Focusing on the return of the diasporic second generation to Greece, primarily in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Counter-Diaspora examines migration experiences of Greek-Americans and Greek-Germans growing up in the Greek diasporic setting, motivations for the counter-diasporic return, and evolving notions of the homeland.

This book examines return mobilities to and from ancestral homelands of the second generation and beyond. It presents cutting-edge empirical research framed within the mobilities, transnational and return migration/diaspora paradigms on a trans/local and global scale. The book is unique in presenting not only a variety of return movements, including short-term visits and longer-term return migrations, but also circulatory movements within transnational social fields while engaging with notions of ‘home’, belonging, identity and generation. The individual contributions range widely over different ethnic, national, regional and global settings, including Europe, North America, the Caribbean, the Gulf and Africa. The result is a remapping of the conceptualisation of ‘diaspora’ and of the role of successive generations in the diasporic experience, as well as a nuancing of the concepts of return migration and transnationalism by their extension to the second and subsequent generations of ‘immigrants’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.

In 2014, the declaration of the Islamic State caliphate was hailed as a major victory by the global jihadist movement. But it was short-lived. Three years on, the caliphate was destroyed, leaving its surviving fighters – many of whom were foreign recruits – to retreat and scatter across the globe. So what happens now? Is this the beginning of the end of IS? Or can it adapt and regroup after the physical fall of the caliphate? In this timely analysis, terrorism expert Colin P. Clarke takes stock of IS – its roots, its evolution, and its monumental setbacks – to assess the road ahead. The caliphate, he argues, was an anomaly. The future of the global jihadist movement will look very much like its past – with peripatetic and divided groups of militants dispersing to new battlefields, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, where they will join existing civil wars, establish safe havens and sanctuaries, and seek ways of conducting spectacular attacks in the West that inspire new followers. In this fragmented and atomized form, Clarke cautions, IS could become even more dangerous and challenging for counterterrorism forces, as its splinter groups threaten renewed and heightened violence across the globe.

This collection focuses fresh attention on the relationships between "homeland" and "diaspora" communities in today's world. Based on in-depth anthropological studies by leading scholars in the field, the book highlights the changing character of homeland-diaspora ties. Homelands and Diasporas offers new understandings of the issues that these communities face and explores the roots of their fascinating, yet sometimes paradoxical, interactions. The book provides a keen look at how "homeland" and "diaspora" appear in the lives of both Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians and also explores how these issues influence Pakistanis who make their home in England, Armenians in Cyprus and England, Cambodians in France, and African-Americans in Israel. The critical views advanced in this collection should lead to a reorientation in diaspora studies and to a better understanding of the often contradictory changes in the relationships between people whose lives are led both "at home and away."

What happens to a country when its skilled workers emigrate? The first book to examine the complex economic, social, and political effects of emigration on India, Diaspora, Development, and Democracy provides a conceptual framework for understanding the repercussions of international migration on migrants' home countries. Devesh Kapur finds that migration has influenced India far beyond a simplistic "brain drain"--migration's impact greatly depends on who leaves and why. The book offers new methods and empirical evidence for measuring these traits and shows how data about these characteristics link to specific outcomes. For instance, the positive selection of Indian migrants through education has strengthened India's democracy by creating a political space for previously excluded social groups. Because older Indian elites have an exit option, they are less likely to resist the loss of political power at home. Education and training abroad has played an important role in facilitating the flow of expertise to India, integrating the country into the world economy, positively shaping how India is perceived, and changing traditional conceptions of citizenship. The book highlights a paradox--while international migration is a cause and consequence of globalization, its effects on countries of origin depend largely on factors internal to those countries. A rich portrait of the Indian migrant community, Diaspora, Development, and Democracy explores the complex political and economic consequences of migration for the countries migrants leave behind.

Diasporic Philosophy and Counter-Education addresses the challenges inflicted by the celebrated "new progressivism". It confronts the current omnipotent progressive anti-humanistic fire and its triumphant anti-Western redemptive crusade at all levels and dimensions of life under the post-metaphysical sky. In this book Diasporic counter-education does not surrender to the celebrated temptations of new-age nomadism as an alternative to the postmodern pleasure-machine's promise. It attempts to reach beyond the total war against the Jewish spirit and its manifestation in Western oppressive identity. It refuses any version of the continuum, "radical" or "conservative" self-indulgence, as well as current nihilist-pragmatic quests for self-forgetfulness. Diasporic awakening is a potentially universal and enduring erotic art of a never-to-be-concluded-self-constitution and re-positioning. The aim of this book is for it to become part of a new beginning in the face of the new global culture of mega-speeds, the exile of the humanist killer of God, the deconstruction of pre-conditions for transcendence and the growing probability of bringing to an End of all life on earth. This book seeks to become a waking call for improvisational co-poiesis; a counter-education that will groom us to become more courageous in responding to the invitation of hope, making humankind richer in the realization of our response-ability to Love of Life.

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta. Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision — an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged. In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.

Felipe Smith is an associate professor of English at Tulane University and the author of American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black Literary Renaissance. "--Book jacket.

Analyzing the role and impact of Diaspora Organizations (DOs) in International Relations (IR), this interdisciplinary volume provides empirical accounts of their work across Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. Over the last three decades, DOs have increased in number, spread to new regions, and addressed an ever-widening array of global problems, yet they have not received sufficient attention in IR in spite of the inter- and transnational nature of their involvements. Contributions explore important topics such as: The role of DOs in cooperation and conflict and in change and stability; DOs as transnational organizations and their degree of autonomy and power within the networks in which they operate; and The changing roles of DOs vis-à-vis states, regimes, and international organizations, when dealing with issues as diverse as peace, conflict, migration, integration, development, humanitarian action, human rights, religion, and economic growth. Demonstrating how IR can benefit from a stronger focus on DOs, this book will also help other disciplines gain insights into DOs and will prove useful to those in the fields of international relations, sociology, geography and anthropology.

Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth—that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on the work of Jose Muñoz, Ellis connects queerness' utopian potential with diasporic aesthetics. Occupying the territory of the soul, being neither here nor there, creates in diasporic subjects feelings of loss, desire, and a sensation of a pull from elsewhere. Ellis locates these phenomena in the works of C.L.R. James, the testy encounter between George Lamming and James Baldwin at the 1956 Congress of Negro Artists and Writers in Paris, the elusiveness of the queer diasporic subject in Andrew Salkey's novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, and the trope of spirit possession in Nathaniel Mackey's writing and Burning Spear's reggae. Ellis' use of queer and affect theory shows how geographies claim diasporic subjects in ways that nationalist or masculinist tropes can never fully capture. Diaspora, Ellis concludes, is best understood as a mode of feeling and belonging, one fundamentally shaped by the experience of loss.