| Summary/Abstract |
Diaspora politics is of growing interest to international relations (IR), yet theorizing about sending states’ engagement of diasporas in different global contexts has been minimal. Central to this article is the question: how do challenges to postconflict statehood shape a sending state's diaspora engagement? I provide a fresh sociospatial perspective on “diaspora positionality,” the power diaspora political agents amass or are perceived to amass from their linkages to different global contexts, which speaks to utilitarian, constructivist, and governance rationales and to emerging IR relational and positional theories. This power is relative to that of other actors in a transnational social field, in which sending states and diasporas operate globally: it is sociospatial, defined by social relationships among diasporas across the globe and by their linkages to specific spatial contexts. I argue that postconflict states view the positional empowerment of diasporas in distant locations as an asset to their statebuilding. Diasporas are not controlled but involved in extraterritorial processes through partially rationalized, partially implicit governance practices. The article focuses on Kosovo as a postconflict de facto state and brings evidence from extensive multisited fieldwork in Kosovo in 2013, and the UK, United States, Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland in 2009–17.
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