When people think of diaspora populations, their first thought tends to be of refugee populations, the migrant crisis, and communities fleeing conflict as a result of what’s reported in the media. However, this is only part of the story. Often these scattered populations across the globe continue to have an enormous impact on their homelands.

The European Research Council has sponsored 5 years of extensive research and close to 500 first-hand interviews among Kosovo, Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Kurdish, Iraqi and Palestinian diasporas, and a large-scale survey. These displaced, real, diverse people, living in European countries from the UK, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and France give us a unique insight into the homelands from which they originate.

This resourceful, entrepreneurial section of the population are important actors in the conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction processes of their homelands, be that Iraq, Palestine, Bosnia or Armenia.
Conflict-generated diasporas can have a huge influence on war and peace, and it is often something that is under reported in the media.

Dr. Maria Koinova, Principal Investigator for the ERC Project implemented at Warwick University, and her team will present their paper “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty”, and be joined by journalists to discuss the wider importance of their work and how it can influence public policy today.

For more information on the project, visit their website here.

Chair

Chris Morris – BBC Correspondent

Morris regularly contributes to BBC News, Today and From Our Own Correspondent, and is the author of the 2005 Granta publication The New Turkey. He was BBC Turkey Correspondent from 1997-2001 based first in Ankara and later opening the BBC’s new bureau in Istanbul covering the 1999 İzmit earthquake and the arrest and trial of the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan. From 2001-2005 Morris was the BBC Europe Correspondent based in Brussels covering the European Union, the proposed European constitution, and other European stories.

Speakers

Dr Maria Koinova – Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty”

Before joining Warwick University in 2012, Dr. Maria Koinova held research fellowships and visiting scholar positions at Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., the European University Institute, and Uppsala University, among other academic institutions. Koinova is the author of Ethnonationalist Conflict in Postcommunist States. Since 2006 Koinova has worked on topics related to diasporas, conflicts, post-conflict reconstruction and democratization, and has conducted multi-sited fieldwork among the Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Croatian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Serbian, and Ukrainian diasporas in the US and/or in Europe.

Tony Barber – Financial Times Europe News Editor

Tony is a columnist and specialist writer on European political, economic and business news and currently the Europe editor for the Financial Times. From 1990 – 1997 he was the East Europe Editor and Europe Editor at the Independent. Before that, he worked as a Reuters Foreign Correspondent from a range of cities from New York, Vienna, Moscow, Warsaw to Belgrade.

Dr Ben Margulies –  post-doctoral Research Fellow, University of Warwick 

Ben’s research background is primarily in comparative and European politics. He is also interested in the way that nations and party systems respond to migration and globalisation. His Ph.D. “Liberal Parties and Party Systems” used data taken from European party manifestos to track when parties moved left or right, and showed how these movements affected vote shares that liberal parties received. Ben joined this project to help develop a large-scale survey among conflict-generated diasporas in Europe.

Dr Dženta Karabegović – Ph.D. University of Warwick

Dženeta’s Ph.D. research project analyses diaspora influence on a weak state in post-conflict environments. Her work has looked into Bosnian diaspora mobilisation in Europe around issues of transitional justice, genocide remembrance, and political participation. This research was undertaken in the form of interviews, participant observation and process tracing with multi-sited fieldwork. Dženeta holds an MA. from the University of Chicago and was a visiting scholar from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

Dr Oula Kadhum – Ph.D. University of Warwick

Oula Kadhum’s research investigates in a comparative perspective diaspora mobilisation for state-building following the 2003 intervention in Iraq. Her work explores how the diaspora in the UK and Sweden mobilised towards this end and why there were differences in their approaches to building the state. Oula completed her Masters degree at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, a postgraduate certificate in Education at Kings College London, and a Bachelors degree from Queen Mary University of London.

Featured image: protestors demonstrating against Turkish President Erdogan’s visit to Strasbourg. France Oct 4th, 2015

On Friday 27 March, the Frontline Club partnered with the London School of Economics to host a series of films for the 7th annual LSE Literary Festival. The external screening, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was packed out with members of the public for a night of short films exploring the foundations of identity and place. The five films took the audience on a journey to far flung corners of the earth, from rural Turkey to the Arctic Circle. While striking in their different visual styles, each shared a common thread by providing intimate snapshots of the lives of displaced individuals, traumatised and trapped in alien landscapes.

“You have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go,” whispers Habib Aydin as he captures a wild bird in a crude wooden cage on the outskirts of his village in south-east Turkey. This is one of the most symbolic scenes in Reber Dosky’s The Call, which follows the story of Habib and his determination to call his only son Ramazan back to settle in the village they fled in 1989. While Habib returned 7 years ago to remarry, his first family remained in Istanbul. “What does this village have to offer?” Ramazan asks during a short visit to see his father. Habib replies: “animals, rocks… what does it not have?” Touched with humour and a soundtrack of birdsong and bleating goats, Dosky presents a story about loss of tradition across a generational divide, where the disconnect between love of family and land is felt keenly.

Xenos, a short by Mahdi Fleifel, follows a group of impoverished Lebanese youths trapped in Greece which is in the grip of economic disaster. Their hopeless existence unfolds in a telephone conversation, played over shots of streets lined with drug addicts cowering in shuttered shop porches. The camera is grainy and uncomfortably intrusive, reflecting the desperate measures they take for money to buy hard drugs. “I’ve tried to mingle with the Greeks,” one youth says, “but when you do, they assume you are gay. They say ‘you want sex?’” Speaking of how they sell their bodies to strangers in a nearby park, another reflects. “This country ruins your soul.”

