Return Migration and Nation Building in Africa

Reframing the Somali Diaspora

Adele Galipo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429957130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

Return migration has received growing levels of attention in both academic and policy circles in recent years, as the African diaspora's role in contributing to the development of their country of origin has become apparent. However, little is known about the lived experiences of those who come back, and even less about the ways in which their return shapes socio-political dynamics on the ground. This book aims to unpack the complexities of migrant transnational experiences as situated in global political and economic processes.

In particular, the book takes the case of the return of skilled and educated Somalis from Western Europe and North America, in an attempt to recast the idea of diaspora return and transnational ethnography in a more political light, and to show how these returnees are both subject to and generative of important political conditions that are transforming Somaliland society. Overall, the book captures the complexities of the migrant's position, showing that "return" is rarely permanent, and that success comes from perpetuating the transnational stance.

This book will appeal to scholars of migration, diaspora, development and African studies, as well as to those interested in the Somali case specifically, the third biggest community of refugees in the world.

1 Introduction

This book is both an exploration of the phenomenon of diaspora return and an analysis of dynamics of social transformations in central Somaliland. The link between this region of the world and the issue of migration is interesting not only because Somalis are the third biggest community of refugees in the world by their number after Afghans and Syrians (UNHCR 2014) but also because the region has become the playground of a number of actors with whom migrants interact and together influence the political, social and economic dynamics on the ground. What interests me most is to look at how people who have been affected by displacement and migration take part in this network of power relationships that incorporates different actors with different objectives, and how all these players influence the political and social changes that the region is experiencing. Yet, while numerous studies exist about the involvement of migrants into the affairs of their homelands, to explain the intersections of return and socio-political changes still requires further scrutiny. How is return negotiated? What are the factors which enable some people to return and get involved? Concretely, what does it mean to be back? Who are these returnees? How do some of them appear as agents for change in specific social and institutional circumstances at home, whereas others do not? How do they interact with other actors who populate the local society? What discourses and values do they mobilise? What are the dynamics behind the process of return and how it relates to nation-state formation? These and similar questions require further consideration, as they provide a fine-grained understanding of current global political developments. Return migration has received growing levels of attention in both academic and policy circles in recent years, as the African diaspora’s role in contributing to the development of their country of origin has become apparent. However, little is known about the lived experiences of those who come back, and even less about the ways in which their return shapes socio-political dynamics on the ground. This book aims to unpack the complexities of migrant transnational experiences as situated in global political and economic processes. Taking the case of the return of skilled and educated Somalis from Western Europe and North America, it captures the complexities of the migrant’s position, showing that “return” is rarely permanent, and that success comes from perpetuating the transnational stance.

Setting the debate: diaspora return

The notion of diaspora is of great relevance in this book and its practice is key to understand both the post-conflict reconstruction process and the current political developments in the north-west part of the Somali region. Yet, definitions and understandings of diaspora are complex and various. In this regard, Tötölyan indicates both the changing nature of old diasporas and the creation of new ones in an era of globalisation, and the spreading of its semantic domain. As he clearly writes, “the term that once described Jewish, Greek and Armenia dispersion now shares meanings with larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community … diasporas have become the exemplary communities of the transnational moment” (1991: 4). With these few lines, Tötölyan summarises the complexity of the concept of diaspora and outlines the difficulty of finding a clear definition. Undoubtedly, the conceptual complication of diaspora has to do with other terms to which it relates to, i.e. transnationalism, migration, refugee, exile, globalisation, nation, ethnicity. And while in this work I focus on successful Somali diasporas who have returned to central Somaliland voluntarily, the stories of my interlocutors are strictly interlinked with all these terms, sometimes reifying these very concepts, others contesting and reshaping their meaning. This book walks away from both definitions and typologies of diasporas which are centred on essentialist notions of “homeland” and “ethnic/religious community” (Safran 1991; Cohen 1997). Instead, it walks in the footsteps of those scholars who have emphasised the hybrid nature and identity of diasporic communities (Hall 1990; Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1994) and those who have highlighted the complex processes of political mobilisation (Werbner 2002; Brubaker 2005; Kleist 2007). In particular, I follow Brubaker’s suggestion to

think of diaspora not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim, as a category of practice … used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilise energies, to appeal to loyalties. It is often a category with a strong normative change. It does not so much describe the world as seek to remake it. (2005: 12)

Acting against all forms of essentialism, and pushing the debate further, Brubaker (2005) calls into question the reality of communities perceived as substances and distinct entities, and puts forward an understanding of the processes that such categorisation entail. In this way, he pushes us to explore the claims and stances that are made in the name of diaspora and so he highlights the political dimension of the concept. In line with Brubaker, in this book diaspora is understood as a category of practice, and so as a political label. This understanding seems more appropriate to analyse the concrete practices and activities that Somalis perform to influence the socio-political transformations in central Somaliland, as those who engage back articulate their involvement in diasporic terms, thus making use of diaspora as a label and category of mobilisation.

