Book Project
Remote Control: Authoritarian Diaspora Engagement Policies and Emigrant Political Behavior
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Overview
My dissertation examines how authoritarian regimes expand their power beyond their borders by targeting emigrants with both repression and outreach. While acts of transnational repression—surveillance, intimidation, forced returns—are increasingly visible, authoritarian states also cultivate loyalty through diaspora engagement policies (DEPs) such as dual citizenship, voting rights, and cultural programs. I adapt Hirschman’s Exit–Voice–Loyalty framework to theorize three emigrant repertoires under authoritarian rule: Exit-Voice (opposition from abroad), Exit-Loyalty (supporting the homeland regime), and Exit-Silence (withdrawing from politics under repression, fear, or detachment). Importantly, the project does not only examine exiles and activists but also ordinary emigrants, whose everyday decisions about engagement are also shaped by authoritarian DEP strategies.
Methods
The project employs a mixed-methods design. Quantitatively, I analyze large-N survey data, including the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), the Center for American Progress (CAP) Turkish diaspora survey, and datasets on dual citizenship and extraterritorial voting. Qualitatively, I conducted over a year of ethnographic fieldwork that included more than 400 hours of participant observation and over sixty in-depth interviews across the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. This combination captures both broad patterns of diaspora political participation and the lived experiences of emigrants navigating authoritarian outreach.
Comparative Cases
The dissertation compares two competitive authoritarian regimes with large diasporas: Turkey and Zimbabwe. Turkey has developed one of the most institutionalized diaspora engagement regimes worldwide, pairing inclusive policies like external voting with surveillance and intimidation. Zimbabwe, by contrast, extracts remittances while denying dual citizenship and voting rights, relying on exclusion and coercion rather than structured outreach. This contrast provides leverage for examining how different DEP strategies —strategic inclusion versus strategic exclusion —shape emigrant political behavior.
Contribution
The study shows that diaspora politics is not simply an unintended consequence of emigration but a terrain deliberately structured by authoritarian states. By extending Hirschman’s model, I demonstrate how DEPs channel emigrants toward voice, loyalty, or silence, and how repression can both suppress dissent and provoke backlash. These findings contribute to debates on transnationalism, diaspora studies, authoritarianism, and democracy by revealing how regimes manage citizens abroad—and how emigrants adapt, resist, or comply in turn.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
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Abstract:
This study examines undergraduate research experiences at a minority-serving institution (MSI) in a political science laboratory. Students contributed to projects in a collaborative research lab at the University of California Riverside that involves undergraduate and graduate students in projects related to health and politics. Adopting a participatory approach to research, the study’s research participants also are coauthors who co-created the research protocols; collected the data; transcribed, coded, and analyzed the data; and wrote up the findings. Our analysis of 12 in-depth interviews with current and former undergraduate research assistants (RAs) found that their work in the lab challenged their perceptions of what research is and what it means to do research; shaped their path to pursue graduate studies; developed their social and professional skills; and offered an inclusive and humanizing experience with graduate students and faculty members. Challenges that the RAs mentioned included time management, bureaucratic accounting and payroll procedures, and feelings of self-doubt; the lab’s culture of inclusion and independence mitigated some of these challenges. Our findings align with the scholarly literature that suggests collaborative research opportunities can have beneficial outcomes, particularly for students from groups that are underrepresented in doctoral programs.
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Summary: The evolution of the construction of gender in migration studies can be appraised under several distinct headings. In the beginning, women were simply “in the shadows” with no recognition of them as potential or actual migrants. Eventually, the field moved to an “add women, mix, and stir” approach, which saw women recognized in migration studies and statistics for the first time. Here, gender was no more than a demographic category to ensure women were counted alongside men in migration flows. However, deconstructing the feminization of migration required that gender be understood as integral to the experience of migration, thus demanding more refined theoretical and analytical tools. Subsequently, migration intersected with masculinity studies, which showed the reciprocal relation where masculinity can be decisive in migratory decision-making, and in return, mobility can be an essential factor in how men think about masculinity. More recently, gender in migration studies has moved beyond binary gender roles. Research on the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) refugees and asylum seekers demonstrates the importance of the relationship between sexual orientation, gender identity, and identity construction in navigating migration journeys beyond the male-female binary. This raises the question of how salient this development is for international studies. While the disciplines of political science and international relations were rather late to the study of international migration, migrants and refugees have become issues of high politics in the early 21st century. Thus, there is a need to revisit and revise how different disciplines intersect in the interest of more effective policymaking based on better data.
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Abstract: As COVID-19 began to spread around the world, so did reports of discrimination and violence against people from marginalized groups. We argue that in a global politics characterized by racialized inequality, pandemics such as COVID-19 exacerbate the marginalization of already oppressed groups. We review published research on previous pandemics to historicize pandemic othering and blame, and enumerate some of the consequences for politics, policy, and public health. Specifically, we draw on lessons from smallpox outbreaks, the third bubonic plague, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and more recent pandemics, such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola. We also compile reports to document the discrimination and violence targeting marginalized groups early in the COVID-19 pandemic. This article lays bare the continuation of a long history of othering and blame during disease outbreaks and identifies needs for further inquiry to understand the persistence of these pandemic politics.
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