportunities in transnational spaces.

410  Handbook on transnationalism

There are two main types of transnational enterprises (Portes and Yiu 2013). One type includes those small businesses owned by immigrants with few years of schooling and resources, as exemplified by studies of Salvadoran, Dominican, and Mexican transmigrant businesses (Guarnizo et al. 2003; Itzigsohn et al. 1999; Landolt et al. 1999; Roberts et al. 1999). The other type includes those owned by immigrants who are highly skilled professionals, as seen in research on international logistics, financial and high technology firms created by Israelis, Indians, and diasporic Chinese (Chand and Ghorbani 2011; Gold 1997; Mankekar and Gupta 2019; Hart and Acs 2011; Light et al. 2002; Saxenian 1996; Yeung 2004). The latter type of firms is not only found in ethnic enclaves, but throughout the mainstream economy of the host country (Portes and Yiu 2013). While not all immigrant entrepreneurs are transnational entrepreneurs, global forces influence many immigrant enterprises, including those that are small and locally embedded (You and Zhou 2019). The adoption of a transnational perspective has transformed our understanding of ethnic entrepreneurship in three significant ways. First, when immigrants – whatever their levels of formal education and prior job experiences – face structural disadvantages in the labor market upon arrival in the migrant-receiving country, they would not simply struggle and passively adapt to adversity in the place of reception, but proactively look for opportunities beyond national borders. Where possible, they would utilize their knowledge of more than one language or culture and capitalize on their transnational or diasporic networks with kin and coethnics abroad. Second, transnational networks are important resources of social capital that open up additional opportunities for entrepreneurial pursuit unavailable in the host society. But these networks do not benefit all ethnic group members equally as the effectiveness of these networks depends on group-level socioeconomic characteristics (i.e. immigrant selectivity) and levels of economic development in the country of origin. Third, transnational entrepreneurs, though regularly traversing nation-state borders, are more settlers than sojourners in the migrant-receiving country (Zhou 2004). To date, research on transnational entrepreneurship tends to focus on how multi-level structures in the host society limit the entrepreneurial opportunities that ethnic group members may pursue. The mixed embeddedness model, for example, highlights the importance of how macro-level institutional arrangements and regulatory regimes of the host society embed migrants within multi-layered opportunity structures and the interactions between these embedded structures and the agency of the individual entrepreneurs (Kloosterman et al. 1999; Kloosterman and Rath 2001; Rath and Kloosterman 2000). With accelerated globalization, multilateral cooperation between nation-states, such as the European Union, the World Trade Organization, Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has created more opportunities for transnational entrepreneurship than ever before. Immigrant entrepreneurs have become less constrained in their ability to conduct economic activities across geographic terrains and nation-state boundaries. As the economies of migrant-sending countries sometimes grow even faster than migrant-receiving countries, the potential for economic gains for entrepreneurs going

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  411

between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries increases. The potential gains are particularly significant for those entrepreneurs who can bridge “structural holes” or make a connection between two tightly integrated cliques that have few ties with each other (Burt 1992). Immigrants, with their transnational networks and bilingual cultural proficiency, are thus better able to take up these global market opportunities to pursue entrepreneurship (Yeung 2004; Zhou and Liu 2015). For example, Saxenian (1996) finds that professional immigrants act as “astronauts,” figuratively indicating the regular and frequent flights between migrant-receiving and migrant-sending countries in running their businesses. They proactively engage with their counterparts in their homeland and construct transnational networks not for direct transfer of technology or knowledge to their homeland, but to participate in entrepreneurial development. Landolt (2001) found that low-skilled Salvadoran immigrants participated in border-spanning economic activities as a household strategy to settle in the host country, which in turn prompted a policy response from the Salvadoran government to facilitate immigrants’ entrepreneurial endeavors, leading to the further development of transnational social arrangements and institutions in the home country. Hernández-León (2008) observed how after the NAFTA reduced barriers to trade between the United States and Mexico, some entrepreneurs – recognizing how costly sending remittances often is – developed opportunities in Mexican companies like Cemex and Famsa to allow Mexican migrants to send “remittances-in-kind” by purchasing construction material and household appliances within the US, to be picked up in hometowns throughout Mexico. Hernández-León also noted how the demand for movement spawned a competitive market of small private transportation service companies vying for compatriot customers, and owners of these companies supplemented their income by providing money transfer and courier services. Yeung (2004) proposes the concept of “globalizing actor-networks” to explain how diasporic Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and Singapore proactively extend their business networks beyond familism and personal relationships (guanxi) to incorporate norms and rules in advanced Western capitalism. Research has indicated that the main macro-structural factors that determine transnational linkages include (1) liberalized immigration and development policies in migrant-receiving countries, like the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 in the US (Massey and Pren 2012); (2) the loosening of emigration restrictions by migrant-sending countries, like the open-door policy and economic reform in mainland China since the late 1970s (Zhou 2017); (3) social changes in sending countries, like the rapid economic development that shifted labor from rural to urban areas, increased levels of education and incomes of the urban labor force, and changed the occupational structure to absorb and accommodate labor with a wider range of skills (Meng and Zhang 2001; Sassen 2001); (4) economic liberalization policies and the lowering of trade barriers that facilitate foreign investments in manufacturing and high-tech industries in both migrant-receiving and migrant-sending countries, like Singapore’s foreign investment and foreign talent policies in the 1990s to promote knowledge-based entrepreneurship or technopreneurship or India’s economic liberalization program of 1991 (Chand and Ghorbani 2011; Liu 2009; Saxenian 2005;

412  Handbook on transnationalism

Mankekar and Gupta 2019); and (5) the proactive policy change to establish an institutional framework and entrepreneurial milieu for facilitating and sustaining transnational practices of compatriots and enticing overseas talent to return to their country of origin (Portes and Zhou 2012; Varma and Kapur 2013). More recently, You and Zhou (2019) have developed a more complex theoretical model – simultaneous embeddedness – which builds upon the established model of “mixed embeddedness” to explain the transnational linkages and the “glocal” dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship (Henderson and Castells 1987). The mixed embeddedness model (Kloosterman et al. 1999; Kloosterman and Rath 2001) situates individual entrepreneurs within a three-rung sphere of influence. The model considers the interaction between individual migrants and their ethnic networks at the micro-level, the interaction between the local economy’s opportunity structure and an immigrant group’s ethnic-based resources and the available entrepreneurial strategies at the meso-level, and four dimensions of the broad politico-institutional arrangements – institutionally structured market demand, labor supply, business operation, and the business system – as well as the state regulatory regime at the macro-level (Kloosterman et al. 1999; Kloosterman and Rath 2001; Rath and Kloosterman 2000). Despite considerable theoretical advancement, however, the mixed embeddedness model overlooks the forces of transnationalism and gives minimal attention to structural conditions in the home country that may enable or constrain potential entrepreneurs to mobilize resources effectively from that country for their entrepreneurial endeavors (You and Zhou 2019). Assuming that immigrants pursue entrepreneurship as a pathway to upward social mobility and integration into their host country, the simultaneous embeddedness model considers two sets of three-layered factors – one set in the host country as specified in the mixed embeddedness model and the other in the home country – interacting with one another and connected by transnational linkages (You and Zhou 2019). At the micro-level, immigrant entrepreneurs’ premigration socioeconomic status may affect their entrepreneurial aspiration and the effectiveness of exploiting transnational interpersonal networks for economic pursuit and business performance in the host country. At the meso-level, conditions in the local labor market in the home country, such as increased educational opportunities, the expansion of middle-class families, labor shortages, the mismatch of skills, and favorable government policies, may all affect the local labor market in the host country. At the macro-level, politico-institutional arrangements in the host and/or home country may enable or constrain transnational entrepreneurial ambition in the host country (Xiang, Chapter 3 in this volume; You and Zhou 2019). You and Zhou (2019) illustrate this model with a case study of Chinese-owned nail salons in New York City. They show that although the nail salon business is highly localized, success in this industry depends on multi-layered factors not only in the host country, but also in the home country. Labor supply provides a good example. You and Zhou (2019) show that the industry used to rely on cheap female labor from the diasporic Chinese community, including undocumented migrants and international students from China. At the turn of the twenty-first century, nail salon

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  413

owners faced severe labor shortages, tied not only to scarcities in the supply of labor in New York City but also to labor shortages in mainland China. On the one hand, the legalization of some undocumented Chinese immigrants through asylum seeking opened up more options for immigrants to seek alternative employment. On the other hand, the newer cohort of Chinese international students had more family resources to support their studies in the US than their earlier counterparts. They no longer had to support themselves by working in nail salons and receiving pay “under the table.” Moreover, the increase in the overall educational level of young Chinese women along with their more ambitious career aspirations further led them to avoid working in low-end sectors of the labor market either in China or in the US. These transnational dynamics served to shrink the pool of available labor in the nail salon beauty industry. Therefore, the struggles of nail salon owners were not only tied to the scarcity of labor in New York City, but also the scarcity of labor in mainland China. In sum, access to market opportunities, tangible and symbolic resources, and favorable institutional arrangements in transnational social fields beyond nation-state boundaries enable immigrant entrepreneurs to do better than their native counterparts and their coethnics that lack such access. However, access to transnational resources is uneven, with some transnational entrepreneurs more easily taking on the role of brokers between core/host and periphery/home countries by taking advantage of the international social capital unavailable to native-born ethnic entrepreneurs (Light et al. 2002; Jones et al. 2014). Counterintuitively, transnational entrepreneurship does not necessarily lead to deterritorialization but instead deepens localization, which contributes to strengthening the economic base of the existing ethnic enclave and immigrants’ integration in host societies (Zhou and Liu 2015).

DIASPORIC COMMUNITY BUILDING While empirical findings regarding the impact of ethnic entrepreneurship tend to be mixed, several conclusions are firm. First, ethnic entrepreneurship creates job opportunities for the self-employed as well as for ethnic workers who would otherwise be excluded from the mainstream labor market (Zhou 1992). Second, ethnic entrepreneurship yields a significant earnings advantage over other forms of employment after controlling for observable human capital and demographic characteristics. This stimulates upward social mobility for the family and the ethnic group (Portes and Zhou 1996). Third, ethnic entrepreneurship buffers competitive pressures from the mainstream labor market, reducing potential competition with native-born workers and enhancing the economic prospects of in-group members as well as out-group members (Portes and Zhou 1996; Spener and Bean 1999). Fourth, ethnic entrepreneurship not only fosters the entrepreneurial spirit and sets up role models among coethnic members, but also trains prospective entrepreneurs (Bailey and Waldinger 1991; Light and Karageorgis 1994). At the same time, research in this area often focuses on examining how entrepreneurship benefits the individual or family in the host society. Less is known