One cannot make sense of this without linking these practices to the resurgence in academic and policy debates of the migration-development nexus. Despite this lexical expression may seem relatively new, the genealogy of the alleged connection between migration and development is quite old. As de Haas (2008) suggests, it can be traced back to the end of the Second World War, with optimistic and pessimistic views on the subject swinging back and forth like a pendulum over the years. Such divergent views on the link between migration and development have been the result of significant paradigm shifts occurred within the social sciences. In fact, if promoters of the modernisation theory in the early 1960s saw migration as a factor of potential development for migrants’ countries of origin in terms of a new equilibrium between capital and labour (Lewis 1954), during much of the 1970s and 1980s supporters of the dependency theory saw migration as a factor of underdevelopment for the societies of origin due to an increase in loss of skilled labour (Papademetriou 1985). In the 1990s, neoclassical economic theories have come back to more positive assumptions about migration as a resource for development. It is within this framework that current understandings of migration-development policies might be situated. In recent years, international donors and organisations are increasingly considering diasporas as potential partners in development activities vis-à-vis their homelands. At the European level, this is well attested by the Commission Communication on the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (2011), which recognised that “at both EU and Member State level, the contribution of diaspora organisations to development policy and practice are increasingly valued”.¹ Within the European context, this has resulted in the creation of a plurality of migrant organisations that have to “adhere to the principles of impartiality, neutrality and unity” (Horst 2013: 228), creating a framework for certain groups to act in the name of specific diasporas. Nieswand (2009), for instance, shows how Ghanaian migrant associations in receiving countries act as representatives of the Ghanaian “diaspora”, thus making some people in a privileged position to speak in the name of a supposed homogeneous collectivity. At the same time, many sending countries have also adopted and adapted to the diaspora policy language of international bodies by creating specific institutions that reach out to their diaspora and include migrants within their national policies. To this end, many African countries like Ghana, Morocco, Kenya, Cape Verde and Ivory Coast have also introduced double citizenship.

The enthusiasm about the beneficial impact of migration for development policies has been put into perspective and examined by some authors who critically highlight the political usage of the term diaspora within the migration-development debate and explore how this analytical category circulates across and among international donors and migrants themselves as a means of self-identification, political position and identity category, shedding light on the politicisation of diasporas (Turner and Kleist 2013; Horst 2013; Marabello 2013; Bernal 2013; Turner 2013; Kleist 2013).² These scholars show how the privileged position of diasporas as supposed experts of their countries of origin – by knowing the language, the culture and the tradition – and their familiarity with Western rationalities make them act as cultural and development brokers by staging themselves and being staged by others as agents of change. This recent critical turn shows how discourses about diaspora and development are translated and enacted by migrant organisations in a way that allow them to acquire power and legitimation in both contexts of residence and origin. As I illustrate in this book, this holds true also in the context of central Somaliland as those who fit within the criteria established by international organisations perceive themselves and are perceived by others as actors of change.

