Transnational Relations Research Articles

Transnational family life of displaced unaccompanied minors – A systematic review

BackgroundResearch on unaccompanied minors (UMs) has identified the physical separation from family as a main stressor despite increased opportunities, via Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), for maintaining transnational family life across geographical borders. ObjectivesThe aim of the study is to synthesize previous research on the transnational family relationships of UMs from the perspective of the children. MethodsA systematic literature review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Standards for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis Protocols was carried out. The databases Web of Science, PsycINFO, Psyndex, and Pubmed/Medline were systematically searched. Reports from International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) were screened manually. Two hundred fifty-six full-texts were identified and screened. ResultsTwelve qualitative and two quantitative studies met inclusion criteria and provided information on transnational family connections and the importance of the family for UMs. Studies addressed the following themes: the importance of the family, contact and maintenance of transnational relationships, the role of ICTs, the impact of family life on UMs' psychosocial wellbeing, and the hope for reunification. ConclusionThis review underscores the continued importance of the family to displaced UMs and highlights the need to foster and examine transnational connections in further research and practice with UMs.

Religion, support and self-care experiences: A qualitative descriptive study with Indonesian adults with the chronic disease living in Montreal, Canada.

To explore and describe the chronic illness self-care experiences of Indonesian immigrants living in Montreal, Canada and to gain a better understanding of how religion and support shaped these experiences. Qualitative description. Data were collected from January to March 2020 via semi-structured interviews. Eight men and women participated. The data were thematically analysed. Major themes identified were (1) religion, (2) being helpful to others, (3) family support, (4) transnational family support, (5) community support and (6) being in Indonesia versus Canada. Religion and faith were sources of motivation for self-care and provided guidance and strength to heal and accept the illness, mainly through the practice of prayer. 'Being helpful to others' (collectivism), including aiding others to avoid getting sick or giving 'health tips', and also just generally taking care of family also contributed to overall well-being. Spouses were the main source of assistance with disease monitoring and management and health maintenance, whereas support from the Indonesian community was minimal and mostly consisted of informational and social support. Transnational relationships with family members in Indonesia, however, provided an additional means for obtaining emotional support, advice and access to traditional medicines. Overall, there was little expectation that family or the community offer or provide support with self-care. These low expectations may partially be explained by the different cultural and social contexts in Canada compared with Indonesia. Religious, cultural, social and family factors may be carried over from the home country and/or may be altered post-migration, and this may impact how Indonesian immigrants with chronic illness engage in self-care. Cultural factors (collectivism, traditional medicines), religious beliefs and support networks, both locally and transnationally should be assessed and considered during care to better support and promote self-care among immigrants living with chronic diseases. Two Indonesian community organizations facilitated recruitment and data collection.

Developing inclusive, diverse and collaborative social work education and practice in Australia

The Australian social work accrediting body has set diversity as an agenda for education and practice. Universities and the social work field have also attempted to adhere to principles of diversity. However, despite progressive approaches and improvement, diversity has been challenged by the whiteness of Australian social work and the neoliberal agenda across both workplaces and universities. The dominant narrative of Australian social work still reflects Western values, power and privileges. This article argues that embracing diversity in social work education needs the ongoing adoption of critical pedagogy, including critical theories, and maintaining inclusiveness for diverse students. Social work practice settings also need progressive approaches to include diverse groups of marginalised people, a commitment to diversity and support for social workers to develop cultural competency and humility. Transnational relationships within different countries and nations can help social work move from ethnocentrism to multiculturalism.

Forum: New Perspectives on Transnational Non-State Actors—A Forum Honoring the Work of Thomas Risse

AbstractThis forum seeks to honor the contributions of a scholar who has greatly influenced international relations (IR) scholarship on transnational relations and constructivist research: Thomas Risse. Best known for his pathbreaking studies on the importance of transnational actors, the power of international norms and ideas in international relations, and the influence of domestic structures on international interactions, his work has significantly contributed to several interrelated research agendas within IR. The forum takes a fresh look at some of his contributions, focusing on assumptions about the nature of non-state actors, the content of human rights, and the evolution of knowledge that underpin his work. Interrogating especially some of the liberal assumptions that have informed these lines of research, we ask: are we still dealing with the same kinds of non-state actors that Thomas Risse and early constructivist research have analyzed? How has the nature of these actors changed, and how has this affected the processes and mechanisms by which they shape transnational politics? To what extent do these changes require different research methodologies? And, finally, which directions for future research on non-state actors, human rights, and constructivism emerge from these discussions?