414  Handbook on transnationalism

about how entrepreneurship affects the wellbeing and development of the diasporic community (Zhou and Cho 2010; Zhou and Lee 2013). As we have just discussed, the ethnic economy constitutes the foundation of a diasporic community, from which other forms of organizational development are based. Here, the concept of the ethnic enclave economy, rather than the general concept of the ethnic economy, is relevant. While every immigrant group may have its own ethnic economy, only some have developed ethnic enclave economies. With increasing access to transnational economic opportunities and social networks, the size of the ethnic entrepreneurial class grows and its economic activities become diversified. This results in the ethnic economy expanding beyond the ethnic enclave (e.g. Chinatown or Koreatown). The formation of the Chinese ethnoburb in Monterey Park, California, which extends to the many satellite suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley, is a prime example. Originally breaking out of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles, Monterey Park, just a 10-minute drive from the old ethnic core, became a magnet for foreign capital and resourceful immigrants from Taiwan during the late 1970s. Within only a little more than a decade, Monterey Park became the first suburban Chinatown, forming another focal point of resettlement initially for predominantly middle-class Chinese immigrants from Taiwan and later Chinese immigrants of more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds coming from Southeast Asia and mainland China (Fong 1994; Li 2012). Arguably, Monterey Park developed through a constant flow of foreign capital into real estate and land development primarily from Taiwan and later from Hong Kong and mainland China (Zhou and Lin 2005). Such development, fueled by transnational capital, in turn stimulated enormous demand for residential and commercial space by both Chinese immigrants already in the US and prospective immigrants abroad. As Chinese immigrants concentrated in this new locale, the ethnic enclave economy took on a new form, locally situated while expanding ties to ethnoburbs and across the Pacific Ocean. Zhou and Lin (2015) discussed how ethnic capital in the new ethnoburb was formed through processes quite different from old Chinatown. They defined “ethnic capital” as an interactive process of financial capital, human capital, and social capital within an identifiable ethnic community. They used this concept to explain the causes and consequences of community development and transformation. In old Chinatown, as a result of the racial exclusion of Chinese inhabitants, social capital became the basis for ethnic capital. Social capital grounded in ties of blood, kin, and place of origin, was activated through intimate face-to-face interaction and reciprocity within the enclave to provide the basis for economic and social organization in a host society that exhibited hostility towards Chinese residents. Social capital in turn facilitated the accumulation of human capital in job training (and to a lesser extent in children’s education) on the one hand, and the accumulation of financial capital in ethnic entrepreneurship and family savings on the other. In the new Chinese ethnoburb, in contrast, ethnic capital is formed initially through financial capital and human capital, mostly brought over from foreign countries along with a more resourceful immigrant population into a more open host society (Koh, Chapter 27 in this volume). Social capital formation through ethnic interaction and organization emerges after the

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  415

formation of ethnoburbs (Zhou and Lin 2005). Specifically, whether in California or New York, social capital in new Chinese ethnoburbs is less likely to be based on interpersonal relations defined by common blood, kin, and place of origin and more likely to be based on weak ties defined by similar socioeconomic characteristics. Moreover, economic activities that underpin the ethnic Chinese economy are less embedded in a locally based interlocking ethnic social structure but more diversified in types and more connected to the mainstream national economy as well as the global economy. Although the ethnic enclave economy as a whole operates on the basis of bounded solidarity and enforceable trust defined by a common ethnicity, it does not necessarily preclude interethnic cooperation and social integration. In either old Chinatowns or new Chinese ethnoburbs, nevertheless, the role of ethnic entrepreneurship is significant. Variations in transnational linkages of entrepreneurship largely explain variations in the production of ethnic resources in the diasporic community.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we examine concepts, models, and empirical research to identify key mechanisms by which ethnic entrepreneurs traverse national borders and also assess the main impacts of ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages on individual socioeconomic mobility and diasporic community building. Research on ethnic entrepreneurship offers mixed evidence with respect to how it affects the economic prospects of in-group members vis-à-vis out-group members. Ethnic entrepreneurship creates job opportunities for immigrants and their kin, many of whom would otherwise be unemployed, and thereby empowers them by enabling them to become economically independent. While opening up alternative paths to upward social mobility for individual immigrants, ethnic entrepreneurship, intertwined with transnationalism, contributes positively to diasporic community building through the production and accumulation of ethnic capital, also conducive to social mobility of coethnic group members. One key takeaway from our analysis is that many immigrant entrepreneurs are simultaneously embedded in multiple economies, politico-institutional circumstances, and nation-state contexts. If researchers are to understand this phenomenon over time, they must take into account the changes in international political economy, broad social transformations, and glocal dynamics in both migrant-receiving and migrant-sending countries. Future research should seek to reconceptualize ethnic entrepreneurship on a more transnational scale to explore in deeper and more sophisticated ways questions such as the following: How do contexts of migrant-receiving and migrant-sending countries interact to affect the probability of self-employment? What constitutes the structure of and access to opportunities? What enables individuals of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds from the same national origin or ethnic group to engage in transnational business? How does transnational entrepreneurship impact or become impacted by the immigrant’s past and present experience in ethnic

416  Handbook on transnationalism

economies, whether in the middleman-minority situation, ethnic enclaves, or ethnic niches in the host country? Finally, why do immigrants and native minorities differ in their rates of self-employment? As the political, economic and social systems of nation-state societies become ever more interdependent, the study of ethnic entrepreneurship should look beyond the borders of migrant-receiving countries to increase knowledge of ethnic entrepreneurship’s transnational dynamics.

REFERENCES Bailey, Thomas R. and Roger Waldinger (1991), ‘Primary, secondary, and enclave labor markets: A training system approach’, American Sociological Review, 56, 432–45. Baycan-Levent, Tüzin and Peter Nijkamp (2009), ‘Characteristics of migrant entrepreneurship in Europe’, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 21 (4), 375–97. Bonacich, Edna (1973), ‘A theory of middleman minorities’, American Sociological Review, 38 (5), 583–94. Breton, Raymond (1964), ‘Institutional completeness of ethnic communities and the personal relations of immigrants’, American Journal of Sociology, 70 (2), 193–205. Brzozowski, Jan, Marco Cucculelli and Aleksander Surdej (2014), ‘Transnational ties and performance of immigrant entrepreneurs: The role of home-country condition’, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 24 (7–8), 546–73. Burt, Ronald S. (1992), Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chand, Masud and Majid Ghorbani (2011), ‘National culture, networks and ethnic entrepreneurship: A comparison of the Indian and Chinese immigrants in the US’, International Business Review, 20, 593–606. Chen, Wenhong and Justin Tan (2009), ‘Understanding transnational entrepreneurship through a network lens: Theoretical and methodological considerations’, Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 33 (5), 1079–91. Dana, Léo-Paul (ed.) (2007), Handbook of Research on Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship: A Co-Evolutionary View on Resource Management, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Drori, Israel, Benson Honig and Ari Ginsberg (2010), ‘Researching transnational entrepreneurship: An approach based on the theory of practice’, in Benson Honig, Israel Drori and Barbara Carmichael (eds), Transnational and Immigrant Entrepreneurship in a Globalized World, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 28–55. Fong, Timothy (1994), The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gold, Steven (1997), ‘Transnationalism and vocabularies of motives in international migration: The case of Israelis in the United States’, Sociological Perspectives, 40, 409–27. Guarnizo, Luis E., Alejandro Portes and William Haller (2003), ‘Assimilation and transnationalism: Determinants of transnational political action among contemporary migrants’, American Journal of Sociology, 108 (6), 1121–48. Hart, David M. and Zoltan J. Acs (2011), ‘High-tech immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States’, Economic Development Quarterly, 25 (2), 116–29. Henderson, Jeffrey and Manuel Castells (eds) (1987), Global Restructuring and Territorial Development, London: Sage. Hernández-León, Rubén (2008), Metropolitan Migrants: The Migration of Urban Mexicans to the United States, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  417

Itzigsohn, Jose, Carlos Dore Cabral, Esther Hernandez Medina and Obed Vazquez (1999), ‘Mapping Dominican transnationalism: Narrow and broad transnational practices’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 316–39. Jones, Trevor, Monder Ram, Paul Edwards, Alex Kiselinchev and Lovemore Muchenje (2014), ‘Mixed embeddedness and new migrant enterprise in the UK’, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 26 (5–6), 500–520. Kloosterman, Robert C. and Jan Rath (2001), ‘Immigrant entrepreneurs in advanced economies: Mixed embeddedness further explored’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27, 189–201. Kloosterman, Robert C., Joanne van der Leun and Jan Rath (1999), ‘Mixed embeddedness: (In)formal economic activities and immigrant business in the Netherlands’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 23 (2), 253–67. Kyle, David (1999), ‘The Otavalo trade diaspora: Social capital and transnational entrepreneurship’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 422–46. Landolt, Patricia (2001), ‘Salvadoran economic transnationalism: Embedded strategies for household maintenance, immigrant incorporation, and entrepreneurial expansion’, Global Networks, 1 (3), 217–41. Landolt, Patricia, Lilian Autler and Sonia Baires (1999), ‘From Hermano Lejano to Hermano Mayor: The dialectics of Salvadoran transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 290–315. Li, Wei (2012), Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Light, Ivan (1972), Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Light, Ivan and Stavros Karageorgis (1994), ‘The ethnic economy’, in Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg (eds), The Handbook of Economic Sociology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 647–71. Light, Ivan, Georges Sabagh, Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Claudia Der-Martirosian (1994), ‘Beyond the ethnic enclave economy’, Social Problems, 41 (1), 65–80. Light, Ivan, Min Zhou and Rebecca Kim (2002), ‘Transnationalism and American exports in an English-speaking world’, International Migration Review, 36 (3), 702–25. Liu, Hong (2009), ‘Immigrant transnational entrepreneurship and linkages with the state/ network: Sino-Singaporean experience in a comparative perspective’, in Raymond Sin-Kwok Wong (ed.), Chinese Entrepreneurship in a Global Era, London: Routledge, pp. 117–49. Mankekar, Purnima and Akhil Gupta (2019), The missed period: Disjunctive temporalities and the work of capital in an Indian BPO’, American Ethnologist, 46 (4), 2–12. Massey, Douglas S. and Karen A. Pren (2012), ‘Unintended consequences of US immigration policy: Explaining the post-1965 surge from Latin America’, Population and Development Review, 38 (1), 1–29. Meng, Xin and Junsen Zhang (2001), ‘The two-tier labor market in urban China: Occupational segregation and wage differentials between urban residents and rural migrants in Shanghai’, Journal of Comparative Economics, 29 (3), 485–504. Min, Pyong Gap (1988), Ethnic Business Enterprise: Korean Small Business in Atlanta, New York: Center for Migration Studies. Min, Pyong Gap (1996), Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nazareno, Jennifer, Min Zhou and Tianlong You (2018), ‘Global dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship: Changing trends, ethnonational variations, and reconceptualizations’, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 25 (5), 780–800.

418  Handbook on transnationalism

Portes, Alejandro, William J. Haller and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (2002), ‘Transnational entrepreneurs: An alternative form of immigrant economic adaptation’, American Sociological Review, 67 (2), 278–98. Portes, Alejandro and Robert D. Manning (1986), ‘The immigrant enclave: Theory and empirical examples’, in David B. Grusky (ed.), Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, New York: Routledge, pp. 47–68. Portes, Alejandro and Jessica Yiu (2013), ‘Entrepreneurship, transnationalism, and development’, Migration Studies, 1 (1), 75–95. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou (1992), ‘Gaining the upper hand: Economic mobility among immigrant and domestic minorities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 15 (4), 491–522. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou (1996), ‘Self‑employment and the earnings of immigrants’, American Sociological Review, 61 (2), 219–30. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou (2012), ‘Transnationalism and development: Mexican and Chinese immigrant organizations in the United States’, Population and Development Review, 38 (2), 191–220. Pruthi, Sarika and Jay Mitra (2020), ‘Special issue on “Migrant and transnational entrepreneurs: International entrepreneurship and emerging economies”’, Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Economies, 6 (1), 7–11. Rath, Jan and Robert Kloosterman (2000), ‘Outsider’s business: A critical review of research on immigrant entrepreneurship’, International Migration Review, 34, 657–81. Roberts, Bryan R., Reanne Frank and Fernando Lozano-Ascencio (1999), ‘Transnational migrant communities and Mexican migration to the U.S.’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 239–66. Sassen, Saskia (2001), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saxenian, AnnaLee (1996), Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saxenian, AnnaLee (2005), ‘From brain drain to brain circulation: Transnational communities and regional upgrading in India and China’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 40 (2), 35–61. Spener, David and Frank D. Bean (1999), ‘Self-employment concentration and earnings among Mexican immigrants in the United States’, Social Forces, 77 (3), 1021–47. Varma, Roli and Deepak Kapur (2013), ‘Comparative analysis of brain drain, brain circulation and brain retain: A case study of Indian institutes of technology’, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, 15 (4), 315–30. Waldinger, Roger (1994), ‘The making of an immigrant niche’, International Migration Review, 28 (1), 3–30. Waldinger, Roger, Howard Aldrich, Russell Ward and Associates (eds) (1990), Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant Business in Industrial Societies, London: Sage. Yeung, Henry W. (2004), Chinese Capitalism in a Global Era: Towards Hybrid Capitalism, London: Routledge. You, Tianlong and Min Zhou (2019), ‘Simultaneous embeddedness in immigrant entrepreneurship: Global forces behind Chinese-owned nail salons in New York City’, American Behavioral Scientist, 63 (2), 165–85. Zhou, Min (1992), Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Zhou, Min (2004), ‘Revisiting ethnic entrepreneurship: Convergences, controversies, and conceptual advancements’, International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1040–1074. Zhou, Min (ed.) (2017), Contemporary Chinese Diasporas, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Zhou, Min and Myungduk Cho (2010), ‘Noneconomic effects of ethnic entrepreneurship: A focused look at the Chinese and Korean enclave economies in Los Angeles’, Thunderbird International Business Review, 52 (2), 83–96.

