Transnational lived citizenship: Practices of citizenship as political belonging among emerging diasporas in the Horn of Africa

This project examines how diaspora populations establish different forms of political belonging orientated towards their homeland, their current place of residence, and across a wider transnational social field.

It investigates how practices of citizenship among emerging diasporas constitute political belonging, to the homeland but also the hostland and the transnational social field. In a further step, the project investigates what forms of political engagement may emerge from such practices. The project seeks to re-conceptualise the notion of transnational lived citizenship by examining the multiple ways in which home-state, residence-state, communities, and diasporic actors interact in local urban spaces. In doing so, the project pays particular attention to the extent to which the nation-state remains or ceases to remain a decisive arena of aspired citizenship and political belonging, and how such belonging is created, performed and contested in everyday practices.

Geographically, the project will focus on the Horn of Africa as a case study region, and in doing so expand on understandings of the Horn as a laboratory of out-migration and (homeland) political engagement. In concrete, the project will focus on post-1991 Eritrean and Ethiopian diasporas residing in the wider region. In both settings, homeland state politics have been proactively involved with diasporas. The project builds on findings from the literature on established diasporas and makes an innovative new contribution to this literature through its distinct focus on emerging diasporas in key urban settings in the wider region.