Transnational Communities: The Quest forDevelopment and South-South Connections

Transnational communities were in the past categorized as dispersed
communities (Tölölyan 1996), struggling with assimilation in host societies
(Brubaker 2001); preoccupied with the nostalgic of return (Cohen
1997); long distance nationalists (Anderson 1998) as nationalist movements
(Sheffer 2003). In this paper I propose that instead of the
static diaspora conception, the transnational community conception is
more suitable to a complex and continuously changing communities
in terms of locations, activities and networks (Portes 1996; Vertovec
1999; Al-Ali and Koser 2003; Levitt and Schiller 2004). Recent literature
sees such communities as transnational families (Baldassar and
Merla 2013); as transnational aid workers (Horst 2013); as transnational
activists (Hammond 2013a). The conception of transnational communities
in this paper refers to evolving diaspora communities positioning.
themselves in between nations, states and societies to access opportunities.
The approach also reflects Faist’s (2000) argument that research on
transnationalism is currently North-South centric and there is a need for
also looking on South-South social processes and transformations