How do political crises affect the relationship between home states and emigrants? Given the Arab uprisings and antecedent politics, I examine how major political developments shape an emigrant-home state transnational exchange. Unstable home states have a dual motivation for diaspora enfranchisement; on one hand, they will seek the recognition and legitimation of their domestic political processes abroad – either by their emigrant communities, or indirectly as a means to influencing the relevant policies of their host states. On the other hand, troubled states may also enfranchise their emigrant communities as a form of monitoring and control. Crises expectedly produce political winners and losers, and this may induce losers to exit the state yet remain affiliated and tied to the political developments back home. I argue that democratic or autocratic resolutions to crisis and their consequent effects on political rights have different implications for state policies and practices towards emigrant communities. Specifically, I hypothesize that post-crisis democratic governments may be less motivated to extend political rights to emigrant communities compared with post-crisis autocratic governments. The latter may in fact be highly incentivized to create and reinforce ties with its emigrant community and to do so through extending political rights abroad at a time when it might be simultaneously curtailing political rights back home. Both crises and subsequent enfranchisement opportunities motivate “diasporic entrepreneurs” to mobilize members at the fault lines of home country politics. To test these arguments, I set to construct a paired comparison of Egypt and Tunisia that relies on elite interviews, legal texts, archival evidence, and survey data, and uses textual analysis and process tracing to explain Egyptian and Tunisian emigrant enfranchisement policies and subsequent diasporic reactions during the 2011-2014 political crisis episodes. I argue that both Egypt and Tunisia witness discursive bargaining over extraterritorial citizenship – specifically diasporic political rights – in the form of constitutional amendments, nationality and citizenship law modifications, judicial textual reinterpretations, and contested voting procedures and candidacy requirements. In this project, I aim to contribute to the literature on state-diaspora relations and its subsequent effects on emigrants’ political mobilization and participation in their host countries. I trace Egyptian and Tunisian emigration policy and diaspora formation in the past decades. I also articulate the institutionalization of home state ties with its citizens abroad. Overall, this project strives to account for the contentious politics of activating and deactivating diasporic communities during politically turbulent times.

This research is intended to supplement the existing literature on the role of the Syrian Armenian Community (SAC) in the Syrian conflict by offering a study of the Armenian diaspora in international conflict, informed by an explicit analytical and conceptual framework and based on a detailed empirical case. There is less research explicitly on the role of the SAC in the Syrian conflict that began with anti-regime protests in 2011 and escalated into sectarian violence and civil war. The Syrian conflict was internationalized when the United States, the West and Turkey supported the opposition and Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Hizbullah supported the regime. The role of the Syrian Armenians in the conflict was not researched by scholars. A major exception was the work of Simon Payaslian, who wrote about the Armenian community in Syria. The Syrian Armenians are the descendants of the Armenians who lived in the Ottoman Empire and who survived the 1915 Armenian genocide. The normative aim of this study is to attempt to find patterns of diasporic activity in conflict such as to support positive activities and discourage negative activities. The Armenians of Syria shared a number of characteristics identified by William Safran concerning diasporan communities, including the maintenance of “a collective memory” regarding the homeland, the determination to maintain relations with the homeland and the eventual return. Theoretically, this research invades the discipline of political science and international relations and establishes a conflict management analytical framework. This study investigates the role of the SAC in politics and in different phases of what conflict resolution theorists sometimes call the “conflict cycle”. The Syrian conflict that occurred in an unstructured environment, like civil war, rebellion or terrorism, let the parties consider each other as a threat and act violently against each other. Methodologically, and borrowing from Jacob Bercovitch, we argue that each phase of a conflict denotes different types of behavior, different potential for conflict management and different options for intervention by a diasporic community. Related to these phases there are possible arenas, such as political, military, economic and socio-cultural, in which diasporic communities can exercise influence in the course of a conflict. This study concludes by stressing that the historical context of the SAC enables analysts and policy makers to understand the interests, aspirations and objectives of diasporic communities as actors in international conflict.

This paper examines the Turkish diaspora’s new role as a diplomatic actor along with the various transnational and international tensions arising out of this transformation. Based on 14 months of fieldwork conducted in Turkey, France and Germany, the paper looks at the reasons behind the Turkish state’s unprecedented interest in its diaspora since the early 2000s; details political activism in Europe among the Turkish diaspora; and explores how Turkey’s growing sphere of influence over its diaspora has affected Turkey’s diplomatic relations with European host states as well as with the European Union. A case study of the Turkish émigré community in Europe represents a significant addition to the scholarly literature on diasporas, transnationalism, and international relations at a time when issues of migration and citizenship have become more salient.

After migrating from Homs to São Paulo in 1914, Salwa Salama Atlas edited one of the earliest women’s magazines of the Arabic-speaking world, published several anthologies, served as headmistress in an orphanage, and co-founded an influent social club. I argue that, through her activities, Salwa was part of a transnational community that discussed new ideas of family and gender, shaping a new, modern Syria which could achieve its independence from the Ottomans and French. Salwa raised awareness of the plight of widows and single mothers and praised their resilience when facing adversity. She also promoted specific moral codes, such as the obligation of women to fulfill their destinies as mothers of the nation—literally by giving birth to Syrians, but also figuratively by educating them properly. Nevertheless, her name lives only in footnotes, where she is mostly remembered as the wife of the nationalist intellectual Jurj Atlas. Salwa was the victim of three overlapping historical biases: she inhabited the mahjar, lived in the global periphery, and, most importantly, was a woman. For these reasons, scholars paid scant attention to her story. This paper aims to correct these injustices. I analyze a 1932 issue of the magazine al-Karma and the anthologies Amam al-Mawqid and Jarrat al-Manna. With this work, I aim to challenge the frameworks of “methodological nationalism,” meaning those that privilege the nation-state to the detriment of transnational movements. I also frame Salwa’s work as a “long-distance nationalism,” that is, one that happened outside the borders of the imagined nation-state.