Democratic Remittances: Mapping Out a Multi-layered Perspective
Frem Civic Center 505, Byblos campus
The Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution (ISJCR) and the Department of Social Sciences (DSS) at LAU cordially invite you to an online seminar on “Democratic Remittances: Mapping Out a Multi-layered Perspective” with Stephan Rother, PhD, University of Freiburg, Germany.
Tamirace Fakhoury, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, LAU, will moderate the event.
Abstract
This talk examines the ideas, strategies and political practices of migrant communities and conceptualizes them as political – and potentially democratic – remittances. It locates research on transnational political practices of migrants within the literature on remittances for two purposes: (1) countering/expanding the still dominant discourse that is based on a purely economic perspective of remittances and development; (2) developing a more systematic approach on the diasporic circulation of material and immaterial goods caused by migration. These remittances can be seen as democratic with regards to their content – i.e. support for democratic values etc. – but the distribution of the can be seen as an act of democratic practice in itself that reaches beyond the nation-state. Using findings gathered during extensive fieldwork focused on the transnational, regional and global level of political participation and activism, this talk aims to map the manifold forms and interplays of democratic remittances and, in a second step, to discuss how these levels might be interconnected. I chose an actor-centered perspective to concentrate on how migrants can influence a variety of democratization processes, moving from the individual to the global level.
About the Speaker
Dr. Stefan Rother is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Germany. His research focus is on international migration, global governance, social movements, regional integration and non-/post-Western theories of international relations. He was part of the research project, “Democratisation through Migration? Political Attitudes of Philippine Return Migrants” (2005-2007) that was conducted at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Freiburg.
Rother has recently published articles in Third World Quarterly, Cooperation and Conflict, European Journal of East Asian Studies, International Migration, Migration Studies, the German Journal for Political science (ZPol) and several edited volumes. Rother is co-editor of the series “Studien zur Migrations- und Integrationspolitik” at SpringerVS. He is currently working on a project on “Regional Democratisation from below? Alignments, De-alignments and Re-alignments in Southeast Asian Transnational Civil Society”.