Description
How do diaspora organizations engage in transnational political claims-making within autocratic states in the Global South? Traditional scholarship tends to examine diaspora organizations’ decolonization efforts in the Global North, sidestepping the large-scale grassroots-level decolonization processes linked to diplomatic efforts within autocratic regimes in the Global South. Drawing on three Filipino diaspora organizations’ decade-long grassroots decolonization efforts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, I argue that diaspora organizations’ strategic weaponization of diplomatic recall contributes to decolonization by contesting the colonial-era power structures, racialized hierarchy, and labor exploitation that marginalize vulnerable diaspora communities. Despite embedded constraints within autocratic regimes, these diaspora organizations have deployed delegitimization, expulsion, and demotion of senior state officials as counter-hegemonic resistance to end colonial-era corruption within labor-export regimes. Methodologically, I employ semi-structured interviews with Filipino diaspora leaders, combined with process tracing, decade-long field observation, and secondary analysis of Filipino and Emirati newspapers. Ultimately, the study advances debates on global diaspora politics, decolonization, and autocracy by highlighting diaspora organizations’ counter-hegemonic grassroots mechanisms and processes to decolonize exploitative migration systems and infrastructures in the Global South.
