What Is a Diaspora? A Population Scattered and Still Connected

The term is Greek, meaning scattering, and was used first of the dispersal of Jewish communities, initially after the Babylonian exile and then far more extensively after the destruction of the Second Temple, and for a long time it referred to that case specifically along with a small number of comparable ones. Academic use broadened considerably from the late twentieth century, and the definitions proposed by scholars including William Safran and Robin Cohen generally require several features: dispersal from an original centre to two or more places, a collective memory or myth about that homeland, a belief that the group is not fully accepted in the host society, an idealised relationship to the homeland including some commitment to its restoration or maintenance, and a group consciousness sustained across time. Not every dispersed population meets those criteria, and the broadening of the term to cover almost any migrant community is a common criticism, on the grounds that a word covering everything describes nothing.

Cohen grouped diasporas by the circumstances of dispersal, and the categories remain useful:

• •Victim diasporas, formed by catastrophe and forced expulsion, including the Jewish, Armenian, African and Palestinian cases, where the founding event is central to the identity
• •Labour diasporas, formed by movement for work, including Indian indentured labour across the British empire and Turkish migration to Germany
• •Imperial diasporas, formed by settlers moving out from a metropolitan centre
• •Trade diasporas, formed by merchant networks maintaining links across long distances, including the Lebanese, Chinese and Armenian commercial networks
• •Cultural or deterritorialised diasporas, where identity is sustained without a clearly defined territorial homeland
• •Most real cases combine several of these, and the same population can experience different causes in different generations

Persistence across generations requires active maintenance, and the mechanisms are identifiable. Religious institutions frequently provide the organisational backbone, since a congregation supplies a reason to gather regularly. Language schools, supplementary education and media in the community language transmit what daily life otherwise erodes. Marriage patterns, endogamous in many diasporas at least initially, reproduce the community. Remittances and investment create continuing material relationships with the place of origin. Return visits, which have become far easier and cheaper, sustain personal connection in a way earlier diasporas could not manage. Hostility from the host society ironically strengthens cohesion by making the alternative unavailable, which is one reason the scholarly definitions include the belief that the group is not fully accepted. Digital communication has changed the dynamics substantially, allowing dispersed communities to sustain dense contact and shared media in real time, which some scholars argue is producing a genuinely different kind of connection from the letter-based diasporas of the past.

Diasporas have political and economic weight disproportionate to their numbers. Remittances flow through them and exceed development aid globally. Diaspora investment, tourism and business networks connect economies, and trade between two countries is measurably higher where a substantial diaspora links them. Politically, diasporas lobby host governments on homeland issues, fund political movements and occasionally armed ones, and participate in homeland elections where external voting is permitted, which has become common. That influence is sometimes decisive and is frequently contested, since a community abroad may hold more uncompromising positions than people living with the consequences, a pattern noted in several conflicts. Homeland states increasingly engage deliberately, creating ministries for diaspora affairs, offering dual nationality and identity cards, and courting investment, which converts an emigrant population from a loss into an asset. The reverse relationship matters too, since second and third generations frequently construct an identity from a homeland they have never lived in.

A diaspora is a dispersed population that keeps a collective identity and a relationship to a homeland across generations, which is what separates it from migration where descendants assimilate. Scholarly definitions require dispersal to several places, a homeland memory, incomplete acceptance in the host society and sustained group consciousness. Cases are grouped by cause into victim, labour, imperial, trade and cultural diasporas. Religious institutions, language transmission, remittances and return visits maintain them.