cohesion and conflict in transnational merchant families

How do people negotiate the diversity of positionalities within kin groups? Through a diachronic approach, I investigate how Ali and Jalal, two merchants with Azeri and Gilaki ethnic identifications who came to Hamburg in the 1930s, mobilized kin to generate capital along the lines of generation, gender, and age. The reader simultaneously learns about the local history of Iranian immigration. Building on literature about historical merchant networks, the social organization of the Iranian marketplace (bazaar), the anthropology of kinship and transnational families, I question the social cohesion on which Aihwa Ong's study of flexible capital creation relies. The material suggests that the experience of family relations influences agents' positioning in the local Iranian social field

The Globality of Islam: Sharia as a Nigerian 'Self-Determination' Movement

This paper was produced as part of a project at the University of California, Santa Cruz titled Globalization, State Capacity and Islamic Movements. The objective of this paper to assess how globalization and Islam impact the capacity of national states to manage Muslim demands for self-determination expressed either as a call for establishing an Islamic state, an alternative Islamic project or greater regional autonomy. After discussing our general arguments, we turn to an analysis of the Sharia movement for self determination in twelve states located in northern Nigeria, a movement that challenged national identities, provoked inter-communal conflict and threatened the existence of the Nigerian federation.

Internal diversity: Iranian Germans between local boundaries and transnational capital

This book explores the interrelation between diversity in migrants’ internal relations and their experience of inequality in local and global contexts. Taking the case of Hamburg-based Iranians, it traces evaluation processes in ties between professionals – artists and entrepreneurs – since the 1930s, examining migrants’ potential to act upon hierarchical structures. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and archival work, the book centers on differentiation, combining a diversity study with a focus on locality, with a transnational migration study, analysing strategies of capital creation and anthropological value theory. The analysis of migrants’ agency tackles questions of independence and cooperation in kinship, associations, transnational entrepreneurship and cultural events within the context of the position of Germany and Iran in the global politico-economic landscape. This material will be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, migration, urbanism and Iranian studies, as well as Iranian-Germans and those interested in the entanglement of global and local power relations

Global Legal Pluralism

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines---comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law---have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism---the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space---are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practice of global law

Global Legal Pluralism

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines---comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law---have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism---the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space---are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practice of global law

Figurations of displacement in and beyond Pakistan: empirical findings and reflections on protracted displacement and translocal connections of Afghans

Pakistan currently hosts up to three million Afghans, a number that is likely to increase due to the Taliban's recent return to power in Afghanistan. This working paper is based on empirical research on the experience of Afghan displacement in Pakistan from 2019 until early 2021 as part of the European Union funded TRAFIG project. Findings show that Afghans' protracted displacement is classed. Many low-skilled, low-income and largely non-educated Afghans experience barriers to upward social mobility, particularly leading the Afghan youth to consider migrating to Europe. First-generation Afghan refugees who migrated mainly in the 1980s and 1990s prefer to stay in Pakistan; only few would return if the conditions allowed it. While aiming to incentivise return, Pakistani government policies hamper the opportunity for Afghans to move around within and beyond Pakistan and remain connected to their translocal and transnational networks. Many Afghan refugees have family members who live in other parts of Pakistan or in other countries, but the potential of these networks to lift those in Pakistan out of protracted displacement is limited. We also found that social cohesion between Afghan refugees and the Pakistani host society has been decreasing. Local networks are highly significant in day-to-day life, but intergroup relations do not yield any emancipatory potential for Afghans. Afghans' presence in Pakistan needs to be reconsidered by all actors, namely the country of origin, host and donor countries. The current approach of 'administering Afghans' keeps them in protracted displacement without the opportunity to integrate legally or sustainably. It needs to be replaced with a new narrative and operational approach - one that acknowledges Afghans' contributions to Pakistan's economy, society and culture, and that secures their right to remain in Pakistan. Such an approach is particularly important today given the looming prospect of more Afghans entering Pakistan to escape from living under a government headed by the Taliban

'Dubai is a transit lounge': migration, belonging and national identity in Pakistani professionals in the UAE

