In this article I suggest analysing the formation of diaspora communities as an instance of mobilization processes thereby countering essentialist concepts of diaspora that reify notions of belonging and the‘roots’of migrants in places of origin. Taking the imagination of a transnational community and a shared identity as defining characteristics of diaspora and drawing on constructivist concepts of identity, I argue that the formation of diaspora is not a‘natural’consequence of migration but that specific processes of mobilization have to take place for a diaspora to emerge. I propose that concepts developed in social movement theory can be applied to the study of diaspora communities and suggest a comparative framework for the analysis of the formation of diaspora through mobilization. Empirical material to substantiate this approach is mainly drawn from the Alevi diaspora in Germany but also from South Asian diasporas.

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When was "the postcolonial"? This apparently simple question contains a number of difficulties relating to concepts, epistemology, and temporality (Hall 1996). These problems emerge from the fact that systems of colonization inscribe their marks so deeply upon the societies of both the colonized and the colonizers that they cannot simply be eradicated by the political act of declaring independence. Even after independence, such societies remain heavily under the influence of the "gravity," to use Edward Said's term, of colonial history (1994, 367). Arguably, decolonization begins before independence with freedom struggles against colonial hegemony and domination. And, it certainly continues after colonization has formally ended, as much time is needed to free social institutions and discourses from often subtle kinds of determination by the colonizing power-if that can ever be achieved. There is no simple dichotomy of the colonial and the postcolonial. Problems of periodization proliferate if "postcolonial" is taken to label a global process of transition. Yet when we take dates of independence not as "definite" but as "decisive" points of transition

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