While globalization facilitates people movement, authoritarian regimes, instead of moving in a democratic direction, are consolidating. Combined, these two different trends have prompted political scientists to enrich the academic debate with new approaches. The limited but promising literature dealing with the authoritarian governance of diasporas has focused on the extraterritorial expansion of voting rights (Brand, 2010) or on institutions and policies that authoritarian regimes set up to control and repress perceived threats coming from abroad (Lewis, 2015). This literature, however, does not help us understand whether and how authoritarian countries make use of the political participation of their diasporas in their democratic countries of residence. This paper identifies a new mechanism which, despite not being authoritarian in essence, may represent an asset for authoritarian regimes in search of legitimation in a global age. Considering the case of contemporary Morocco, this paper discusses an authoritarian regime’s policies towards its emigrants who are politically active in their democratic countries of residence. It argues that the diaspora who is actively involved in the democratic political sphere of its country of residence can function as an instrument of “soft power” for authoritarian regimes. The paper relies on elite and key-informant interviews conducted in Morocco, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France between August 2015 and May 2016. It details how Morocco, despite denying its population abroad the right to fully participate in the domestic political life, displays a high degree of activism in creating links with European citizens of Moroccan origin who are politically active in their respective countries. In practice, this means that the regime lobbies on a special subcategory of its population abroad: those who are elected in various European institutions (such as parliaments, provincial or regional institutions and municipal councils) in order to promote its interests. By analyzing the Moroccan case study, the paper aims at shedding light on the processes underlying the legitimation of authoritarian regimes that are facing the challenges, but also the opportunities, posed by globalization.

Next to the colorful clashes with Arab neighbors, excessive adventurism and glowering anti-Western rhetoric, the relationship between the Gadhafi regime in Libya and its opposition expatriates is often overlooked. This paper seeks to examine the cleavage between the Libyan state’s conceptualization of Libyan nationalism, and that of its exiled opposition. Because of the authoritarian nature of the state, resistance movements grew outside the country rather than within and often clashed with regime elements as Gadhafi sought to export his ideology abroad. These interactions included rallies and counter rallies, disincentives in domestic policy to discourage return, co-optation of students studying abroad with state funding, and even assassinations. I will take a closer look at a) these interactions, with special attention given to the 80’s before the Reagan bombing campaign b) the literature by expatriates, like political propaganda, poetry and fiction and c) the later attempts at reconciliation on the part of the regime, all to further explain the goals of the regime in spreading its unconventional nationalist project and the fragmentation of opposition groups in their resistance efforts. Furthermore, I place these pieces within the framework of the theory posited by Anna Baldinetti, citing the origins of Libyan nationalism within exile communities while the country was under occupation by Fascist Italy. I find that these opposition groups, despite being relatively weak and disorganized, were considered a grave threat by the regime. In responding to these perceived threats, the regime perpetuated the dilution and stagnation of the development of a Libyan nationalist identity. I conclude with remarks on the implications for the future cohesiveness of the Libyan people by connecting these findings with the persisting conflict in Libya today.

Even before officially taking office in June 1956, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser began a series of social and economic programs which threatened the autonomy and prosperity of urban middle-class Coptic Christians. In response, many emigrated to North America, Australia, and Europe. The Church followed its North American immigrants as early as 1954. Bishops and priests visited medical students in New York and New Jersey to serve their spiritual needs and supported the eventual creation of the Coptic Association of America in 1963. Transnational cooperation made possible the establishment of the first Coptic Orthodox parish on the continent in Toronto in 1964. In charting the settlement of this ethno-religious minority in Toronto, the aim of this paper will be twofold. First, I present a methodological framework to develop Orientalism as a discursive tool of historical analysis to study both western representations of the Orient and the liminal spaces occupied by Middle Eastern Christian immigrants in Canadian society. While Edward Said's Orientalism clarifies the legitimizing concepts informing a fixed binary of difference, it leaves little room for negotiation. As Joan Scott said of gender, understanding Orientalism as a useful category of historical analysis may offer historians a means to conceptualize perceived differences between East and West and extricate constant, yet contested, unequal relationships of power. Second, I apply this framework to a study of the significance of Coptic immigrants' refusal to be identified as "Arab." Analysis of institutional records, transnational correspondence between clerical and lay elites, and oral interviews with members of the earliest Coptic immigrant communities reveal the centrality of parish festivals and community outreach to immigrants' self-Orientalism. I argue that, Copts' active contestation of simplistic orientalist discourse - the rejection of the stigma of 'Arab-ness' and the sensationalization of an "authentic" Copto-Pharaonic heritage - supported their legitimate integration into Canadian multiculturalism.

Diasporic and immigrant writing from the Middle East and North Africa poses a challenge to the theoretical framework used today in diaspora and postcolonial studies. The field’s schematic emphasis on the nation-state and geographic movement from East to West -as an essential aspect of the experience of postcolonial migration- has fallen short to highlight the stateless forms of dwelling and travelling one finds in contemporary Anglophone-Arabic literature. Today Arab authors residing in the U.S. and Britain foster a migratory understanding of the postcolonial condition in which the homeland is no longer a fixed entity, but a “diasporic structure of feeling" that evolves with travel and stateless dwelling across regional and transnational borders. Throughout this paper I argue that the work of the British-Sudanese writer, Jamal Mahjoub, critiques the boundaries of postcolonial subjectivity and rather presents belonging as a “diasporic sentiment” that traverses the strictures of nation-states and the focus on geographic displacement to the West. In Travelling with Jinns, Mahjoub dismantles the binary relationship between home and homelessness and introduces “diaspora” as an empowering form of stateless belonging in the twenty first century. Mahjoub’s work proposes a new notion of migratory belonging that expands the conceptual and contextual boundaries of postcolonial studies, and further illustrates how the borderless articulations of diaspora are imagined in the work of Arab immigrant writers in Europe.