The thesis is a study of migration and its links to belonging, class, national identity and recognition in United Arab Emirates (UAE) federation. It focuses on Pakistani migrants, especially Pakistani professionals in Dubai, which is the second largest Emirate of the UAE because of its territorial extension and economic production (Davidson, 2008a). It is not only an empirical study but also partly a conceptual and analytical treatise on migration in the GCC countries. By comparing the extant literature on migration in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and the findings of my own field research, I argue the need to move beyond concepts such as belonging despite exclusion (Vora, 2013), citizenship as belonging (Vora & Kock, 2015) and nationalism for nationals (Kock, 2015), which have dominated the literature on migration in this region, to better grasp that belonging, class and national identity are contested and situational. Dubai as a transit lounge is an expression used by one of my Pakistani participants to describe the dynamic nature of the city. But more than that, it was used to emphasize that foreign workers life in the emirate is characterized by temporariness. The UAE authorities have categorized people through the citizenship law (no. 17, 1972) in Emiratis and non-Emiratis by conceiving of them as two distinct categories. In my view, this might be interpreted as a fracture between two groups of individuals. In particular, non-Emiratis have been considered and represented in the literature as a monolithic group (Mahdavi, 2011), as disempowered individuals and, especially low-wage migrants, as victims of the market economy over which they cannot wield any control (Kathiravelu, 2016). The extant literature on migration in the GCC countries has portrayed the image of foreign communities in which the role of human agency in the migration experience is underestimated. Starting from the historical evolution of migration in the Arab Gulf region and the links with African and Asian countries, which have contributed towards shaping the ethnic diversity of the UAE and the GCC countries, my research focuses on the presence of Pakistani migrant professionals in Dubai in order to understand the development of migration in the Emirate; the role and importance of the Pakistan Association Dubai (PAD) in contributing towards determining belonging; and therefore how migration affects the Emirati national identity. This thesis challenges the extant literature on migration in the Arab Gulf region by questioning the dichotomy between nationals and non-nationals as two reciprocally-exclusive categories. Instead, it argues the need to look at inter and intra dynamics that take place in the field between the two groups in order to understand how their relations are constructed. It is thus important to consider social interactions between nationals and non-nationals because individuals occupy contradictory and multi-layered locations, spaces and social categories (Yuval-Davis, 2011; Anthias, 2015). This reasoning stems from my historical analysis of ethnic composition and social stratification in the Gulf port cities, especially Dubai, where the coexistence of different ethnic groups resulted from economic exchanges and intermarriages with people coming from African and Asian countries, which in turn contributed towards shaping the ethnic diversity of the region. For example, the construction of belonging cannot be grasped only by looking at non-nationals as an isolated category (Koch, 2015) but it has to be analysed and discussed in relation to others . As such, it is important to consider the role played by migrants and their ethno-national migrant associations in forging the discourse on the Emirati national identity. Migrants, through civic engagement and their participation in the Emirati public sphere, contribute towards strengthening Emirati national identity via their sense of belonging to the country and their agential capacity (e. g. migrant organizations)

narrating traditional iranian carpet merchants

Iranian carpet merchants developed a collective identitary narrative to enhance their capital creation in the social field of the German market, the field of Iranian foreign trade, and transnational bazari networks. This chapter goes beyond the practicalities of juggling resources across social fields: it explains the motivation behind this agency. Building on David Graeber's anthropology of value, as well as on studies about identity marketing and ethnic entrepreneurship, I show how the merchants' resources were evaluated between the 1950s and today to explain by which systems of value these social fields were shaped. From the confrontation between changing systems of value emerges Iranian carpet merchants' potential to increase the efficiency of their capital creation by—collectively—trying to redefine the meaning of their resources

‘I think I'm more free with them'—Conflict, Negotiation and Change in Intergenerational Relations in African Families Living in Britain

While the family is increasingly being recognised as pivotal to migration, there remain too few studies examining how migration impacts on intergenerational relationships. Although traditional intergenerational gaps are intensified by migration, arguably there has been an over-emphasis on the divisions between ‘traditional’ parents and ‘modern’ children at the expense of examining the ways in which both generations adapt. As Foner and Dreby [2011. “Relations Between the Generations in Immigrant Families.” Annual Review of Sociology 37: 545–564] stress, the reality of post-migration intergenerational relations is inevitably more complex, requiring the examination of both conflict and cooperation. This article contributes to this growing literature by discussing British data from comparative projects on intergenerational relations in African families (in Britain, France and South Africa). It argues that particular understandings can be gained from examining the adaptation of parents and parenting strategies post-migration and how the reconfiguration of family relations can contribute to settlement. By focusing on how both parent and child generations engage in conflict and negotiation to redefine their relationships and expectations, it offers insight into how families navigate and integrate the values of two cultures. In doing so, it argues that the reconfiguration of gender roles as a result of migration offers families the space to renegotiate their relationships and make choices about what they transmit to the next generation

In the skies over Sofia:Place(s) in displacement for Syrian women in Bulgaria

This article shows that policy categories such as “refugees” and “migrants” fail to capture the complex reasons why people move during conflict and how they experience place(s) in displacement. Drawing on ethnographic interviews conducted in the summer of 2021, we explore the ways in which three Syrian women, whose lives have been affected by displacement in complex ways, emplace themselves in Sofia. Although policymakers consider Bulgaria a transit country for refugees on the so-called Western Balkan route, some Syrians have stayed after 2011. Their choice can only be understood in the context of longstanding trade and marital migrations encompassing the Mediterranean and its hinterlands, and we thus develop a mobile and dynamic understanding of Syrians’ acts of emplacement: they may be localized in Sofia, but they also unfold against the backdrop of transnational networks. However, we do not romanticize ideas of constant fluidity. Rather, we put place back into displacement, demonstrating that women’s lives and migratory projects are shaped by the places they pass through, and that they leave an imprint on transitory and more permanent homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods in Sofia, with all the tensions and contradictions that this entails.</p