Description
Global diaspora populations are increasingly the explicit target of governance processes that seek to curtail their transnational political activities. In the burgeoning literature on transnational repression, such governance is predominantly attributed to the extraterritorial practices of authoritarian home states or other actors in the diaspora sending state. This leaves the broader global and local politics of transnational repression unaddressed, and does not account for variation in how transnational repression is (en)countered by liberal host-states. This paper suggests that, in order to fully understand the contemporary politics of diaspora governance - including through transnational repression - we have to understand not only the diaspora-homeland relationship but attend to the global and imperial conditions of possibility of this governance.
Drawing on multi-method research, and utilising a practice-analytical lens that centres repressive and securitizing governance experienced by the Tamil diaspora community in the UK (and globally), this paper argues that - beside homeland politics - hoststate interests in the domestic and international sphere are key to understanding how contemporary diaspora repression plays out. Furthermore, the paper shows that many of the repressive practices aimed at the UK-based Tamil community, from overpolicing to the creation of suspect communities, are fundamentally rooted in - if not direct continuations of - British colonial governance. Diaspora repression therefore relies on and is made possible by entanglements between home and host-state, as well as between past and present. Fundamentally, the paper advances debates on connected sociologies and global histories on how to study the present with the past, both conceptually and empirically.
