Diaspora strategies’ are generally defined as purposeful initiatives by migrant-sending states aimed at mobilizing citizens abroad, and even former citizens, to contribute towards the national interest of the ‘home’ country. Over the past decade, the concept has garnered increasing attention and resulted in a rapidly proliferating number of initiatives and programmes on the part of governments around the world to establish effective ‘diaspora strategies’ for connecting and engaging with their emigrant networks.These initiatives are supported by a growing number of forums, consortiums, working groups and institutes within the international development community. Inaugurated in 2011, the Global Diaspora Forum, spearheaded by then United States Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, is perhaps the most striking and high-profile example to date of the rapidly growing importance of ‘diaspora strategies’ within transnational governance circles (International Development Engagement Alliance, 2011).Yet despite the growing emphasis within the policy sphere on the transferability of diaspora strategies across national contexts, state engagements with their ‘diasporas’,and indeed, the very terms on which they base such engagements, are necessarily historically and geographically contingent. In this light, the papers in this special section of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography analyse the emerging ‘diaspora strategies’ of states in Southeast Asia, seeking to carefully ‘place’ the growing popularity and circulation of these strategies by interrogating how they are constituted and played out in the specific context of this tropical region.
From ARI organised workshop “The ‘Diaspora Strategies’ of Migrant-sending Countries: Migration-as-development Reinvented?”, 5-6 November 2012.