Young Muslims’ religious identities in relation to places beyond the UK: a qualitative map-making technique in Newcastle upon Tyne

ABSTRACT Transnational relations can play an important role in young people’s identity negotiations and transitions to adulthood. In this article, we explore how young British-born Muslims construct and contest their religious identities and experience their changing religious identities from their lateteens until their early-twenties. We analyse how places beyond the UK shape their religious beliefs and identities in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England, and present a methodological tool to understand young people’s complex and changing (religious) identities and spatialities. We draw on in-depth interviews – including map-making methods – with a small number of young Muslims living in Newcastle upon Tyne whose parents migrated from Pakistan or Bangladesh. This article contributes to youth geographies, by illustrating that when the participants begin to negotiate ‘being Muslim’ more independently, the spatial orientation of their religious identities starts to change as well. We show that the changing meaning and importance of the places beyond the UK should be understood in relation to other spatial notions when explaining religious identity negotiations of young people. Moreover, the paper provides a methodological contribution in demonstrating how map-making can help to examine young people’s identities and changing relationships to places in a transnational context.

Ageing, migration infrastructure and multi‐generational care dynamics in transnational families

AbstractThe analysis of transnational family relations from an intergenerational to a multi‐generational perspective highlights the significant role migration infrastructure plays in transnational family care arrangements at different family life stages. Changing migration policies and local‐bound welfare systems in the host and home countries tend to fixate the role of care‐receiver and provider against fluid transnational family care dynamics as the life course of the family unfolds. This paper focuses on Chinese transnational one‐child families in which the initial separation between parents and their only‐child was motivated by the child's overseas education, and followed by the adult child's employment and family formation in the UK. My findings illustrate how reified definitions of the family and familial roles structure mobile individuals’ access to family rights in a transnational context. They warn of the danger of entrenched injustice embedded in the definitional classification of family migrants.

De Facto Adoption and Transnational Kinship Formation: Rearticulating Paper Children Immigration during the Chinese Exclusion Era and After

Abstract This article situates Chinese paper children immigration during the Exclusion Era and the pre–1965 period in the combined framework of ancient Chinese adoption and transnational kinship formation. It examines, by reading paper children's oral histories and related sources, how the paper children system was rooted in, borrowed from, and modified ancient Chinese adoption practices, through which Chinese immigrants formed transnational, fictive kinship in the United States that were mixed with both blood and non-blood relationships. Since the Exclusion Era, a discourse about Chinese immigrants, especially paper children being illegal, was so powerful that immigration historians seldom question this assumption, even as they critique the institutionalized exclusion that created such illegality. This article, however, challenges this assumption by arguing that paper children immigration generated de facto adoptive relationships between paper children and their paper families, and that these adoptive relationships further sustained paper children's legal status as American citizens. Treating paper children as de facto adoptive members of their paper families, this article brings to the surface a fact that by emphasizing their illegality, the dominant discourse only acknowledged their hidden, original identities and deemed parent-child relationships based on blood ties as the only legitimate ones.

Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora

What does studying visual and print representations of Mexican masculinity in flux/transit do for scholars of Bracero-era and twentieth-century Mexican and US pasts? Historians such as Deborah Cohen, Lori Flores, and Mireya Loza have reshaped our understanding of the lives of Braceros, bringing gendered explorations to some of the millions of Mexican men who arrived to the United States after the Second World War for labor. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández's Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora continues those conversations, injecting a critical examination of intimacy, belonging, and masculinity through photographs and private archives. Moreover, the author inserts the necessary theme of diaspora into her study and states that scholars must consider “how the interstitial experience of being between nations as diasporic subjects created opportunities for new manifestations of gender” (p. 21).This “feminist cultural transnational history” utilizes archives in Washington, DC, the US Southwest, and Mexico to consider how Mexican men—some migrants and others political exiles—grappled with race and gender over the course of the twentieth century (p. 4). What makes this analysis singular is how the author seeks to illuminate gender transformations, contending that scholars must reflect upon the gender of Mexican men through “transnational masculine intimacies,” which highlight the role of emotional bonds between these men and their transnational kin networks (p. 5). Within two sections and fourteen chapters, Guidotti-Hernández's book reshapes our understandings of Mexican gender and race, which scholars in women, gender, and sexuality studies and American studies will want to read.If cultural historian Gail Bederman asks scholars to consider manhood as a gender script that changes in relation to new experiences, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora shows us how gender and masculinities need to be studied not just in context, but over space and time. Furthermore, Guidotti-Hernández maintains that scholars must attend to how Mexican men's relation to gender was precarious, and that “fragility was a function of the intimacies that” migrant men forged to help make sense of their racial, social, and political statuses in the United States. (p. 2). If the author contends that scholars must study gender and intimacy in both space and time, then the organization of the book must include different objects of study over time in different locales, which it does. The first half of the monograph traces cultural objects regarding the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and Enrique Flores Magón, while the second section explores configurations of emotion through examining photographs at Leonard Nadel's Bracero archive at the Smithsonian (p. 5).My favorite part of Guidotti-Hernández's second monograph is her study of queerness and alienation in the photographs of Braceros within the Leonard Nadel Collection. Through a series of pictures taken of faceless Braceros picking lettuce in Salinas, Guidotti-Hernández contemplates the relation between Mexican migrants and the food crops they cultivate in a space where Braceros are removed transnationally from family. The author asks the reader to consider the nuance of the relationships between Mexican migrant men. While she determines that Braceros may not have had social and political overlap with the Anglo gay domesticity of the US- or Mexico-based middle-class and upper-class homophile movement, one thing was certain: “they were parallel experiences that idealized friendship and intimacy among and between men” (p. 223). I think this is important, as further studies of Braceros should consider how race, gender, and sexuality shaped these homosocial spaces.Guidotti-Hernández's visual analysis of the Nadel Collection is masterful. Yet, although I appreciated her insertion of queer possibilities to help the reader rethink masculinities in diaspora, I also wanted to learn more about the histories of the men in the photographs. Flores's Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement utilizes not just photography, but also Monterey County newspaper and print media stories that piece together how Braceros encountered racial discrimination, worker exploitation, and everyday life in central California. I think that paring both monographs would demonstrate how a critical investigation of how Bracero men forged intimacy and friendship alongside how photographers and the state viewed Braceros.

Kerja Sama Transnasional dalam Pemberantasan Perdagangan Orang (Human Trafficking) di Kamboja

Cambodia as a country with a low human development index still has to deal with the high number of trafficking cases in the country. Although Cambodia and two international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), namely The Asia Foundation and the International Justice Mission (IJM) have collaborated to combat human trafficking in the country, these efforts so far have not shown maximum results. This research was also conducted to reveal what are the faktors that hinder the achievement of transnational cooperation goalsto combat human trafficking in Cambodia. This study uses several concepts such as poverty, low education, corruption, and other social and cultural faktors as domestic faktors that hinder the eradication of human trafficking. Meanwhile the theory used is the Theory of Stages of Norm Internalization from Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink and Theory of Transnational Relations and Domestic Structure from Thomas Risse-Kappen. On the other hand, the data collection technique in this research is literature study and for the data analysis technique, the researcher uses stages consisting of data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing.Based on the analysis in this study, the causes of transnational cooperation got hinderedin combating human trafficking are divided into indirect causes which include the lack of a strong internalization process for human rights norm in Cambodia as a result of state-controlledcountry and direct causes which include poverty in the country, low education, corruption in law enforcement related to the eradication of human trafficking, as well as other social and cultural faktors in the form of debt bondage and lack of job opportunities in Cambodia.

Bastille Day Dinners in Scotland and Festivals in France: Transnational Relations or Monologues in the 1790s?

In the 1790s, Scotsmen were involved in celebrations of the French Revolution in both Scotland and France. How far did those men, stemming mainly from the elites, manage to relate with the French? The article examines Bastille Day dinners given in Scotland from 1790 to 1792, international festivals organized by the French Jacobins in harbour cities from 1790 to 1792, as well as Thomas Muir’s welcome reception held in Bordeaux in 1797. Though the celebrations look very dissimilar, in each case the question of the foreigner was raised; the guests pledged friendship and peace to the foreigners, but tended to idealize those foreigners as incarnations of nations or revolutionary principles, rather than engage at a personal, concrete level with them.

