Diaspora activists and military humanitarian intervention

Abstract

Research investigating the role of diasporas in conflict has mostly portrayed diasporas as peace wreckers and long-distance nationalists. While there is now increasing recognition of diasporas' positive contributions to their homelands during and after conflict, so far little attention has been paid to the role diaspora groups may play in pushing decisions by their host states to participate in military humanitarian intervention 'back home' in their troubled societies. In this thesis I investigate the active mobilisation of different diaspora groups in the United States during the 1990s and explore the ways in which these mobilisations played into US decisions to intervene. Examining diaspora transnational activism, I argue, can lead to a deeper understanding of how a host state reaches decisions about its interests and moral duties to strangers when facing hard choices about humanitarian intervention. The research I present centres on the values, discourses and processes that help to make military humanitarian interventions possible. I do not seek to analyse the many factors influencing states' decisions to use force for humanitarian purposes, but rather, to investigate how the motivations behind humanitarian action or inaction are created in the first place, and how understandings of sovereignty, self-determination and (non)intervention in the context of humanitarianism can change. I ground my study in a comparative, interpretive analysis of politically active Haitian and Kosovar diaspora members and organisations in the United States in the lead up to Haiti's 1994 and Kosovo's 1999 humanitarian interventions, and of politically active Colombian diaspora members and organisations mobilising for unsuccessful humanitarian intervention in their home conflict. As a result, the thesis as a whole illustrates an important transnational actor-factor that so far has received scant academic attention: diasporas' efforts to educate US decision makers, cultivate an interest in intervening, and help 'rescue' people in danger 'back home'. By analysing diaspora transnational politics in humanitarian intervention, this thesis offers us a lens through which to look at the changing confluence between the state and the individual as a site of identity and of normative and political contestation, with potential humanitarian repercussions. Show more