While these authors have been busy in disentangling the assumptions behind the migration-development nexus, other academic contributions that examine the relationships that diasporas have towards their homeland have often revolved around the concept of long-distance nationalism (Anderson 1992). For Anderson, what make long-distance nationalism possible are mass migration and mass communications that allow migrants to retain their sense of “Old World” identity and get involved in the political affairs of their homelands. In Anderson words, “the political participation of the long-distance nationalist is directed towards an imagined heimat in which he does not intend to live, where he pays no taxes, where he cannot be arrested, where he will not be brought before the courts and where he does not vote: in effect, a politics without responsibility or accountability” (Anderson 1992: 11). Anderson’s notion of long-distance nationalism has a rather negative connotation and is often used by scholars who deal with conflict-generated diasporas (Adamson 2002; Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Lyons 2004; Chalk 2008). Within this framework, diasporas are seen as actors who might fuel conflict and are reluctant to negotiate peace. Yet, the nature of diasporic politics is complex and very context-specific. In his book Long-distance nationalism: Diasporas, Homelands and Identities, a comparative, ethnographic study of Slovenian and Croatian diasporas in Australia, Skrbiš (1999) conceptualises long-distance nationalism as a process which is inextricably linked to the conditions of a modern global and transnational environment. To use Skrbiš words, “it is that type of nationalism which crosses neighbouring states and/or continents” (1999: 6). In contrast to Anderson, and highlighting the transnational aspect pointed by Skrbiš, Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001) also analyse practices of long-distance nationalism among Haitians. In Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home, the authors provide an analysis of the Haitian experience of migration to the United States. Through an ethnographic account of the relations between Haitians in Haiti and those living abroad, Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001) unfold the transnational social networks in which migrants are embedded. They show how these people continue to engage in the economic, political and social life of their homeland even if they settle far away from it, thus practising long-distance nationalism on daily bases through travels, donations, resources, projects and various activities that aim to rebuild Haiti. Participants in transnational politics are not merely immigrants; they are transmigrants who, according to Nina Glick Schiller and her colleagues, are “immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state” (Glick Shiller et al. 1995: 48).

The issue of multiple relationships and ties that migrants establish across nation-states has been at the core of the now well-established paradigm of transnationalism which, since the early 1990s, has become the main research approach in the study of migration, challenging important analytical concepts used so far in the analysis of people movements (Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Goldring 1998; Faist 2000; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). In the words of Basch and her colleagues, transnationalism is defined as:

The process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasise that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders … an essential element is the multiplicity of involvements that transmigrants sustain in both home and host societies. (Basch, Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1994: 6)

Transnationalism has provided essential new insights into contemporary forms of migration, raising general conceptual issues about ways of understanding migrants’ daily lives across national borders (Rouse 1991; Goldring 1996). To use the words of Wimmer and Glick Schiller “transnationalism seems to better analyse and discuss diasporic identities and long-distance nationalism because we have changed the lens through which we perceive the world” (2003: 596). In fact, transnational scholars share the assumption that migrants remain strongly influenced by their continuing ties to their home country and by social networks that stretch across national borders. They see migrants’ cross-border ties as a factor in contemporary migration, arguing that it is indispensable to empirically assess the strength, influence and impact of these ties that appear to be proliferating rapidly within the context of globalisation. A transnational lens allows to take into account the complexity of migrants lives as situated within multi-layered social fields and whose transnational activities mutually interact and transform one another (Levitt et al. 2003: 567–8). So far, scholars of transnationalism have stressed the importance of locating migration within transnational processes in terms of global economic connections and the formation of transnational migratory networks. Within anthropology, the contribution of transnational studies has mainly consisted in moving away from a methodological nationalism in the study of migration by focusing on people on the move and on border-crossing analysis. This process has entailed to rethink notions of culture in the light of global flows and modes of deterritorialisation (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996; Olwig and Hastrup 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Thus, anthropological literature on migration has called into question the very object and method of the discipline of anthropology itself by conceiving of the relationship between social-cultural groups and territories as open, in a way that goes beyond the assumption of sedentariness (Monsutti 2010: 108). In this order of things, the field of migration studies, in connection with the study of transnationalism and globalisation, has experienced a proliferation of theoretical conceptions that moved away from the vision of rootedness in the world. The liberalisation of global economies, the global economic integration, the increasing political, economic and social interdependence among nation-states have provided new configurations for international migration movements. Yet, as Boris Nieswand (2011) makes it clear, the simultaneous maintenance of multiple belongings across nation-states may have an impact on the status of a single individual. In his analysis of status inconsistency, Nieswand acknowledges how migrants who continue to engage in their homeland while leaving abroad are trapped in what he defines as the “status paradox of migration”. This paradox occurs when migrants are simultaneously members of two classes – usually a lower class in the receiving country and a higher class in the sending country (2011: 3; 124; 163). Based on his own observ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. “A man who has not travelled has no eyes”: the travel of history, histories of travel
• 3. The (trans)local organisation of power
• 4. “You will never get rid of what you were born with”: returning qurbajoog
• 5. Making culture, building a nation: Somali cultural festivals as laboratories of national-cultural identity
• 6. Drinking tea at the Maan-soor Hotel, Hargeysa
• 7. Towards trans-transnationalism
• Appendices
• Index