Croatian Migrant Families: Local Incorporation, Culture, and Identity

So far, Croatian migrant families have been predominantly studied within the scope of theoretical questions oriented toward ethnicity and their role as the guardians of ethnic/national identity. Going beyond the ethnic lens of those studies, the article focuses on an exploration of family structures and the social functioning of wider kinship networks in the migration context as well as an understanding of how migrants conceive of ethnic/national identity. By highlighting the complex entanglements of traditional family patterns (patrilocality, seniority, and gender roles), transnational kinship networks and “a little tradition of ethnic/national identity” held by migrants, this article seeks to establish autonomous research into family processes among Croatian migrants and to make a rapprochement between classical anthropological research of family and kinship and migration studies.

Turning the sock inside out: history of Basque studies from a transnational perspective

ABSTRACT Historiography on area studies has too often adopted national and homeland traditions as an unproblematic framework of analysis, rather than regarding them as nourished by transnational relationships at different levels. Transnational mobility spaces are defined by crossing and inter-crossing movements, rather than by territories and borders, and represent a particularly appropriate approach for rethinking the historical evolution of those area studies linked to stateless nations and sub-state homelands, such as Basque studies. In this article, it is contended that the history of Basque studies gains clarity and understanding when a transnational perspective is adopted and the following three mechanisms that decisively generated the flows of people and ideas between homeland and diasporas are analysed: 1) the deployment of transnational scholarly networks; 2) mobility linked to exile and the intellectual diaspora; and 3) transnational scholarly exchanges and scholarships.

A lesbian, gay and bisexual migration tale: On the role of intimate citizenship for transforming sexual subjectivities

This study examines the role of migrations for sexual subjectivities, based on biographic narrative interviews with CEE LGB migrants married or raising children with a same-sex partner in Belgium and the Netherlands. Migrants’ experiences highlight the salience of the migration-as-liberation with the empowering role of new beginnings in LGB-protective countries. At the same time, migrants’ stories also challenge this liberation tale, especially when situated within transnational family relations. In this context, migration and post-migration junctures differently impact sexual subjectivities, demonstrating fragmentations and non-linearity, and highlighting how migrations are only potentially transformative, with an important role played by full access to intimate citizenship.

Progress by death: Labor precaritization and the financialization of social reproduction in South Korea

This article looks at the contemporary South Korean political economy of crisis and recovery to visualize the material conditions of working-class lives and the ways in which their capacity to reproduce labor and life contradicts the regionally specific logic of ‘progress’. I visualize three critical scenes of workplace death that chart the ways in which the social reproduction capacity of the working class is fatally contracted in the era of neoliberal reforms. These scenes of death mirror the process of neoliberal transition that the financial crises of 1997 and 2008 accelerated in the region. In doing so, I articulate the notion of ‘progress by death’ as the intensified necropolitical logic of neoliberal capitalism that is led by the post-developmental state and fully transnationalized chaebol capital in South Korea. Building on feminist theories of social reproduction and the studies on the financialization of life, I argue that the logic of ‘progress by death’ as a constitutive element of financial capitalism reproduces the uneven patterns of growth and the transnational relations of violence, debt, and dispossession across Asian economies.

Material Care and Kinship on Trips to Dakar:

This article examines how relatives in Dakar take up diverse parental roles (Goody 1971, 1982) vis-à-vis migrants’ children, in efforts to cultivate transnational affective and economic relationships with children growing up in France. It examines the social work of kinship-making during families’ trips to Dakar, questioning whether and how transnational kin might establish roles of pluriparentalité with children growing up abroad. Not everyone who cares for a child assumes a parental role, however. Analysis of an example of transnational “cross-cousins” sheds light on the ways caregivers distinguish between types of care that create parenthood and those that underpin other kinship relations. Applying insights from linguistic anthropology into the ways speaking roles may be distributed among many social actors, it considers, first, how transnational relatives share parental roles and second, how Senegalese caregivers signal extra-parental relations of care. Examining how adults in Dakar care for migrants’ children who live abroad, I show how Senegalese caregivers trace the contours of parenthood within a universe of kinship relations.

