Migration and Transnational Governance: Middle East Cases And Challenges’

Mashriq & Mahjar 5, no 1. (2018), 1–10 ISSN 2169-4435 Laurie A. Brand is the Robert Grandford Wright Professor of International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. Email: brand@usc.edu Dr. Tamirace Fakhoury is Associate Professor in Political Sciences and International Affairs in the Department of Social Sciences, and Associate Director of the Institute of Social Justice and Conflict Resolution (ISJCR). Email: tamirace.fakhoury@lau.edu.lb Laurie A. Brand and Tamirace Fakhoury MIGRATION AND TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE: MIDDLE EAST CASES AND CHALLENGES1 In early March 2017, a feud broke out between the Turkish and German governments. The source was a critical upcoming referendum in Turkey aimed at giving increased powers to the President Recep Tayyib Erdoğan. Hosting the world’s largest Turkish diaspora community of an estimated five million, Germany was a natural site for rallies of Erdoğan supporters in favor of a ‘yes’ vote on the referendum. When such gatherings scheduled for the first weekend in March in Cologne and Gaggenau were cancelled by the authorities for what were characterized as security concerns, Erdoğan further exacerbated the strained bilateral relationship by comparing such practices to those of the Nazi period. The furor over this episode had not yet calmed down the following week, when Dutch authorities prevented the Turkish Foreign Minister from flying to Rotterdam for a rally and the Minister of the Family and Social Policy from holding a similar meeting in Hamburg. While it may still appear strange to some that foreign political figures would travel to diaspora communities to encourage support for a referendum or election in the sending state—indeed, Turks were first allowed to exercise the right to vote from abroad only in the 2014 presidential elections—the right to cast a ballot from outside the homeland and the attendant strategies of sending-state politicians to campaign beyond the borders of their national territory have become increasingly common around the world. They constitute examples, in this case particularly high-profile ones, of the phenomenon of transnational governance explored in this special issue. 2 Laurie A. Brand and Tamirace Fakhoury The field of transnationalism, which was, in effect, launched by the now-classic 1994 Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc work Nations Unbound,2 began as a deliberate departure from the thenexisting literature on migration which was underpinned at most levels of analysis by a clear dichotomy between the sending and receiving state. While return migration was certainly studied, it was still largely within a framework which understood migratory movement as definitive in terms of virtually all relationships, save perhaps nostalgia. With the exception of work on remittances, once left, the sending state was either ignored or deemed to have little importance in understanding the political, social, and cultural futures of the migrants. Thus the field of transnationalism began with an implicit antistate bias: with so much work shaped by what is now called methodological nationalism—the conception of social phenomena around or within the contours of the territorial boundaries of the nation state—scholars in this emerging area of study self-consciously eschewed not only the state level of analysis, but the state itself. Indeed, at the same time that neoliberal economics’ assault on the state was leading to a celebration of the virtues of non-governmental organizations, one of the themes of the transnationalism literature was that the e/im/migrants were heroic transgressors of established territorial boundaries. Instead of being constrained by lines drawn and policed by often-coercive states, these peoples’ lives and movements were seen as subverting the state system, implying a kind of liberation from the demands and oppression of governments. By embodying forms and levels of identity, which they maintained or adapted as their hypothesized transnational existence required, they were at times referred to as “deterritorialized nations.” Like all fields, the transnationalism literature has grown and developed greater nuance and sophistication with the passage of time. While there is no question that its initial successes in breaking down the conceptual barrier between sending and receiving states were, and have been, seminal to a better understanding of migrants’ experiences, it is also the case that the vaunted liberation from...