Tuna Kaptan and Felicitas Sonvilla offers a different perspective of the conventional refugee narrative in Two at the Border, by focusing on the plight of two smugglers stationed at the Turkish city of Edirne near Greece. Ali, from Syria, and Naser, from Palestine, form a strong bond through their shared financial hardship and longing for home. “I thought about returning to Palestine,” Naser admits in the confines of his apartment. “My parents are seriously ill. They cry on the phone for me to come home. I haven’t been able to send a single lira back.” Stuck in their own limbo, their lives consist of traversing the distance between their apartment and the heavily patrolled borders.

In October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Morgan Knibbe’s Shipwreck is a testament to the horrors faced by those who resort to crossing into Europe by sea. The camera sways and lurches as hundreds of coffins are loaded onto a military ship at the harbour. Between the hysteria and silence of loss, one survivor, Abraham, whispers his story as he walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks.

In the last film of the evening, Adrift, Frederik Jan Depickere follows the story of Simu, a Ugandan who fled political persecution. He now works as a construction site cleaner 150km above the Arctic Circle. With all his family dead or missing, Simu stares out over the ghostly tundra landscape. “I used to dream of being a pop singer,” he says. “But according to my situation now, I think that dream is dead.” The camera pans over a field of snow peppered with bare black trees. “I don’t belong here. But at home they would just make me disappear.”

For more information on the LSE Literary Festival 2015, click here.

Where there are borders, attempts will likely be made to cross them in the hope of reaching greener pastures. But the individuals who try are not necessarily welcomed by those who live on the other side. Fences, walls and legislation are thrown up to at least regulate the influx of migrants. And in some cases, borders are made dangerous.

One such place is the border between the US and Mexico, which is now at its most militarised in US history as the US embarked on its “war on immigration”. Mexico, in turn, is both a destination for migrants, as well as a stop on their way north. Ten thousand migrants every year (according to an estimate by Amnesty International) attempt to cross that border, the majority of whom are Central Americans (from Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador in particular). It is not known how many more of these irregular migrants enter Mexico to settle there, or what percentage cross into the US undetected.

Those who do succeed, however, may find themselves in the Arizona desert, or are detained and deported. What is more, these migrants are not only kept from getting into the country: their very journey is thwarted along the way.

Those who are crossomg the Americas towards the US border will often do so on foot, undertaking a dangerous journey. As many of them are undocumented individuals, they must dodge the strict migration controls within Mexico, which means they find themselves on obscure, unsafe routes, along which they may face assault or abuse, or encounter smugglers and traffickers. Large numbers of people are reported missing along these routes and the number of kidnappings is high.

Across the border, migration calls to mind other issues: of employment, housing and social standing. Migration is a complex issue, interlinking the factors pushing people out of their home countries with those that pull them into their new one. Poverty, the lack of opportunities and insecurity at home are reasons for people to leave – while their arrival can have economical, political and cultural consequences. One strong fear is that migrants will take a toll on the local economy and impact the job market. (Although, historically, Mexican migrant workers have been welcomed – as far back in 1850s as field hands in the Southwest, and when the US entered in WW2 in 1942 – albeit on temporary contracts.) This image, of “the other” coming in and “stealing” the locals’ livelihood, or “spoiling” their culture, can become part of polarised political debates, as it has in the US. In a more recent development, many of the policies designed for the enforcement of immigration law, especially detainment, have become privatised, along with the increased militarisation of the border.

This comes down to 650 miles of fence and 21,000 Border Patrol Personnel. In 2012, a total of $18 billion was spent on the enforcement of the border. While there are no hard numbers on the (undocumented) immigrants, their flow towards the US border seems to have slightly decreased – probably partly because of this securitisation, and partly because of the bad economy. Nevertheless, the dangers en route remain. The heightened enforcement along the Mexico–United States barrier does nothing to bring safety to their journey, let alone a solution to the circumstances that made them search for their fortune away from home in the first place.

Migration is a universal occurrence: people have moved away from their homes to settle elsewhere countless times in the course of history, in mass migrations due to wars or natural disasters or as individuals looking to escape poverty and a better future. Human stories are needed to gain a deeper understanding of the issues that come into play in the lives of those who have decided on the perilous undertaking of crossing the border.

In the documentary Who is Dayani Cristal?, Mexican activist Gael Garcia Bernal traces back the trail of one such unfortunate migrant found dead in the Sonora Desert, Arizona. The film, a mix of documentary with fictional elements, was the winner of the Sundance Cinematography Award in 2013. It was screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 7 July, followed by a Q&A with director Marc Silver. For further details of this event, see here.

Mama Illegal is a film about the sacrifices made by three Moldovan women who leave their homes and families to work illegally as cleaners in Italy and Austria. 

Enduring long separations from their children, and leaving their families to face the hardships of life in Europe’s poorest country, the women hope to pave the way for a better future.

Director Ed Moschitz follows the women from 2004-2007 in an attempt to shed light on the often ignored suffering of economic migrants.  

**Official Competion IDFA 2011**

Director: Ed Moschitz 

Year: 2011

Length: 102′