Punk Prayers versus Neoliberalism

Abstract This paper examines the trajectories of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina in the years since their performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This study, however, does not simply focus on their activities as individuals, but seeks to contextualize their work over the last decade in terms of capitalism, neoliberalism, and collective struggle. Planting the history of Pussy Riot within the context of historic and contemporary tensions within intersectional feminisms in Russia, the “West”, and transnationally, this paper will map divergences and convergences that render transnational feminist collaboration both troubled and uniquely productive. Global neoliberalism has challenged nation-states to develop hybridized and dynamic tactics of control that function both locally and in terms of transnational relations, and feminist movement therefore faces the same challenge; this paper participates in that struggle.

Places Beyond Memory

This study highlights a heretofore-unexplored narrative device in Bernardo Atxaga’s fiction by highlighting how the author’s representation of spaces surrounding Reno and the Great Basin in Días de Nevada models what Berberich et al. (2016) call affective landscapes. The approach contributes to, and looks beyond, the traditional focus on memory in criticism of Atxaga, and it illustrates the story’s engagement with the emotional experiences of populations in the North American West that are not explored or rarely treated in the author’s other works. Finally, this paper contributes a new conceptual model to studies like Elena Delgado et al. (2016) that have used affect and the emotions as categories of historical analysis in the study of national and transnational relations between Europe and the Americas.

Satisfaction Guaranteed: Your Choice and the Transnational Distribution of Hardcore Pornography Between the Netherlands and Britain

Recently, there has been increasing academic interest in the historical foundations of the pornography business. However, these studies tend to focus on individual national contexts rather than exploring the transnational relationships that exist, or have existed, between these countries. This article considers how a transnational approach can further understandings of entrepreneurship in the pornography business. It suggests the need for an interdisciplinary framework to examine transnational enterprise in the pornography business, combining ideas from enterprise alongside criminology and economic geography to frame the enterprise history of the Netherlands-based company Your Choice. Based in Amsterdam, but run by British entrepreneurs, Your Choice’s activities can be dated back to the 1970s, specializing in the transnational distribution of hardcore pornographic films to customers in Britain, where the sale of such material is legally problematic. Drawing on ethnohistorical research, which includes primary interviews, workplace observation, and archival and doctrinal research, I use Your Choice as a case study to show how transnational entrepreneurship in the pornography business can create opportunities as well as help to manipulate restrictive laws and regulations. I also suggest that negotiating such legalities carries risk, as does the need to respond and adapt to ongoing shifts in the market.

South Sudanese Refugees in Sudan: A Transition toward a Diaspora Community

South Sudanese people shifted from being disadvantaged internally displaced people (IDPs) in Khartoum before the session of South Sudan from Sudan in 2011, toward a semi-refugee status or the ambiguous category of “returnees” after returning back to Khartoum following South Sudan’s civil wars beginning in 2013. This article argues that South Sudanese communities in Khartoum are developing many characteristics of becoming a “diasporic” and “transnationalistic” community, broadly defined. The South Sudanese diasporic community developing in Khartoum is commonly characterized by their strong feelings of anger, sadness, and disappointment over what happened to their long-awaited dreams of an independent South Sudan, and also by a strong feeling of belonging to a distinctive South Sudanese identity in Khartoum, both of which are a continuation of old South Sudanese identities developed in the shantytowns of Khartoum since the 1960s. While transnational relations and networks extend strongly between Khartoum and many different areas in South Sudan, the impact of South Sudan’s post-2011 violence and political negotiations between different warring parties has strong resonance in South Sudan’s communities in Khartoum. Moreover, the experience of being displaced after independence, back to old South Sudanese diasporic homes, has fundamentally shaped a new self-identification as diaspora and a transnational community.

Challenges to Maritime Security of Pakistan

Pakistan’s strategic significance in the maritime sphere has been at the center of debate. Particularly with the on- going development “Port of Gwadar” and how it may crop a new profitable armature in the region and encyclopedically. Still, the broader significance lies in the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) action by China that includes Port of Gwadar under China Pak Economic Corridor (CPEC), aiming to strengthen indigenous connectivity. In turn this study shows logical and descriptive approach for assessing theoretical substantiation to measure challenges to maritime security and how it may be affected by current challenges in the swell. Further, fabrics under transnational relations; regionalism, constructivism and critical security studies approach support the core argument “Challenges to maritime security of Pakistan”. The major finding of this study is apparent through collaborative security and how effective it has been in eradicating crimes in the swell. The major recrimination of this paper is to view challenges to maritime security as a coherent approach towards security and cooperation.