Social remittances and the changing transnational political landscape

Abstract

International audienceThe term " social remittances " was coined over fifteen years ago to capture the notion that, in addition to money, migration also entails the circulation of ideas, practices, skills, identities, and social capital also circulate between sending and receiving communities. The articles in this special issue, which are primarily about migration and politics, drive forward research on social remittances by examining understudied areas such as Poland, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Tunisia, and Senegal. They elucidate transnational politics by showing how emigrants influence social protests, elections, and calls for greater transparency or reform. They bring to light the social underpinnings of social and economic remittance exchanges and the ways in which material constraints shape social remittance circulation. Finally by bringing discussions of the circulation of people and money into conversation with discussions about the circulation of culture and objects, they pave the way toward a better understanding of how objects and subjects, structures and agents, although ontologically distinct, maintain a reciprocal relationship of co-production

Suppressing transnationalism: bringing constraints into the study of transnational political action

“…Over the past four decades, increasing global mobility coupled with technological advances have fueled international migration and cross-national connectivity between immigrants' places of origin and settlement (Boccagni, Lafleur, & Levitt, 2015;Chaudhary, 2018b;Engbersen, Bakker, Erdal, & Bilgili, 2014;Lacroix et al, 2016). This "simultaneity" (Levitt & Schiller, 2004) has enabled immigrants to maintain a variety of economic, social, and political ties with their origin societies.…”

“…TPA may also come from the ground up in cases where diaspora communities seek to foster development and social change in their home countries from afar. Indeed, research on programs of "co-development" find that receiving and origin country governments can often work together to foster TPA, social remittances, and other forms of transnational engagement (Chaudhary, 2018a;Godin et al, 2015;Lacroix, Levitt, & Vari-Lavoisier, 2016;Levitt, 1998).…”

Migration patterns and emigrants’ transnational activities: comparative findings from two migrant origin areas in Ethiopia

“…The social space of "illegality" is an erasure of legal personhood, − a space of forced invisibility, exclusion, subjugation, and repression that "materialises around [the undocumented] wherever they go" (Coutin, 2000, p. 30;De Genova, 2002). Some scholars showed how having or lacking legal status affects immigrants' integration, thereby, their transnational engagement, not just the economic dimensions, but also the socio-cultural and political (Castañeda, Morales, & Ochoa, 2014;Lacroix et al, 2016).…”

“…There exists a growing volume of literature (Button & Vega, 2008;Glick Schiller, Basch, & Blanc, 1992;Lacroix, Levitt, & Vari-Lavoisier, 2016;Massey et al, 1999;Vertovec, 2004) providing an important insight into the complex dynamics of immigrants' transnational engagement. Most of these studies tend to compare migrant populations who originated from different countries but currently residing in the same host society.…”

Blockchain Technologies and Remittances: From Financial Inclusion to Correspondent Banking

“…In sum, the existing literature on remittances has productively unpacked the "point of sale" of remittances (Maurer et al, 2013), their affective economies (Hudson, 2015, p. 246), their cultural content (Carling, 2014;Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou, 2017), and the motives of senders and of recipients (Levitt, 1998;Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, 2011;Lacroix et al, 2016;Vari-Lavoisier, 2016). More broadly, it has also pointed toward the place of remittances and digital payments in the business of poverty capital, or what Maurer (2015a) aptly terms "poverty payment."…”