Session 6(b): Policy

Session 6(b): Policy
Chair: Mihai Mindra

Harnessing the Power of the African Diaspora: Institutional and Policy Dynamics
Jack Mangala
College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan, USA

The past years have seen the formulation of a corpus of international, regional and national initiatives aimed at engaging the African diaspora for the continent’s development. These institutional and policy initiatives have emerged and must be understood in the context of the on-going global dialogue on migration and development, which has framed the diaspora as a key development agent and moved the migration–development nexus at the forefront of the international development agenda. The paper seeks to analyze these various initiatives and assess the significance, potential and limitations of the African diaspora as development and political agent. The paper is structured in two parts. The first part addresses the conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the profound dynamics and structural changes that define and affect diasporas’development and political agency. I argue that the dominant theoretical framework needs to be enriched by incorporating and addressing pressing questions of the political economy of Africa and its diaspora as well as contemporary social processes operating at an increasingly global scale. Against this background, the second part investigates major international (UN, EU/AU, Word Bank, OIM), regional (AU, NEPAD) and national (Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda, Mali and Sudan) institutional mechanisms and policy initiatives and orientations designed to promote a significant role of the African diaspora in the continent development. I argue that development is more than money and much needed technical expertise that the African diaspora can offer; and contend that remittance-centered approaches are bound to fail unless the African diaspora, in its various constituencies, takes full ownership of these various initiatives and inject a more holistic view of development. I conclude by discussing some policy implications of the study and offering a few orientations in the quest for the African diaspora’s power.

Immigration and Justice: Are Constraints Justifiable? A Global Luck Egalitarian Account
Orsolya Reich
Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

No abstract is presently available

Politics and the Making of the African Diaspora in the United States
Cassandra Veney
Gender and Women’s Studies Program and Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Africans and people of African descent have been migrating to the United States for centuries—both under voluntary and involuntary conditions and circumstances.  With new civil rights legislation, the country’s immigration laws were reformed to reflect that nation’s acceptance of people from countries outside of Europe.  Therefore, in the 1960s and 1970s, more people from the African diaspora came to the United States as immigrants, including thousands of women who traveled alone.  Beginning in the 1980s with a reform in its refugee laws, thousands of African refugees began to migrate to the country.  This paper will examine the role of institutions that demanded an increase in the number of African immigrants and refugees admitted to the country.  It will address the internal and external factors that made an increase in immigrants and refugees possible.
As more and more refugees and immigrants arrived from Africa and its diaspora, the paper will address what led to or prevented people from forming diaspora communities, networks, organizations, etc.  In other words, were there economic, political, social, and cultural institutions that they easily assimiltated into that made forming a disaporic community and identity unnecessary?  If this were not the case, the paper will address the various economic, social, and political factors that made forming a diasporic community necessary.  The paper will particularly examine the relationship between the African refugee and immigrant community and the African American community.
Finally, the paper will situate African refugees and immigrants and others from the diaspora within the context of pre and post-911 policies by examining various state and federal institutions that violated their human rights in a number of ways. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not the beginning of the government’s anti-foreign and anti-immigrant sentiments.  They began in the 1990s with several laws that merely institutionalized the negative perception of foreigners and heightened the public’s fear of non-citizens.

Download Draft Conference Paper –

Faith and Social capital: Exploring Religious Influence in the Indian Diaspora in Multicultural Australia
Sudheesh Bhasi
Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, Australia

This research paper examines the role of religious institutions in providing the impetus to promote levels of social capital that increase social opportunity and improve the quality of life in diasporic immigrant communities. The term “social capital” coined by L.J. Hanifan as early as 1920, refers to that which satisfies the “individual’s social needs and bears the intangible social potentialities conducive to the substantial improvement of living conditions of the community”. The research conducted as part of an ongoing doctoral study, examines first-generation Indian migrants settled in Sydney to explore the extent to which Hindu religious groups can provide degrees of social capital that may improve the immigrants’ ability to achieve better standards of living in their newly appropriated environments.
Drawing upon empirical ethnographic research among the Indian community in Sydney, the paper will explore ways in which values imparted through religious groups are appropriated by the immigrants in creating positive changes in their own lives, which in turn improve their social potentiality. Thus the study sheds light on the conditions under which religious groups can help promote social capital that generates higher levels of education, literacy, health, employment, and other public goods that increase social opportunity. Religious institutions are seen as structures that not only maintain the diasporic identity of the migrant, but also reproduce it in new ways, creating a hybrid identity that lies at the centre of the subjectivity of Indians in Australia. Finally, the research introduces alternative views of social development, which are opposed to its conceptualisation from a purely economical standpoint. To this extent, the paper draws upon Amartya Sen’s (1990) critique of utility-based evaluations of development, in favour of human development economics concerned with valuing the quality of life and the fulfilment of basic needs.