Diaspora Policy

I am currently at work on a book tentatively entitled Diaspora Management Logics. The book is building on various diaspora-related projects I have been involved with.

My prior work on Diasporas was publish in a special issue I co-edited with with Alexandra Délano Alonso on “The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics: Unpacking the State and Disaggregating the Diaspora” for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies . The articles we published offer insight into my forthcoming book project and helped me test my intuitions against cases that I was not familiar with, such as Morocco, Germany, and El Salvador. In this special issue I also published a co-authored article (w/ Marko Žilović) entitled “Foreign Policy Priorities and Ethnic Return Migration Policies: Group-Level Variation in Greece and Serbia,” which captures one of the diaspora management logics I discuss in the book, namely the geostrategic logic. This special issue was later published as a book with Routledge.

In 2013, I spent a month and a half in Seoul, at Korea University, researching South Korea’s diaspora policy. I conducted over 20 interviews. A policy memo on the politics of diaspora management in the Republic of Korea was published with The Asan Institute for Policy Studies, one of the leading think tanks in the country. This piece was the first where I reconceptualized the term “diaspora management” and articulated the various logics.  In 2010,  “Ethnic Return Migration, Selective Incentives, and the Right to Freedom of Movement in Post-Cold War Greece,” appeared in a volume edited by Willem Maas, Democratic Citizenship and the Free Movement of People. In this piece the geostrategic logic of the state was ultimately undermined by a labor market logic of the ethnic return migrants.