Legacies of Forced Migration: A Comparative-Historical Perspective

Abstract

Scholars and policy-makers have increasingly come to realize that there is a pressing need for more comparative analysis in the study of population movements. In order to better understand the implications of migration, we need to develop analytical tools that take into account the fact that the study of a given population’s movements can always be improved upon by noting similarities and differences with analogous patterns. To build an accurate account of a given population’s experience, we have to keep in mind that there is increasingly no such thing as an isolated experience, one that is disconnected from a broader world of transnational phenomena: physically, with ease of jet travel; culturally, with global media saturation; and juridicopolitically, with interconnected national migration regimes and international bodies in place to oversee migrant flow. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the reality of migration—one that cuts across these multiple lines—is the development of transnational and cross-cultural identities, particularly those of diasporic communities in which a sense of ethnocultural belonging deeply inflects more abstract or procedural senses of belonging, such as buying into a notion of democratic citizenship. When working as scholars to build the comparative perspective, we tend to think of the international (contrasting, say, the immigration policies of the European Union with those of the United States); the geographical (interrogating the North-South divide); the economic (noting the impacts of neoliberal policy on poorer states); and the socioanthropological (comparing the attitudes and values of a diaspora with those of the home community).