Conceptual Framework

Abstract

This chapter begins by defining the main theoretical problem and continues by situating it within existing scholarly literature. The conceptual framework is developed by surveying and synthesizing works from political science, human geography, anthropology, sociology and political psychology. The interdisciplinary literature review provides meaning and substance to concepts relevant to my study; forms interlinking relationships between these concepts and identifies gaps where a theoretical contribution can be made. I begin by setting my study within the larger literature on return migration, by examining the “voluntariness” of voluntary return, the specifics of post-conflict return, reintegration strategies and the sustainability of return. The following section develops a substantive definition of the diaspora concept and the third section of the chapter discusses how emotions have been neglected in the social sciences by a dominance of the rational-choice paradigm, by treating emotions as merely personal reactions and thus leaving them outside of the ‘political’ and by overemphasizing the methodological challenges involved in the study of emotions. Scholarly literature on citizenship is presented in the fourth section of the chapter. Next, emotional/affective/intimate citizenship is discussed as the theoretical nexus between citizenship and emotions by looking at how scholars so far have established this connection, primarily through the concepts of home and belonging, elaborated in the next two sections of the chapter. The final section of the chapter concludes by identifying how resolving the central theoretical problem contributes to the existing literature(s).