Ethnic entrepreneurship and its transnational linkages  419

Zhou, Min and Rennie Lee (2013), ‘Transnationalism and community building: Chinese immigrant organizations in the United States’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 647, 22–49. Zhou, Min and Mingang Lin (2005), ‘Community transformation and the formation of ethnic capital: The case of immigrant Chinese communities in the United States’, Journal of Chinese Overseas, 1 (2), 260–284. Zhou, Min and Hong Liu (2015), ‘Transnational entrepreneurship and immigrant integration: New Chinese immigrants in Singapore and the United States’, in Jody Agius Vallejo (ed.), Immigration and Work, Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, pp. 169–201.

27. Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles Sin Yee Koh

INTRODUCTION Who are ‘transnational elites’, and what is particularly distinctive about their transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles? This is a question that has fed public interest and academic debates in various disciplines for decades. In common parlance, an ‘elite’ is often understood as someone who is wealthy and who enjoys privileged social status. Indeed, as Koh et al. (2016) point out, public fascination with the rich and wealthy can be traced back to the early nineteenth century with the publication of ‘rich lists’ and a genre of biographical accounts of wealthy families. Although wealth remains a key characteristic associated with elites, more recent contributions to academic scholarship have expanded the scope to explore other non-economic attributes such as social networks, lifestyles and mobilities. Apart from general and voyeuristic interests in the lives of the upper echelons of society, attention to elites and their transnational lives has also been stimulated by growing concern with the structures of differentiation that segregate the elites from the non-elites. Arguably, access to transnational resources and opportunities is one of the key means for elites to enhance their already privileged status. It is also a means for them to transfer and maintain their elite status across generations. A better understanding of how elite status is achieved, enhanced and maintained through their transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles is therefore crucial in informing policy to address structural inequalities that further segregates the elites from the non-elites. This line of inquiry leads us to the question: What are the pathways to becoming an elite and how are they differentiated for different groups of people? More importantly, how does transnationalism enable and filter access in one’s pursuit of transnational elite status, networks, spaces and lifestyles? (For example, see Withers and Piper, Chapter 18 in this volume on the temporality–precarity nexus that circumscribes temporary labour migrants’ mobility and agency; and Zhang, Chapter 20 in this volume on the frictions of mobility for marriage migrants.) In other words, how does transnationalism (re)produce transnational elites? What does this differentiated (re)production tell us about the persistence of structural inequalities and the inequities of transnationalism? To address these questions, this chapter reviews major developments in the social science literature on elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles. Following this introduction, the next section provides an overview of how ‘elites’ have been conceptualised in the literature. The third section reviews scholarship on the (re) 420

Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles  421

production of elites through their transnational networks. The fourth section shifts the focus to elite spaces and lifestyles. The conclusion highlights common themes in emergent debates.

(TRANSNATIONAL) ELITES: WHO ARE THEY? In The Power Elite, sociologist Charles Wright Mills (1956) wrote about the power elite who held decision-making positions in three key institutions in America: business corporations, political organisations, and the military. This conception was slightly different from that of Baltzell (2017 [1958]), who distinguished between the ‘elite’, ‘a statistical or conceptual group of individuals … ranked at the top of the division of labor or … the functional class system’ (p. xiii, original emphasis) and the ‘upper class’, a ‘class community of extended families … at the top of … the social class system’ (p. xiii, original emphasis). Importantly, Baltzell saw the upper class as an organic social unit that incorporates new members through marriage and family connections. Despite their different conceptualisations of the elite and the upper class, Mills and Baltzell agreed that members of these two groups enjoy power and privilege over others in society. Specifically, elites and the upper class are members of inner-circle networks, which enable them to make or influence key decisions regarding social, economic and political life in their societies. Furthermore, as a result of their privileged class positions, they tend to live a leisurely life that is characterised by luxury and ‘conspicuous consumption’, a term Veblen (1992 [1899]) coined to describe the unapologetic public displays of affluence by the wealthy. Mills’ and Baltzell’s thinking about the elite and the upper class was shaped by the specific temporality and circumstances of post-war America in the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, their distinctive treatment of the elite and the upper class continues to have relevance in subsequent conceptualisations of the upper echelons of society across many contexts beyond America. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, under the influence of the globalisation thesis (Short 2004), the literature shifted focus to corporate/business elites and expatriates (Beaverstock 2002). The term ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) (Carroll 2010; Sklair 2001) emerged in response to the shift in capitalist production from the local/ national scale to the global scale, a process that has been facilitated by the development of a globally integrated financial system. In his book The Transnational Capitalist Class, Sklair (2001) suggested that the TCC can be analytically divided into four fractions, with the first fraction being supported by the remaining three fractions. These fractions are: first, the owners and controllers of transnational corporations and their local affiliates (‘the corporate fraction’); second, globalising bureaucrats and politicians (‘the state fraction’); third, globalising professionals who perform technical and ideological roles (‘the technical fraction’); and lastly, merchants and media who propagate the ideology of materialism (‘the consumerist fraction’). Sklair argued that members of the TCC have an outward and global orien-

422  Handbook on transnationalism

tation, identify with the global capitalist system, and tend to share similar lifestyles (e.g., patterns of higher education, consumption, and residential segregation from the masses). They are transnational in the sense that ‘they operate across state borders to further the interests of global capital rather than any real or imagined nation-state’ (Sklair 2001, p. 295). The preoccupation with a transnational class of corporate/ business elites exemplifies the era’s fixation on economic globalisation and the transnational expansion of major multinational corporations. The turn of the twenty-first century saw a resurgence of interest in wealth elites rather than corporate/business elites. These wealth elites have been referred to as ‘the super-rich’, ‘high net worth individuals’ (HNWI) (i.e., individuals with investable assets of US$1 million or more), and ‘the one per cent’ (i.e., the top 1 per cent of the population in terms of their assets) (Forrest et al. 2017; Hay 2013; Hay and Beaverstock 2016; Koh 2020). The resurged interest in debates about this new elite stems from awareness about growing wealth and income inequalities at the global scale (Dorling 2014; Hickel 2017). While some studies reaffirmed the enduring effectiveness of wealth elites’ class reproduction strategies, others highlight the presence of in-group class fractions (e.g., gendered) (see chapters in Heilbron et al. 2017). The awareness about the existence of in-group class and other dimensions of differentiation has accorded attention to new(er) groups of elites and how they attained elite-ness. For example, a more recent development, since the 2010s, trained attention on the Global Middle Class (GMC), that is, members of ‘the upper segments of the middle classes … [who] are affluent and globally oriented in their lifestyle and mobility patterns’ (Koo 2016, p. 441). Extant literature has focused on their strategic cultural capital accumulation, especially through transnational mobility and cosmopolitan education for their children (Forsey 2017; Maxwell et al. 2019). While members of the GMC may not be members of the traditional upper class who have inherited their elite status and wealth, the two groups are similar in the way they use education as a means of socio-cultural capital accumulation and status making, as we shall later see (also see Waters and Leung, Chapter 15 in this volume on transnational higher education; and Liu-Farrer, Chapter 19 in this volume on international student migrants). What this brief overview shows is that there have been several shifts in the conceptualisation of ‘elites’. In the mid-twentieth century, the focus was on interlocking business-politics-media elites who are arguably more locally or nationally oriented. Between the 1960s and 1990s, the focus was on the TCC, corporate/business elites who are increasingly globally oriented. In the early twenty-first century, the focus turned to two groups – wealth elites and the GMC – who are more transnationally oriented. Despite the specific differences in the type of elite in question and their geographical orientation, there is consensus in these bodies of work on the significance of networks for elites, as well as the fact that elite spaces and lifestyles are distinct and oftentimes segregated from other segments of society. The next two sections expand on these aspects respectively.

Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles  423

(RE)PRODUCTION OF ELITES THROUGH THEIR TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS Corporate Interlocks The observation that elites gain and exert their power through closed networks is not something new. As noted above, one of the key characteristics of corporate/business elites and the upper class is their membership and positions in inner-circle networks. This aspect has been extensively explored in the business and economics literature, particularly with reference to the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a select group of individuals who sit on multiple corporate directorate boards (see Chu and Davis 2016 for a review). Noting the importance of social cohesion within the inner circle, Useem (1984, p. 63) argued that ‘the inner circle is truly a circle: acquaintanceship networks are dense, mutual trust and obligation are widespread, and a common sense of identity and culture prevail’. Moreover, ‘the networks of family loyalties and patrician connections [are crucial elements that] crisscross and reinforce the matrix of interlocking directorships’ (Useem 1984, p. 67). These two observations draw connections between corporate/business elites and the upper class. The earlier body of work has focused on interlocking directorships in specific countries, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States. This may suggest that elites’ interlocking connections operate within the national border and not beyond. However, as Brayshay et al. (2005) highlighted, interlocking transnational networks across the British Empire and other countries were already present in the so-called pre-globalisation period. Moreover, they found circumstantial evidence of shared schooling experiences (especially in a few notable elite schools and institutions) and social club memberships among the elites in their study. More recent work has also demonstrated an increase in corporate/business elites’ transnational networks and social cohesion (Carroll and Fennema 2002; Heemskerk et al. 2016; Kentor and Jang 2004). Hall (2009), for instance, showed that investment bankers in London orchestrated transnational socio-technical networks and reproduced these transnational ‘networks of power’ (p. 182) during the global credit crunch to ‘reinvent themselves through new financial products and organisations’ (p. 186). Nevertheless, there are certain limits to the transnational-ness of these networks, as existing evidence points to the establishment of sector-, geography- and/or context-specific networks (see Xiang, Chapter 3 in this volume). For example, in their study of the Islamic financial services market, Bassens et al. (2011) found that Shari’a intellectual elites, through their multiple board memberships, connect corporations and regulatory bodies in Gulf cities (e.g., Doha, Dubai, Kuwait, Jeddah, Manama and Riyadh) to selected cities such as Beirut, Kuala Lumpur, Karachi, London and New York. Other recent studies have also demonstrated that transnational corporate elites, especially those who are not based in Western-liberal economies, either develop hybridised networks that are selectively transnational

424  Handbook on transnationalism

and national (e.g., in China, de Graaff 2019), or do not form cohesive transnational networks (e.g., in Latin America, Cárdenas 2015). There is also evidence of regional corporate networks clustered in Asia, in addition to the more established transatlantic networks connecting North America, the UK, the Commonwealth countries, and the Netherlands (Heemskerk and Takes 2016). All of these highlight the need to consider context-specific factors and conditions in evaluating the degree of transnational-ness of corporate elite networks. Elite School Networks Beyond the specific focus on corporate/business elites and interlocking directorships, the non-corporate transnational networks of elites is also an important area of investigation that offers insights into how transnational elites are (re)produced. Here, schooling and specialist education or training programmes at key institutions play a significant role in the establishment of these networks prior to entry into the workplace. These education-led alumni and friendship networks are key to the subsequent development, operation and maintenance of corporate or sector-specific elite transnational networks – even though the conversion of social and cultural capital of alumni ties may not be as automatic, as Hall’s (2011) study of MBA programmes illustrates. In the global equity derivatives market, Robertson (2014) found that French trained elites followed a similar training path featuring education in preparatory schools and grandes écoles (part of the higher education system in France), followed by specialist training in French banks. Due to the team-based work in global finance and a strong allegiance to their own grandes écoles, it is not uncommon for French trained departmental head bankers to recruit team members from their own alma mater. This networked practice of education, training, and hiring paves the way for exclusive entry into an elite transnational network in the global financial market, with ‘endorsed’ members playing significant roles in charting the development of the sector, and ultimately exerting influence in specific spheres in the global economy. The role of education in elite formation was also noted by Hall (2017) in her analysis of how postgraduate education facilitates entry into, and upward career mobility within, elite financial labour markets in the City of London. Specifically, she found that postgraduate education was a means of ‘inculcating new recruits in investment banks into the legitimated and expected forms of socioeconomic practice within these elite labor markets’ (p. 110), including the expected norms of work practices, work cultures, and technical competencies associated with this elite profession. Moreover, she found that postgraduate education also played an important role in embedding early-career investment bankers ‘societally and territorially in the distinctive cultures of particular financial centers at different points in their careers’ (p. 114). This takes place through graduate training schemes where graduate recruits undergo work-training rotations at various financial centres across the world to learn about the topological (transnational) networks of investment banking. In sum, specialist postgraduate education coupled with work-training schemes serve the role of (re)producing locally embedded financial elites with tacit understandings about

Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles  425

the transnational networks of investment banking and the ability to work in different locations across the network when the need arises. Indeed, the significance of education – specifically, education at elite schools and specialist programmes – in (re)producing transnational elites and their networks has been well documented. Kenway and her colleagues have examined how elite schools capitalise on their school and alumni networks to develop, reinforce and propagate an outward image of elite-ness, upper class privilege, and global/transnational mindedness (Kenway et al. 2017; Koh and Kenway 2016). Importantly, members of such schools (including principal, teachers and students) actively participate in ‘class networking and bonding-across borders’ (Kenway et al. 2017, p. 229), which (re) produce an elite and privileged class consciousness that is then embodied by the students and graduates (see Khan 2011). This shared sense of elite-ness and class privilege is often carried through into elite professions, and further maintained and (re) produced through various elite networks that shape hiring preferences (Rivera 2015) and career mobilities (Ye and Nylander 2014). Using the Great British Class Survey dataset of over 85,000 UK-based graduates, Wakeling and Savage (2015) found that graduates from a geographically clustered group of elite universities (Oxford, Cambridge and key institutions in London) are more likely to enter elite professions, have a higher household income and savings, and possess highbrow cultural capital (defined as engagement with upper class cultural forms such as classical music, art galleries, museums, and haute cuisine). This underlines the interconnections between elite schools, elite professions, and elite social positions. Exclusive Club Networks In a sense, alumni ties to elite school networks can be considered a kind of club membership. Membership is exclusive and privileged as not everyone can gain access and admission into the club; only those who with endorsed ‘clubbability’ (Sinha 2001) can be admitted. Members share a sense of earned entitlement and camaraderie due to their shared affiliation and socialised experiences. The club metaphor also applies to corporate and governance networks where members may have the power to shape and influence business and political decision-making, oftentimes indirectly and behind closed doors. The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland since 1971 is one such example. Graz (2003, p. 335) described the WEF as a transnational elite club, where ‘private authority [is] exercised on a global scale by informal and weakly institutionalized non-state actors’. He further criticised the WEF as an instance where private actors without legitimised public accountability attempt to resolve public issues, and highlighted the limits of the club’s ability to effect transformational political change. Nevertheless, this transnational elite club has come to be established as the place to be for aspiring ‘second-tier businesspeople’ (Graz 2003, p. 336) to network with the more established members of the club who might be conceptualised as the ‘elite of elites’ (Maclean et al. 2017, p. 127). Another example of the transnational elite club is the Group of Thirty (G-30), a hybrid organisation that is partly a think tank and partly an advocacy group.

426  Handbook on transnationalism

Established in 1978, the G-30 has played a significant role in modifying and synchronising the transnational practices of global financial regulation. As Tsingou (2015, pp. 230–231) rightly pointed out, members of transnational elite clubs, such as the G-30, are motivated by ‘peer membership and a common goal in line with values they consider honorable’. Moreover, the club acts as a conduit for members to interact with other external actors (e.g., policymakers and regulators at the national and global arenas) to set agendas, introduce new ideas, and offer recommendations for best practices. In other words, the G-30 operates as a transnational policy network made up of transnational elites who have the expertise and commercial interests in business-friendly global financial policies. Thus, the transnational elite club is not just an upper-class social group; it is an organisation that has the transnational networked power to potentially shape national and global policies.

(RE)PRODUCTION OF ELITES THROUGH THEIR SPACES AND LIFESTYLES Social Clubs and Residential Enclaves Beyond the workplace in elite professional sectors, elites are also (re)produced through their spaces and lifestyles that are usually distinct and segregated from the non-elite majority (Pinçon-Charlot and Pinçon 2018). Elite social clubs and gated residential enclaves, for example, are often guarded and secured spaces that are meant to serve as exclusive sanctuaries for elite occupiers and members. These spaces not only function as segregated elite spaces; they also help to reinforce the shared sense of elite-ness amongst those whose lifestyles revolve around consumption of these spaces. In his study of British transnational elites in Singapore, Beaverstock (2011) found that expatriate social and sporting clubs were ‘deemed a major transnational socialising environment, for both social and business knowledge transfer and accumulation’ (p. 535). These clubs offer a bubble-like, in-between space that is disembedded from the local socio-economic context, and where members could interact with their peers. It is telling that the members of these clubs are transnational expatriates of different nationalities as well as ‘western educated/experienced’ (p. 527) Singaporeans – in other words, transnational elites transcend nationality but share similar lifeworlds and lifestyles. Based on his reading of Sentosa Cove, a high-end private island residential enclave in Singapore, Pow (2011) argued that super-rich gated communities are ‘globally-oriented sites where local and transnational practices intersect to produce new geographies of wealth, privilege and exclusion’ (p. 383). He further argued that these elite residential spaces have been created and (re)produced by various actors (including the host country government, urban development professionals, the media, and the transnational elite residents) using an assemblage of transnational ideologies, imaginaries, discourses and practices (see Ortega and Katigbak, Chapter 14

Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles  427

in this volume on transnational urbanism). Specifically, the Singapore government has been actively attracting HNWI to reside and park their wealth in Singapore by promoting the city-state as a safe tax haven and an attractive lifestyle destination. As part of this broader strategy, Sentosa Cove has been developed as a zone of exception (Ong 2006) where normal regulations on foreign property ownership and permanent residence do not apply. The transnational elite residents of Sentosa Cove admitted to being attracted to the waterfront living lifestyle away from the hustle bustle of city life – an exclusive lifestyle in land-scarce Singapore that is not accessible to the masses. These super-rich enclaves therefore embody the elite ethos of their residents, reflecting their desire for exclusivity, security, and sameness (with respect to socio-economic class, cultural capital, and transnational experiences) with regard to their neighbours. Power Over Space The power over space, in terms of the agency to fortify and to exclude others from that space, is indeed one way through which elites establish their exclusive position in society. As Pinçon-Charlot and Pinçon (2018, p. 116, original emphasis) put it, ‘To achieve social tranquillity and to fashion an environment that suits them and ensures the best conditions for educating their children, members of the upper bourgeoisie practice systematic social ostracism’. Moreover, Domhoff (2014, p. viii) noted that elites’ power stems from the ‘social cohesion that is generated among [them] by virtue of their participation in long-standing prestigious social institutions, such as prep schools, exclusive social clubs, debutante balls, and elite retreats’. Indeed, it is the distinctive lifestyle activities taking place in exclusive networked spaces that (re) produce elite status, superiority, and the intergenerational transfers of class capital that are crucial to the maintenance of the family’s status across generations. This exercise of marking out exclusive spaces is not limited to elite social clubs and residential enclaves. Instead, in the context of transnationalism, the making of elite-ness and exclusivity is also extended into the spaces of education, especially in elite schools. Indeed, elite schools such as Eton College in the UK and St. Paul’s School in the USA have been primarily patronised by the children of upper-class ‘old money’ families (i.e., families who have been wealthy for generations or established dynastic families) in the past. However, in recent years these schools have become the preferred educational choices for contemporary transnational elites such as the nouveau riche or ‘new rich’ families (i.e., families who have acquired wealth in their current generation) and the GMC. These contemporary transnational elites often partake in transnational migration centred on children’s education as a family project to accumulate capital, to pursue class privilege, and to kickstart intergenerational transfers of class capital (Liu-Farrer 2016). Indeed, as explained in the previous section, education at the ‘right’ institution in the ‘right’ location enables the accumulation of social, cultural, educational and network capital that can be converted into other useful forms of capital in the future. Migrating for education in an international

428  Handbook on transnationalism

location further enhances the capital accumulation project as this experience adds transnational mobility capital to one’s arsenal. Although elite schools and colleges have started opening their doors to the children of the ‘new rich’ and the GMC, these social institutions ultimately act as the gatekeepers and custodians of elite cultural reproduction through education. For example, elite schools use multi-step admission screening to determine ‘whether … the child and his family share the [school’s] “values”’ (Courtois 2015, p. 58). Elite schools thus exercise power over space in deciding who to allow in and who to exclude. Nevertheless, the emergence of the GMC and their strategic accumulation of elite capital, primarily through children’s education at elite schools, does signal a potential expansion in the study of elites beyond the extant focus on ‘the power elite’, ‘old money’ families, and the super-rich. The Pursuit of Transnational Mobile Lifestyles Another way for elites to assert their exclusivity and distinctiveness from non-elites is through the ways they are (transnationally) mobile – both in bodily form and through the virtual circulation of capital. As the contributors to the edited volume Elite Mobilities (Birtchnell and Caletrío 2014) demonstrated, the power-laden mobilities among elites correspond to and in turn reproduce existing patterns of social stratification. Elite mobilities tend to be faster, less hindered, more efficient, more secured, more exclusive, and less visible than the mobilities of the masses. Elites travel in private vehicles (e.g., cars, jets, yachts, helicopters) and to exclusive spaces and destinations that are not accessible to non-elites. Elites are able to move their capital transnationally and across multiple borders relatively effortlessly in order to maximise the value of their existing capital and to reduce any potential devaluation if their capital were kept immobile. Elite mobilities also highlight the role of intermediaries. In their study of the intermediaries of the super-rich, Koh and Wissink (2018) found that these middlemen play important roles in facilitating and shaping the transnational mobilities and lifestyles of their wealthy elite clients. These intermediaries offer services in the realms of lifestyle (e.g., concierge services, events planning), homes and fixed assets (e.g., property management), private travel (e.g., the maintenance of private jets and private yachts), investments and legal issues (e.g., wealth management, tax and immigration advice), and even the sphere of family and relationships (e.g., matchmakers, nannies). They facilitate elites’ transnational mobilities and lifestyles by assisting in the day-to-day operations of a transnationally mobile life as well as by offering expert advice to guide elite clients in making strategic decisions regarding their mobilities. For example, a wealth management consultant may offer advice regarding the best offshore jurisdiction for the client to place deposits in order to take advantage of lower taxes. In safeguarding the wealth assets of the elite, intermediaries also further enable the already privileged elite to enjoy a truly transnationally mobile life.

Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles  429

CONCLUSION Elites are often the subject of public fascination because they are considered to be members of the upper echelons of society who have earned their privileged social positions through lineage or hard work. As elite lifestyles and spaces are usually not accessible to the masses, this classed segregation further contributes to the public’s enthralment with elites and their high-status and luxurious lives. This chapter has explored the question of how transnational elites are (re)produced through their networks, spaces and lifestyles. It highlights the role of educational and schooling networks as well as transnational elite clubs in facilitating and legitimising elite status and power to influence and shape agendas and policies. It explains how exclusive elite spaces and lifestyles reinforce the distinctions between elites and non-elites, a process that is exacerbated by elites’ ability and relative ease in partaking in transnational lives. It calls attention to the role of intermediaries in enabling elites to enjoy and capitalise upon transnational lifestyles and transnational mobilities. While some studies demonstrate that corporate elite networks in certain sectors are increasingly transnationally oriented and embedded, other studies suggest that these networks are also simultaneously locally or nationally oriented and embedded. Indeed, González (2019) found that although class consolidation is increasingly taking place transnationally, ‘class formation dynamics are still tethered to national processes of elite production and reproduction’ (p. 261). Here, Nichols and Savage’s (2017) conceptualisation of ‘elite constellations’ is insightful. Rather than thinking of elites and their networks in territorial and topological terms, ‘elite constellations’ captures the idea that elites embark on cross-sector and cross-time accumulation and mobilisation of capital. In other words, ‘elite constellations’ offers conceptual utility by enabling theorisations to transcend the transnational-national/local binary (see Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013 for a discussion on binary thinking in the study of mobilities; and Xiang, Chapter 3 in this volume on multi-scalar transnationalism). This is particularly relevant to the current era of intensified and cross-cutting transnational flows where the transnational and the local are intertwined and complicit in the (re)production of existing and emergent types of transnational elites. Indeed, extant scholarship has acknowledged a diversification of ‘elites’ (beyond the traditional corporate/business and financial/wealth elites) and a relative expansion of pathways for non-traditional elites to gain entry into exclusive elite networks and to enjoy elite status (e.g., through education in elite schools, a strategy employed by members of the GMC). Emergent attention on intermediaries who service the needs of elites (Harrington 2016) has also opened up new lines of inquiry that point to how these intermediaries could be conceptualised as ‘elites’ in and of themselves. At the same time, commentators observe stratification within elite groups, where members at the top of the hierarchy are getting ahead at a much faster rate compared to members who are lower positioned. In other words, differentiation and inequalities are developing within groups that we might think of as ‘elite’. Looking into the future, it seems inevitable that new and emergent conceptualisations of elites will

430  Handbook on transnationalism

shape future understandings of the formation of elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles, and vice versa.

REFERENCES Baltzell, E. Digby (2017 [1958]), Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class, London and New York: Routledge. Bassens, David, Ben Derudder and Frank Witlox (2011), ‘Setting Shari’a standards: On the role, power and spatialities of interlocking Shari’a boards in Islamic financial services’, Geoforum, 42 (1), 94–103. Beaverstock, Jonathan V. (2002), ‘Transnational elites in global cities: British expatriates in Singapore’s financial district’, Geoforum, 33 (4), 525–38. Beaverstock, Jonathan V. (2011), ‘Servicing British expatriate “talent” in Singapore: Exploring ordinary transnationalism and the role of the “expatriate” club’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (5), 709–28. Birtchnell, Thomas and Javier Caletrío (eds) (2014), Elite Mobilities, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Brayshay, Mark, Mark Cleary and John Selwood (2005), ‘Interlocking directorships and trans-national linkages within the British Empire, 1900–1930’, Area, 37 (2), 209–22. Cárdenas, Julián (2015), ‘Are Latin America’s corporate elites transnationally interconnected? A network analysis of interlocking directorates’, Global Networks, 15 (4), 424–45. Carroll, William K. (2010), The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the Twenty-First Century, London and New York: Zed Books. Carroll, William K. and Meindert Fennema (2002), ‘Is there a transnational business community?’, International Sociology, 17 (3), 393–419. Chu, Johan S. G. and Gerald F. Davis (2016), ‘Who killed the inner circle? The decline of the American corporate interlock network’, American Journal of Sociology, 122 (3), 714–54. Courtois, Aline (2015), ‘“Thousands waiting at our gates”: Moral character, legitimacy and social justice in Irish elite schools’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36 (1), 53–70. de Graaff, Nana (2019), ‘China Inc. goes global: Transnational and national networks of China’s globalizing business elite’, Review of International Political Economy, 27 (2), 1–26. Domhoff, G. William (2014), Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (7th edition), New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Dorling, Danny (2014), Inequality and the 1%, London and New York: Verso. Forrest, Ray, Sin Yee Koh and Bart Wissink (eds) (2017), Cities and the Super-Rich: Real Estate, Elite Practices, and Urban Political Economy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Forsey, Martin (2017), ‘Education in a mobile modernity’, Geographical Research, 55 (1), 58–69. Glick Schiller, Nina and Noel B. Salazar (2013), ‘Regimes of mobility across the globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (2), 183–200. González, Carlos (2019), ‘Is the locus of class development of the transnational capitalist class situated within nation-states or in the emergent transnational space?’, Global Networks, 19 (2), 261–79. Graz, Jean-Christophe (2003), ‘How powerful are transnational elite clubs? The social myth of the World Economic Forum’, New Political Economy, 8 (3), 321–40. Hall, Sarah (2009), ‘Financialised elites and the changing nature of finance capitalism: Investment bankers in London’s financial district’, Competition and Change, 13, 173–89.

Elite transnational networks, spaces and lifestyles  431

Hall, Sarah (2011), ‘Educational ties, social capital and the translocal (re)production of MBA alumni networks’, Global Networks, 11 (1), 118–38. Hall, Sarah (2017), ‘(Post)graduate education markets and the formation of mobile transnational economic elites’, in Johannes Glückler, Emmanuel Lazega and Ingmar Hammer (eds), Knowledge and Networks, Cham: Springer International, pp. 103–16. Harrington, Brooke (2016), Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hay, Iain (ed.) (2013), Geographies of the Super-Rich, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Hay, Iain and Jonathan V. Beaverstock (eds) (2016), Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Heemskerk, Eelke M., Meindert Fennema and William K. Carroll (2016), ‘The global corporate elite after the financial crisis: Evidence from the transnational network of interlocking directorates’, Global Networks, 16 (1), 68–88. Heemskerk, Eelke M. and Frank W. Takes (2016), ‘The corporate elite community structure of global capitalism’, New Political Economy, 21 (1), 90–118. Heilbron, Johan, Johs Hjellbrekke, Felix Bühlmann and Mike Savage (eds) (2017), New Directions in Elite Studies, London: Routledge. Hickel, Jason (2017), The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, London: William Heinemann. Kentor, Jeffrey and Yong Suk Jang (2004), ‘Yes, there is a (growing) transnational business community: A study of global interlocking directorates 1983–98’, International Sociology, 19 (3), 355–68. Kenway, Jane, Johannah Fahey, Debbie Epstein, Aaron Koh, Cameron McCarthy and Fazal Rizvi (2017), Class Choreographies: Elites Schools and Globalization, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Khan, Shamus Rahman (2011), Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Koh, Aaron and Jane Kenway (eds) (2016), Elite Schools: Multiple Geographies of Privilege, New York: Routledge. Koh, Sin Yee (2020), ‘Super rich’, in A. Kobayashi (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (2nd edition), Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 127–31. Koh, Sin Yee and Bart Wissink (2018), ‘Enabling, structuring and creating elite transnational lifestyles: Intermediaries of the super-rich and the elite mobilities industry’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (4), 592–609. Koh, Sin Yee, Bart Wissink and Ray Forrest (2016), ‘Reconsidering the super-rich: Variations, structural conditions and urban consequences’, in Iain Hay and Jonathan V. Beaverstock (eds), Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 18–40. Koo, Hagen (2016), ‘The global middle class: How is it made, what does it represent?’, Globalizations, 13 (4), 440–453. Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2016), ‘Migration as class-based consumption: The emigration of the rich in contemporary China’, The China Quarterly, 226, 499–518. Maclean, Mairi, Charles Harvey and Gerhard Kling (2017), ‘Elite business networks and the field of power: A matter of class?’, Theory, Culture & Society, 34 (5–6), 127–51. Maxwell, Claire, Miri Yemini, Aaron Koh and Ayman Agbaria (2019), ‘The plurality of the global middle class(es) and their school choices: Moving the “field” forward empirically and theoretically’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40 (5), 609–15. Mills, C. Wright (1956), The Power Elite, London: Oxford University Press. Nichols, Georgia and Mike Savage (2017), ‘A social analysis of an elite constellation: The case of Formula 1’, Theory, Culture & Society, 34 (5–6), 201–25.

432  Handbook on transnationalism

Ong, Aihwa (2006), Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pinçon-Charlot, Monique and Michel Pinçon (2018), ‘Social power and power over space: How the bourgeoisie reproduces itself in the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42 (1), 115–25. Pow, Choon-Piew (2011), ‘Living it up: Super-rich enclave and transnational elite urbanism in Singapore’, Geoforum, 42 (3), 382–93. Rivera, Lauren A. (2015), Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Robertson, Justin (2014), ‘On the national production of global elites: The rise of a French trained global elite in financial derivatives’, International Political Sociology, 8 (3), 275–92. Short, John R. (2004), ‘The super-rich and the global city’, in Global Metropolitan: Globalizing Cities in a Capitalist World, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 109–22. Sinha, Mrinalini (2001), ‘Britishness, clubbability, and the colonial public sphere: The genealogy of an imperial institution in colonial India’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (4), 489–521. Sklair, Leslie (2001), The Transnational Capitalist Class, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Tsingou, Eleni (2015), ‘Club governance and the making of global financial rules’, Review of International Political Economy, 22 (2), 225–56. Useem, Michael (1984), The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K., New York: Oxford University Press. Veblen, Thorstein (1992 [1899]), The Theory of the Leisure Class, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Wakeling, Paul and Mike Savage (2015), ‘Entry to elite positions and the stratification of higher education in Britain’, The Sociological Review, 63 (2), 290–320. Ye, Rebecca and Erik Nylander (2014), ‘The transnational track: State sponsorship and Singapore’s Oxbridge elite’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36 (1), 11–33.

Index

activism see networks of labour activism; transnational activism affect ‘affective turn’ in social sciences 93 relationship with emotions 93 role between spouses from diverse cultural backgrounds 104–5 theories of 94–5 and transnationalism 93–6 ageing see transnational ageing agency presumption of, in migrant workers’ decision to opt-in to contracts 281 and temporary labour migration 280, 282, 283–8, 289 and transnationalism 279 anti-colonialism 33, 37–9 Antwerp Group 38 Asia ‘Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’ 49 gender imbalance 349 higher education students 295–304 migration to Australia 67–8 monetary transfer model 359 older migrants 84 and popular culture 246–58 pre-migration networks 350 regional corporate network clusters 424 research on formation of transnational families 183–93 state engagement in transnational authoritarianism 132 temporary labour migration 280–289, 334 transnational marriage migration in 310–321 transnational triangles 346, 347 see also Global South; Philippines aspirations amongst East Asian families 191–2 career 413 of children influenced by migrant parents 201–2 entrepreneurial 412 of Jamaican returnees 381

and Korean dramas 254 of migrant women 185, 313, 314, 316, 319–20 of migrant workers 280, 282, 289 of mothers for children 99–100 and polymedia 377 social reproductive 304 spread of global media influencing 255, 257 of town and residents 216 authoritarianism and activism 172–3 concept of 11–12 cultural consumption in North Korea 257 see also transnational authoritarianism autocracies as increasingly focused on silencing citizen voice abroad 128 perceiving cross-border mobility as threat 130–131 seeking to reap material benefits of free movement 130 strategies of co-optation 131, 134–5, 136, 137 combination of 135–6 of cooperation with non-state actors 135, 136 future research directions 136–7 of legitimation 131, 133–4, 136, 137 in non-autocratic contexts 137 of repression 131–3 Bay of Bengal 32–3 capital circuit for urban development 217 circulation of care as type of 395 class 427 diasporic 212, 216, 218 economic 333, 334 ethnic 407, 408, 414–15 knowledge 332 mobilisation 211, 428, 429 433

