Maria Koinova
Visiting Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and Reader in International Relations at the University of Warwick
About the presentation
This presentation features questions and findings from the large-scale European Research Council Project "Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty,” conducted at the University of Warwick from 2012-2017.
As a Principal Investigator, Dr. Koinova conducted her own research and led a team of four researchers who studied the transnational mobilization of six conflict-generated diasporas (Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Iraqi, Kurdish and Palestinian) in five EU countries (United Kingdom, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and France) toward the Balkans, Caucasus and the Middle East.
The project progressed from a qualitative analysis of over 500 interviews to a cross-national survey among 3,000 randomly selected respondents from the Iraqi, Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in the UK, Sweden and Germany. Linkages of diasporas across the globe, their socio-spatial positionality and embeddedness in translocal networks have been very important to this project. Other core contributions include comparative theorizing about diaspora mobilizations vis-à-vis weak and de facto states, the role of diasporas in transitional justice, and engagement of contested sending states with conflict-generated diasporas abroad.
Thus far, the project has yielded a large number of publications, among them in European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Review, International Political Sociology, International Political Science Review, and Global Networks among others, as well as three special issues in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2017), International Political Science Review (2018), and Ethnic and Racial Studies (in progress for publication in 2019).
Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.