Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement

by Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff

Overview

In the first full-length scholarly study of the increasingly important phenomenon of digital diasporas, Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff examines how immigrants who still feel a connection to their country of origin use the internet. She argues that digital diasporas can ease security concerns in both the homeland and the host society, improve diaspora members' quality of life in the host society, and contribute to socio-economic development in the homeland. Drawing on case studies of nine digital diaspora organizations, Brinkerhoff's research supplies new empirical material regarding digital diasporas and their potential security and development impacts. She also explores their impact on identity negotiation, arguing that digital diasporas create communities and organizations that represent hybrid identities and encourage solidarity, identity, and material benefits among their members. The book also explores these communities' implications for policy and practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780511738302
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/02/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	813 KB

About the Author

Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff is an Associate Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She holds a Ph.D. in public administration from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and an MPA from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She consults for multilateral development banks, bilateral assistance agencies, NGOs, and foundations. Combining her research with this work, she published Partnership for International Development: Rhetoric or Results? (2002), as well as three co-edited journal issues and more than forty-five articles and book chapters on topics ranging from evaluation to NGOs, failed states, governance, and diasporas. She is the editor of Diasporas and Development: Exploring the Potential (2008). She also completed an edited volume for the Asia Development Bank on Converting Migration Drains into Gains: Harnessing the Resources of Overseas Professionals (2006), and she is the editor of the Lynne Rienner Publishers book series Diasporas in World Politics. She is the co-director and co-founder of GW's Diaspora Research Program, a multidisciplinary research program on diasporas, identity, policy, and development; she also co-founded the GW International NGO team and co-edited NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (2007).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Diasporas, identity, and information technology; 3. Keeping the dream alive; 4. Digital diasporas as cyber-communities; 5. Digital diasporas and conflict prevention; 6. Policy agendas, human rights, and national sovereignty; 7. Helping the homeland; 8. Digital diasporas: a new avenue for peace and prosperity?

Editorial Reviews

"...Brinkerhoff offers us the first thorough comparative study of diaspora groups on the Internet, allowing her to identify a number of important cross-cutting themes and findings...Brinkerhoff draws a number of important insights from her thorough analysis of online interactions, pointing out, for example, the ways in which members of religious minorities often persecuted in the homeland can, from the liberating position of diaspora and through the anonymity afforded by the Internet, openly claim an identity an identity previously denied to them (p. 65)."
Perspectives on Politics, Peter Mandaville, George Mason University

From the Publisher