434  Handbook on transnationalism

‘mobility’ 235, 428 political 176–7 symbolic 191–2 virtual circulation of 428 see also social/cultural capital capital accumulation child-centred familial strategy of 192 ethnic 407 and international education 294, 302–3, 304 of island communities 221–3 and temporary labour migration 280, 281, 282 of transnational elites 21, 422, 427–8, 429 care background and context 388–9 circulation of asymmetry of 399 concept 20 definition 394 factors shaping transnational family engagement in 395 between family across distance 388 framework 393–5 gender, power and 395–7 locating within broader networks of exchange 394 in polymedia environment 20, 393, 397, 399 through three care modes 392 and co-presence 20, 391, 392, 399 conceptualisation of 389–90 importance of communication technologies 23, 389, 393, 397–400 portability of 379, 392–3, 394, 399–400 rise of migrant care workers 390–392 Caribbean migration family network and emotions 95 and media landscapes 380–382 migrants in UK 39–41 cell phones 372, 380–381 childcare pay of workers 173, 390 provided by grandparents 80–81, 396 children activists 169 dreams of future 69 hope for futures of 97, 98 left-behind 13, 67, 98, 189, 201–3, 283, 327, 334, 377

and love 99–101 migration affecting 198–9 negotiating intimacies 187 and older people 79–81, 82–3, 85, 191 ‘parachute kids’ 192, 296 physical co-presence required for care of 391 provision of education 190, 192, 296–7, 303, 422, 427–8 transnational ties 116, 117, 118, 119, 122 in two-way care exchange of love for money 394 unequal power relations with adults 206 ‘waiting’ 70 in ‘wild geese families’ 296 circulation across Bay of Bengal 32–3 of bodies, ideas, and capital 211 cultural 148 ‘discursive’ 51 of emotions 95 geographies of 270, 271 of identities, ideas, and capital 333 of images 376, 379–80 overview 19–21 of people, objects and feelings 12 of popular culture 14, 247, 249, 250–251, 254, 255 of practices 273 of transnational object 149, 150 virtual, of capital 428 see also care: circulation of citizenship acquisition 231, 395 and Chinese students 231 digital 23, 389, 398–9 emotional dimensions 103, 375 and religion 266 and return migration 328, 329 rights, and gender 17, 184, 310–312 and temporary labour migration 278–9, 281, 282 transnational labour 23, 278, 287–8, 289 class formation dynamics 429 and gated subdivisions 219–20 hierarchy and remittances 190 influencing mobility potential and trajectories 303 and intimacy 188

Index  435

of migrant wives 312, 313, 317 and overseas education for children 192, 296–7, 303 and popular culture 246, 248–9, 254 significance of 187 and students 233, 296–7, 303 and transnational elites 421–2, 423, 425, 426, 427, 429 and workers 34–5, 41, 48, 95, 184, 303 class privilege 182, 421–2, 423, 425, 427 co-optation 131, 134–5, 136, 137 co-presence ‘ambient’ 188, 202, 379 attention to creation of new forms of 96 and caregiving 20, 391, 392 and communication technologies 19, 81–2, 149–50, 188, 202, 373, 379, 399 desire for forms of media more effectively enabling 382 experienced as sense of ‘being there’ 399 ‘intimate visual’ 379 ‘ordinary’ 81–2 physical 85, 391, 392 virtual 149–50 commercial interests 236–7 communication technologies and exchange of appropriate emotional gestures 94 facilitating communication and perceived proximity 149 implicated in social movements 19, 375–6 importance to caregiving 23, 389, 393, 397–400 role in retaining connections with home 94, 373–4, 377–8, 393 and soft power 248–9 transnational ageing conceptualisation 79 emotional support through 83 use of 81–2 and transnational networks background and context 371–2 Caribbean migration and media 380–382 impact summary 382–3 political and social movements 375–6 prior to digital and social media 372–4

transnational relationships 376–80 use by state autocracies 135 use in building connected family relationships as currently more viable 193 impacts 374–5 in parent–child relationships 100, 202 ‘romanticizing’ role 187–8 sustaining intimacies 13, 186–8 see also polymedia environment constellations of actions 47 elite 429 family 79, 204 migrant 348 cooperation memorandum of understanding setting out procedures for 284 multilateral between nation-states 410 with non-state actors 135, 136 of transnational organisations 160 corporate elite networks 423–4, 425, 429 countries of origin development 161, 360–365 left-behind youth/children 201–3 transnational ties to 328, 358, 359, 360 transnational triangles connecting two destinations and 345–8 Covid-19 pandemic implications for transnationalism 21–3 increase in reliance on technologies 389 cross-border connectivity flexible and fluid identities emergent in 3 friction at heart of 320 transnationalism as marker for people-led 1 between USA and Caribbean 212 see also transnational connections; transnational ties cultural capital see social/cultural capital development community 406–7, 414 in countries of origin hometown associations influencing 161 migrant engagement with 360–365 diasporic 408, 414 economic 303, 409, 410, 411

436  Handbook on transnationalism

entrepreneurial 332, 407–8, 411, 413–14 migrants as agents of 335 remittances intersecting with 190, 357, 359–65, 373 transnational 12, 152 transtemporal 12, 152 see also migration–development nexus ‘diaspora consciousness’ 335 diaspora development engagements 363 ‘diaspora tourism’ 330 diasporas and communication practices 372 defining 267–8 digital 249 and home 144, 146 identity formation in 252, 328 overlap with transnationalism 265, 272 Philippine 218 revitalising concept of 33 state-promulgated ‘diaspora strategies’ 329 and transnational authoritarianism 128–9, 130–131, 132, 133, 134, 135–6 Uyghur 171 diasporic community building 413–15 diasporic religions 15, 267–9, 270, 272 diasporic returns 327, 328, 329–30 dictatorships see transnational authoritarianism digital citizenship 23, 389, 398–9 digital fan culture 250–252 digital kinning 397–400 digital media as borderless 246 in Caribbean 380–382 creating constantly available modes of communication 374 enhancing political activism 375 facilitating low-cost connections to regional media 374 facilitating ‘portability of networks of belonging’ 378 increasing attention to cultural and social implications of 372 and international students 378–9 popular culture spread due to 250, 255 and social relationships 19, 379 uses 371 young Moroccans’ use of 200 dispossession 65–6

see also temporality: exilic Docker’s Union 36 ‘dutiful daughters’ 311, 318–19 education see international education; transnational higher education elite school networks 424–5 elites see transnational elites emergent scale definitions 48, 56 examples 48 as horizontal 48 in south China local scale 54–6 trade 52–4, 56 and taxonomical scale differences between 45, 48 as intertwined in practice 48–9 US imperialism closely tied to 49 ‘emotional citizenship’ 375 ‘emotional remittances’ 102–3 emotions and care 34, 371, 382, 390, 391, 392, 394 as fundamental to migration 104 and home 141–3, 146, 147–8, 149, 150, 151 ICTs providing support for older people 83 intimate 184, 390 of older people staying behind 82 in polymedia environments 19, 96, 100, 382 in popular culture 249, 254 relationship with affect 93 and return migration 326–7, 328, 330, 331, 336 role between spouses from diverse cultural backgrounds 104–5 role of ICTs 186–7 in sustaining transnational connections and investments in property 224–6 theories of 93–6 in transnational families 96–104, 189, 283, 319, 360–361 entrepreneurs ethnic enclave 406–7, 410 middleman-minority 405–7, 408 transnational 20–21, 409–10, 412, 413, 415–16 ethnic economy 405–8, 414

Index  437

ethnic enclave economy 405–6, 407, 414, 415 ethnic entrepreneurship benefits of 413–14, 415 community building diasporic 414–15 positive effect on 407, 415 ethnic economy and variants 405–8 future research directions 415–16 and healthcare 407–8 limitations to previous research on impact of 404, 406, 409 as longstanding area of inquiry in migration studies 404 transnational linkages 408–13 ethnic return migrations and homeland visits 327–31 ethnographic studies 1.5 generation Korean New Zealanders 328 Caribbean family network and emotions 95 Chosŏnjok women’s mobility 316 communications technologies and transnational networks in Caribbean context 380–382 Filipinas in rural Japan 318 on left-behind children in Philippines 377 love, intimacy, colonialism and geopolitical hierarchies 318 on media and migration 372 new second generation in New York 330 notion of reflexivity 282 older Indians in transnational families 83 on return migration 332 transnational turn in migration studies fuelled by 121 exchange of care 20, 388, 389, 391–4, 398–9 circular system of 332 communications 112, 187, 200, 372–3, 377 economic 188, 365 in globalisation definition 264 of information 100, 134, 174, 176 of love 99, 100–101 multi-directional 224 networks of 221

of new ideas, values, behaviours and roles 333 remittances as processes of 361 social 94–5 student 207, 296 transnational 114, 115–16, 121 exclusive club networks 425–6 family see transnational families ‘floating ties’ 96 fragmentation 65, 67–8, 71, 72 friction see transnational marriage migration gated residential enclaves 21, 426–7 gated suburban communities 14, 218–20, 225 gender and care 185, 186, 202–3, 389, 393–4, 395–7 and citizenship rights 17, 184, 310–312 and communication technologies 374 and family 183, 184–6, 187, 188, 189, 190–191, 193, 202–3, 334 and mobility of young women 255 in Philippine society 221–2, 225 and pursuit of remittances 189 and remittances 189, 190–191, 334, 362–3 and technology 253–4 transnational patriarchy 17, 311 gendered division of labour 86, 185, 349 gendered emotion 101–4 gendered ideology of family 100, 184 gendered norms of parenting 99–100, 187, 188 gendered politics of movement across borders 312–21 generational composition, changing 119 Glasgow shipwrights 35–6 Global Middle Class (GMC) 21, 422, 427–8, 429 Global South branded goods produced in 170–171 comparative approach 217–18 knowledge transfer 238 movement with entire families as rare 203 multi-scalar approach 49–52, 214 norms and resources travelling to 176–7 older people from countries in 80, 84 real estate practice in 218–20 relational approach 214–15

438  Handbook on transnationalism

religion in 262, 273 transnational urbanism in 211–26 and worthiness 175 guilt 101–4, 189 health and wellbeing of Filipina immigrants 408 implications of children’s emigration on older people 82–4 implications of parental migration on children left behind 202–3 hierarchy across gender 183, 186 class 252 destination 342–3, 350 educational 295, 302, 303 geopolitical 318, 320, 321 taxonomical 45, 47–8, 53–4, 56 ‘high net worth individuals’ (HNWI) 21, 422, 427 home ascriptive dimension of 142, 147, 150, 152 calling a place home and appealing to 144–5 communication technologies’ role in retaining connections with 94, 373–4, 377–8, 393 dream homes 223–5 emplacing 147–8 feeling at home 145–7 home–migration nexus 141–3 importance of defining and researching 143–8 making 147 many ways to use notion of 141–3, 151–2 portability and materiality 149–51 practical and performable dimension of 142–3, 150 and scale 144–5, 146, 149 socio-material dimension of 142, 150 temporalities of 64, 66, 147 women ‘as heart of’ 99, 100 homeland visits 18, 81, 205, 325, 327–31, 333, 345–6, 393 see also return migration homemaking definition 143 migrant practices 150–151 multiple meanings 147 as social process 143

transnational 147, 150 as transnational development 12, 152 as transtemporal development 12, 152 hometown associations (HTAs) 161, 162, 363, 364 hope 97–9, 103–4 ICTs see communication technologies; polymedia environment identity diasporic 252, 328 formation and politics 334 of Korean-American ethnic return migrants 328 learning about ancestral homeland as means of strengthening 330 of students 232–3, 295–8 transnational 334–5 ‘immobility regimes’ 22, 389 Indian mutineers 38 Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) 39–41 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 36, 37 integration and claims-making 162 diasporic 404 into home society 331, 332–3, 334–5, 336, 362 into host society 62, 63, 161, 198, 266, 269, 331, 362, 404, 412, 413 regional initiatives 295 and religion 266, 269, 273 and time 64, 68 international education as de facto channel for skilled labour migration 297 early 296–7 education-migration industry impacting 304 educational hierarchy 295, 302, 303 expansion and diversification 17, 294, 303 fluid mobilities in pursuit of 302–3 higher education programmes and providers see TNE and universities 295–6 intra-regional 299–300, 303 need for critical, political perspectives on 239 profit-driven and predatory regime 17, 304

