August 27, 2010

14.00-16.00

CRRC-Armenia

52, Abovyan Street
3rd floor, room 305
Yerevan, Armenia




Over the last several decades, a growing number of contemporary and historical sending states have developed policies to engage their diasporas in the politics and economy of the homeland. In Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the collapse of communism presented a unique opportunity for new governments to reconfigure relations with their diasporas and overcome the antagonism that had hitherto marred state-diaspora relations. This talk addresses the varying approaches to engaging the diaspora in post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav Armenia, Croatia, and Serbia. Specifically, I focus on citizenship policies, extraterritorial voting, parliamentary representation, and the creation of diaspora bureaucracies -- policies that are often used by sending states to deepen emigrants' political ties to their country of perceived origin. These three postcommunist countries simultaneously grappled with war, independence, state-building, and economic collapse, and thus one might expect to find strong policies to engage the diaspora. In fact, governments in these three states showed varied willingness to deepen state-diaspora ties. This talk assesses the sources of this variation.



Sarah Garding is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation looks at the policies of post-Soviet Armenia and post-Yugoslav Croatia and Serbia towards diaspora populations, and the participation of the latter in homeland political affairs in the wake of independence. She carried out the research for this project in Croatia and Serbia during 2009-2010 as an IREX fellow, and is currently in Yerevan as a fellow with the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus.

This talk is co-sponsored by the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC) and the Caucasus Research Resource Center (CRRC). For more information, please visit http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146138098747342