Diasporas and Development

Project Coordinator: Prof. Susan Eckstein

This is a book project that brings together scholarship and insight from a variety of disciplines, and examples across the globe, on the variety of ways in which diasporas impact the development of the countries they had originally left behind.

This project seeks to build upon, and convene, a number of exciting literatures emerging in different disciplines and on different issues that all pertain to the question of what impact diasporas (defined, tentatively, as populations that have left one ‘home’ society and settled in another ‘host’ society, while maintaining some group identity and meaningful associations with the ‘home’ society) have on the society (country) they originally came from. The project purposefully adopts a broad view of the question at hand.

The project held an authors’ conference in September 2009, in which the first drafts of the chapters for the book were presented. It is expected that an edited book will be published in 2010.