Index  439

regionalisation of 299–300, 302 utilised as social reproduction strategy 303 working to pay for 297–8, 303 international students and digital media 378–9 growing population of 294, 303 identities diversity of 294–5 early study abroad 296–7 globe-trotting university 295–6 student-workers 297–8, 303 ‘international mobile student’ definition 304 mobility patterns fluid and multiple 302–3, 304 intra-regional migration 299–300 largest flows 298–9 returns 300–301, 303 social class influencing 303 as significant transnational force in contemporary world 304 see also students; young people International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) 37–8 interconnectedness 8, 130, 175, 325, 327, 407 intimacies geopolitical 212–13, 217–21 negotiating everyday 13, 186–8 Islamic mosques 54–6 island tourist destinations 218, 221–3, 225 Italian mansions in peri-urban fringe 218, 223–5 kinship and cell phones 380 cross-border ties 116 definition 399 digital kinning and care circulation 397–400 and prevalence of transnational ties 119, 122 and suburban living 225 and transnational marriages 316 ventures based on 223 kinship networks 99, 393 knowledge practices 237–8 Korean Wave cultural products included in 248 as example of crossover of culture and economy 250

global circulation of 249 growing interest in 249 intriguing reason behind popularity of 254 phenomenon of 248–9 and postcolonial 15, 247, 249–50, 254 as resource for soft power 249–50 significance of 247 transnational mobility of 255 viewed as counterpoint to Western cultural influence 251 labour maritime 37–9 networks of activism 16, 283, 286, 287–8, 289 translocal spaces of organising 34–6 transnational and transient overview 277–80 transnational citizenship 23, 278, 287–8, 289 see also temporary labour migration left-behind youth/children 13, 67, 98, 189, 201–3, 283, 327, 334, 377 legitimation 131, 133–4, 136, 137 life course approach to ‘going home’ 377–8 care across 80–81, 86, 392–3, 394, 395, 397, 399 engagements with theory 60 and exilic time 70–71 kinship networks for support across 99 in later life 77–87 multiple moves for students over 302 and sense of home 145–6 lifestyle aestheticised, in Korean dramas 254 ‘aspirations’ 231, 377 ‘dual’ 232 social media highlighting 376 of transnational elites 21, 420, 422, 426–7, 428–9 transnational, of older people 78, 84 loneliness 79, 82, 84, 100 love 99–101, 103–5, 394 maritime labour 37–9 marriage migration see transnational marriage migration materiality of home 149–50 merchants of labour 283, 284–5, 289

440  Handbook on transnationalism

methodological nationalism 8, 9, 32, 49, 51–2, 143, 265, 277, 340 methodological statism 9, 31 middleman-minority economy 405–6, 415–16 entrepreneurs 405–7, 408 migrant care workers 390–392 Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA) 287–8 migrant integration see integration migrant receiving countries entrepreneurship affecting diasporic integration in 404 ethnic entrepreneurship 409, 410–411 published research on 50 second generation youth 200–201, 203, 205–6 migrant transnationalism as individual and diasporic agency 277 links to return migration 362 in migration–development nexus 357–8 and remittances importance of 112, 358–65 as social practices 365 sending money back home 356–7 temporary labour migration 277–80, 288–9 transnational ties prevalence and substance as research tools 121–2 prevalence of 116–19 substance of 119–21 variation and change in background and context 110–112 framework for analysis 112–16 generational composition 119 types of change over time 115–16 see also transnational migration migration see multinational migrations; return migration; stepwise migration; temporary labour migration; transnational marriage migration; transnational migration migration–development nexus and agentic transnationalism 279 incorporating transnational family effects in 189–90 marriage migration through lens of 313–14 migrant transnationalism in 357–8 multiple forms of remittances as central tenet of 19, 358

migration governance 280–281, 284, 287, 288, 289 migration–home nexus 141–3 mobilisation of capital 211, 428, 429 civic engagement for 376 collective 363 diasporic 130, 363 of inner self 255 resource 53, 68, 156, 157, 332, 335 and scale 48–9, 53, 56 ‘mobilities turn’ 8, 13–14, 203, 204, 315 mobility blocked, associated with minority status in host societies 404 cross-border, of older people 81 elite 428 employment 16 fragmented lives due to disruption involved in 10 in marriage migration context 312, 315–17, 321 ‘new mobilities paradigm’ 8 pandemic and government responses impeding 2, 22–4 and polymedia environment 388–9 power relations involved in uneven access to 5 of religion 264–9 studying 270–271, 272–3 return 18, 327, 329, 330 of students 230–234, 240, 298–304 of transnational elites 422 pursuit of 428, 429 of young people 203–5, 207 see also social mobility money diasporic 217 entering national economy from outside 361 and friction within transnational marriages 318–19 ‘old money’ families 427, 428 seeking control over 396 for self 113 sending back home 19, 356–7, 365, 391 significance in overseas ventures 236 transaction cost reduction 359–60 transferred to and between criminal and terrorist networks 359 two-way care exchange of love for 394 multi-scalar framework

Index  441

application in south China Islamic mosques 54–6 trade 52–4 defining 46–9 Global South perspective 49–52 purpose 45 multinational migrations concept of 341–2 defining 342–3 driving new transnational ties 343–9, 351 transnational ties driving 349–50, 351 as umbrella term 18, 342 networks of labour activism 16, 283, 286, 287–8, 289 ‘new mobilities paradigm’ 8 Nigeria schoolgirl identity 232–3 seaworker dispute 38–9 non-profit organisations 159–62 ‘non-relation’ 67 North Korea 255–7 older people see transnational ageing ‘the one per cent’ 21, 422 opportunity structures for activists 172–4, 178, 179 migrants embedded within multi-layered 410 of national-origin groups, factors affecting 409 organisation theory non-profit organisations 159–62 organisations 155–6 profit organisations 157–9 see also transnational organisations Other 63–71 peri-urban towns displacement of farming and indigenous communities 220 rise of Italian style mansions in 218, 219–20, 223–5 Philippines children of migrants and remittances 201 communication technologies 373, 376, 377 ‘culture of migration’ 216 examples used to support idea of transnational migration 341

experiences of feminised labour migration 186 migrant care workers 390–391 migrants living in New Zealand 97–8 motherhood in 99–101 transnational marriage migration 310, 314, 318 transnational triangles 346–7 transnational webs 349 urban transformations in 211–12, 215, 217–26 place in conceptualisation of pre-national transnationalism and translocalism 31–4 encounters of, and translocal resistance 39–41 maritime labour and translocal connections 37–9 translocal, and labour organising 34–6 policy to address structural inequalities 420 attention to remittances 19, 356 cultural 248 declarations around TNE 239 gap around caring 397 migration as national development 284 open-door in China 411 as transnational ties factor 121 political engagement and communication technologies 375 Filipino au pairs in Denmark 376 migrants’ transnational 364 shaped by transnational activities 200 Turkish organisations in Germany 161 political movements, communication technologies implicated in 375–6 political networks 285–6, 287, 289 ‘political remittances’ 364 politics familial 185–6, 189, 193 gendered, of movement across borders 312–21 of transnational activism 169–78 polycentrism and successful internationalisation 157 in transnational activism 171, 177 polymedia environment and circulation of care 20, 393, 397, 399 concept of 82

442  Handbook on transnationalism

illustrating intersection of media, relationships, emotions and their social consequences 382–3 and mobility 388–9 social relationships sustained through 96 technologically enabled forms of connectedness creating 19 and transnational families 100, 188, 372, 376–80, 393 and transnational friends 378–9 see also communication technologies popular culture digital fan culture 250–252 everyday reflexivity 252–5, 257 experience of 258 hidden transformation in North Korea 255–8 meaning of term 258 soft power 247, 248–50, 255, 257 transnational cultural connectivity 246–7 port cities 32, 33–4, 38, 39 portability of benefits and services 23 of care 379, 392–3, 394, 399–400 of home 149, 150 ‘of networks’ 378, 379 of pensions and healthcare access 80 of place 223–5 of religion 268–9, 270 postcolonial and Korean Wave 15, 247, 249–50, 254 perspective on TNE 237–8 postcolonial theorists 68, 215 postcolonial urbanism 217–18, 225 Powell, E. 41 power and care circulation 395–7 over space 427–8 soft 247, 248–50, 255, 257 power relations in activism 177–8 Korean popular culture understood by 254 multi-scalar framework contributing to unpacking global 49 negotiating within family and community spaces 317 role of distance in reshaping gendered and generational 396 technologies enrolled in 187

transnational connections tied to 47 unequal among urbanism actors 215–16 between children and adults 206 private transfers 360–361 profit organisations 156, 157–9, 163 reciprocal agency 11, 110, 111, 112–13 reflexivity emotional 94, 96, 104 everyday 252–5, 257 relation as key element in concept of transnationalism 62 limited attention paid to temporal aspects of 63 to one’s present 69 and ‘post-migrants’ 63–4 temporal of discontinuity 67 of meaning 66 of unity 70, 71 relational temporality 62–4, 70 religion conceptualising within contemporary context 262–4 diasporic 15, 267–9, 270, 272 in motion 264–9 studying 270–271, 272–3 and remittances 364–5 transnational exilic temporalities of 65, 71 in globalising world 265–7 transnational perspective 272–3 remittance decay hypothesis 112, 122 ‘remittance heroines’ 334 remittance houses 148 remittances agency over requests, receipts and acknowledgements 120 collective 333–4, 363 costs of sending 359–60, 365–6, 411 defining in context of sending money back home 356–7 within dynamic web of transnational ties 116–19 and finance networks 285 and gender 362–3 and guilt 102–3 and humanitarian crises 120 impact on young people 198, 201–2 importance of 112, 358–65

Index  443

in Italy 224 love expressed through 99, 100, 104, 391 as major tenet of migrant transnationalism 357 migrant housing investments as form of social 147 in migrant transnationalism framework for analysing variation and change 113–15 for older people 79, 81 in Philippines 201, 218, 219 ‘political’ 364 as private transfers 360–361 and religion 364–5 and return migration 331, 333–4, 362 ‘reverse’ 396–7 and separation and substance of transnational ties 122 social 333–4, 361–2 as social practices 365 and state authoritarianism 129 and temporary labour migration 282, 284, 341 and time 121 transnational family 117, 188–92, 319, 373 Vietnamese marriage migrants 318 ‘remittances-in-kind’ 411 repertoires of action 169, 175 repression see transnational repression return conceptualisation 326 return migration conceptual linkages with return and transnational mobilities 326–7 diasporic 327, 328, 329–30 dimensions of 326–7, 335–6 and emotions 326–7, 328, 330, 331, 336 ethnic, and homeland visits 327–31 as fluid and nuanced articulations of staged movement 336 of international students 300–301, 303 Jamaican migrant example 381 links to migrant transnationalism 362 often seen as vehicle for development 362 process incorporating contradictory navigations of self and society 335 reintegration and transnational identity 331–5 and sense of home 144–5

and time 381 transnational approach to 325, 327–8 return mobilities conceptualisation 327 involving need to learn more about ancestral homeland 330 in later life among Greek-American males 329 recoding return as 329 transnational 18, 327, 330 scale definitions 46, 56 and home 144–5, 146, 149 and social activism 170–172, 179 and transnational urbanism 215–17 understanding requiring new perspective 409 see also emergent scale; taxonomical scale; transnational scale second generation youth 192, 198, 200–201, 203, 204, 206 self exilic time of self-withdrawal 70–71 and forgetting 70 mobilisation of inner 255 money for 113 passage beyond 64–7, 68, 71 and return migration 335 social clubs and residential enclaves 426–7 social/cultural capital of alumni ties 424 as benefit of international education 301, 302–3 circulation of care as type of 395 and diasporic community building 414–15 elites’ accumulation of 422, 427–8 elites’ possession of 425, 427 embodied forms of transnational 231 entrepreneurs taking advantage of 413 intergenerational transfer of 80, 330, 427 interpersonal relationships serving to establish 407 mixed embeddedness model 408 as objective of international education 294, 297 and religion 271 and return migration 327–8, 330, 332 students’ employment of 233–4 students valuing 237–8

444  Handbook on transnationalism

studying at home leading to deficient 235 time as resource to be used as part of 68 transnational networks and entrepreneurial opportunities 410 social mobility accumulation of ethnic capital for 407 converting cultural capital to achieve 303 entrepreneurship as pathway to upward 412, 413, 415 migrants’ desire for unimpeded 315–16 transnationalising family as main route towards international 192 social movements actors 174, 176–7 communication technologies implicated in 19, 375–6 forms of joint mobilisation characterising 176 reduced role of gatekeepers 169 and transnational organisations 156, 160, 162, 163 social networks 285–6, 287, 289 social practices and popular culture 253 remittances as 365 social reproduction association with care 390, 391, 394 commodification of migrant labour for 280 international education utilized as strategy of 303 and temporary migrant labour 280, 282 of transnational families 16, 188–92, 232, 233, 303 of transnational students 233–4 soft power 247, 248–50, 255, 257 solidarity among migrant women 317 ethnic community governed by bounded 407, 415 intergenerational 82, 83 requiring translocal connections 31 of seafarers 38 between shipwrights 35 of significance in contesting Powell’s speech 41 transnational activism 175 transnational shaping multi-ethnic 36 south China Islamic mosques in 54–6

trade in 9, 52–4, 56–7 stepwise migration 342, 346–7, 348, 350 students and class 233, 296–7, 303 employability and social reproduction 233–4 identity and consumption 232–3 mobility of 230–234, 240 networks 234 student-workers 297–8, 303 and TNE 235–40 see also international students; young people subaltern groups 37–9, 41 subaltern social movements 31–2 taxonomical scale components 47 and emergent scale differences between 45, 48 as intertwined in practice 48–9 in Global South 50–51 as hierarchical 48, 56 ideal-type 47 imperialist operations governed by 49 indicating mobilisational and coordinating capacity of institutions 56 modern states exercising power through 48 in south China trade 52, 53–4, 56–7 temporality a-logical 67, 70–71 an-archic 66, 70–71 atemporal 65–6 differential 66 exilic 65, 66, 70–71 of the infinitive 71 as internal and subjective 63 of re-composition of elements 61 relational 62–4, 70 self-naturalising 63 time expressed as flat 61 ‘undocumented’ 71 unity and cohesiveness of 67 temporality–precarity nexus 280–283, 289 temporary labour migration and citizenship 278–9, 281, 282 context 277 future research directions 289 institutional actors

Index  445

time

merchants of labour reinforcing 283, 284–5, 289 social and political networks contesting 285–6, 287, 289 towards transnational labour citizenship 23, 278, 287–8, 289 migrant transnationalism 277–80, 288–9 temporality–precarity nexus 280–283, 289 transnational and transient labour overview 277–80

asynchronous 61, 69, 72 avenues of further research 72 ‘balanced’ 66 disastrous 69, 71 fragmented 65, 67–8, 70, 71, 72 movement beyond self 64–7 neutral 66, 68, 69, 71 as ‘processes of flow’ 60 relational temporality 62–4, 70 role in transnationalism scholarship 60–61 ‘trans-’ as movement of temporal re-composition 67–70 as transnational ties factor 121 and waiting 69–70 timelessness 62 TNE aka programme mobility 230 commercial interests 236–7 definition 235 models 235–6 postcolonial contexts and neocolonial knowledge practices and relationships 237–8 quality assurance and ethics 238–40 recent discourses around 240–241 trade ‘diaspora strategies’ 329 imbalanced, in Asia 281 in south China foreign, and development of Islam 54–5 transnational 52–4, 56–7 unevenness in scalar coordination 9 between USA and Mexico 411 trade unions 30, 34–9, 174, 175, 286–8 ‘trans-’ beyond self 64–7, 68, 71

interpretations of 61 as movement of temporal re-composition 67–70 transaction costs 358–65 transient labour overview 277–80 translocal connections benefits of engaging with 41 definition 8 maritime labour and anti-colonialism 37–9 means of articulation 31–2 requiring solidarity 31 of significance in contesting Powell’s speech 41 translocalism conceptualisation through histories and geographies 31–4 context 30 labour organising spaces 34–6 resistance and spaces of encounter 39–41 transnational activism activist campaigns dimensions of 170–171 involvement of different actors 172 logic underpinning rise of 173–4 scalar differences between various targets of 171 actors 170, 172, 174–5, 176–7, 178 boomerang pattern 171 challenges 176–7 definitions 170–172 diffuseness characterising 169, 177, 178 features as inherently political 169–70, 177–8 opportunity structures 172–4, 178, 179 polycentrism 171, 177 processes, tools and tactics 175–6 repertoires of action 169, 175 transnational advocacy networks (TANs) 130, 162, 174–5 transnational ageing background and context 77–8 childcare 80–81 communication technologies emotional support through 83 requiring help from children to use 399 use of 81–2 as field of research 78–9 future research opportunities 87

446  Handbook on transnationalism

implications for health and wellbeing 82–4 and life course perspective 77–8, 86–7 older people bridging and negotiating 86 children of 79–81, 82–3, 85, 191 conceptualisation of 79 from countries in Global South 80, 84 cross-border mobility 81 ICTs providing support for 83 implication of children’s emigration on health and wellbeing 82–4 invisibility within transnational contexts 84–6 lifestyle of 78, 84 remittances for 79, 81 research findings on transnational involvement 77, 79–82 seen as burden rather than resource 84–5 and transnational ties 77, 78, 81, 83–4, 85–6 types 79 transnational authoritarianism concept of 128 context 128 future research directions 136–7 international politics of 128–37 and migration 129–30 rise of 130–136 ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) 21, 421–2 transnational care see care transnational connections construction of homes as marker of portability of place through 223 and Covid-19 23 and family and community relations 46–7 in Global South 215 important role of emotions in sustaining 223 migrants and temporality 64 multi-scalar framework 52, 56 process of return as ‘new freedom’ to harness 332 and reciprocal agency 11 role in transforming urban areas 14, 215, 223 and scalar coordination 9, 45, 46–7, 49

and social remittances 362 as ubiquitous in twenty-first century 45 see also transnational ties transnational dyads connecting two destinations 343, 344–5 as type of transnational tie 18, 342 transnational elites conceptualisation 421–2, 429–30 differentiation and inequalities developing within groups 429 production through spaces and lifestyles power over space 427–8 pursuit of transnational mobile lifestyles 428 social clubs and residential enclaves 426–7 production through transnational networks corporate interlocks 423–4, 429 elite school networks 424–5 exclusive club networks 425–6 scholarly interest in 21 transnational entrepreneurs 20–21, 404, 409–10, 412, 413, 415–16 transnational families aspirational futures 191–2 being ‘family’ in context of transnational migration 182–3 as currently more viable due to communication technologies 193 shared and contested imaginaries of 183–6 changing generational composition 119 communication technologies role in sustaining intimacies 186–8 emotions in 96–106, 189, 283, 319, 360–361 evolution of remittance flows in 117 familial politics 185–6, 189, 193 involvement in care 388–400 migrant wives in marriage migration context 310–321 and polymedia environment 100, 188, 372, 376–80, 393 remittances 117, 188–92, 319, 373 social reproduction 16, 188–92, 232, 233, 303 transnational higher education programmes and providers 235–41 students 230–234

Index  447

transnational labour see labour; temporary labour migration transnational lives conceptualisation 4 of elites 420–430 mobility and young people 205, 207 returnees who have sustained 325, 329 role of care in sustaining 20, 388–400 and time 60, 64, 65, 66, 67–8, 70–72 transnational marriage migration ‘clashing cultural scripts’ and enforced dependency 311–12 and friction as interrupted mobilities 312, 315–17, 321 and intimate geopolitics 312–13, 317–21 recent literature in Asian context 313–15 ‘rubbing’ metaphor 313, 315 use as framework 312 stories depicting diverging fates of migrant wives 310–311 transnational migration application of term 340–341 becoming increasingly feminised 391 emotions motivating 96–104 and family in context of 182–3 intimacy and role of communication technologies 186–8 remittances, social reproduction and aspirational futures 188–92, 193 shared and contested imaginaries of 183–6 features in English literature 50 full potential as yet unreached 351 and home background to home–migration nexus 141–3 importance of defining and researching 143–8 portability and materiality 149–51 recommendations 151–2 between Hong Kong and Australia 98 and international students different mobility patterns 298–303 diverse identities 294–8 pitfalls and expanding mobilities 303–4

between Mexico and parts of USA 160–161 overview 16–18 and religion 262, 265–7, 268–71, 273 rise of migrant care workers 390–392 between southern Ecuador and northern Italy 328 transformation as result of new communication technologies 393 and transnational authoritarian state practices 129–30 for working mothers 99–100 of young people 198–205 see also migrant transnationalism transnational mobility see mobility transnational networks and circulations overview 19–21 and communication technologies background and context 371–2 Caribbean migration and media 380–382 impact summary 382–3 political and social movements 375–6 polymedia environments and transnational relationships 376–80 prior to digital and social media 372–4 developed by international and immigrant students 234 elite 420, 423–6, 429–30 and entrepreneurial opportunities 410–411 of finance 285 problematising temporality of 61 social and political 285–6 translocal anti-colonial 37–8 in typology of transnationalism 6 see also transnational activism transnational organisations contexts and concepts of 155–7 definition 156 non-profit 156, 159–62, 163 outlook and future research 163–4 as profit organisations 156, 157–9, 163 transnational patriarchy 17, 311 transnational popular culture see popular culture transnational practices authoritarian state 129–30 of autocracies 134

448  Handbook on transnationalism

definition 111 of global financial regulation 426 and prevalence of transnational ties 112–13 and return migration 332–3 and substance of transnational ties 113, 115, 119–20 ‘ways of being’ 81 see also remittances transnational relationships and communication technologies 96, 372, 376–80 with former host country in bi-directional flow 332 role of emotions in 11, 96–7, 102, 103, 105 and views of home 147–8 transnational religion exilic temporalities of 65, 71 in globalising world 265–7 see also religion transnational repression 131–3, 136, 137 transnational scale 5, 45, 47, 49, 53, 56–7 transnational ties to country of origin 328, 358, 359, 360 definition 115–16 driving multinational migrations 349–50, 351 dynamic web of 116–19 intensification of 115 at liturgical level 266 multinational migrations driving new 343–9, 351 and older people 77, 78, 81, 83–4, 85–6 policy and time as factors 121 prevalence and substance as research tools 121–2 prevalence of 112–13, 114–15, 116–19, 122 substance of 113, 115, 119–21 three types of 18, 342, 344–9, 351 transnational triangles connecting two destinations and origin 345–8 as type of transnational tie 18, 342 transnational urbanism case studies dream homes, portability of place, and peri-urban transformations 223–5 island tourist destinations 221–3 lessons learned from 225–6

suburban gated communities 218–20 context 211–12 postcolonial urbanism 217–18, 225 and scale 215–17 theoretical terrains 212–15 transnational webs connecting multiple countries 344, 348–9 as type of transnational tie 18, 342 transnationalism affect and emotion 93–105 conceptualisation of expending reach of 6–7 focus on refining 5–6 histories and geographies 31–4 overview 8–11, 24 in relation to organisations 163–4 definition 111 delimiting 111–12 development as specific research programme 156 early accounts of 4–5 and ethnic entrepreneurship 408–13 flows and connections 39–40, 41 introduction to 1–2 and maritime labour 37–9 in migration studies emergence as concept 3 impetus for new research directions 7–8 popularisation as term 3–4 multi-scalar framework 45–57 in (post-) pandemic world 21–3 and return migration 325–36 ‘reverse’ 18, 262, 326 synergy with other emerging concepts 7–8 and temporary labour migration 277–89 terminology of 2–3 and time 60–72 typologies of 5–6 varieties of 11–15 see also migrant transnationalism transnationalism approach 2–8, 18, 325, 327–8 white labourism 34–5 worthiness 175 young people

Index  449

choices of study abroad destinations 300 future research avenues 206–7 left-behind youth 201–3 mobility of 203–5, 207

popular culture of 250–257 second generation youth 200–201 transnational dyads 345 transnational engagements of 198–200 see also students