Introduction 4 connections to grandparents and friends from home, summertime visits to their hometowns, annual picnics and flag-flying parades, religious gatherings and diaspora associations, grief and nostalgia over childhoods spent in the homeland, and foreign business dealings all serve to bind members of national and ethnic groups to a home-country (Guarnizo et al. 2003; R. Smith 2006). So too do experiences of marginalization in the host-country make them feel more at home in their places of origin. Consequently, diaspora members’ “ways of being and ways of belonging” can bind them to the homeland and become transnational in character (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004: 1002), rather than bound within their place of settlement.6 History shows that exile has long served as an incubator for diaspora voice. While traumatic for its victims, banishment enables dissidents to survive abroad during periods of repressive crackdown at home (Gualtieri 2009; He 2014; Ma 1993; Shain 2005[1989], 2007; Taylor 1989). Many nation-states have been founded by exiles, including China’s Sun Yat-sen, Poland’s Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. Others have captured revolutions already underway, as when Vladimir Lenin returned by German train to lead the Bolshevik coup d’état in Russia and Ruhollah Khomeini arrived by plane from France to forge the Islamic Republic of Iran. Diaspora members from the Balkans, Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Eritrea have bankrolled wars and funded 6 persons’ experiences or felt sense of belonging, which are subject to change over time. As scholars such as Anthias (1998: 563–64), Brubaker (2005, 2015), and Wald (2008, 2009) argue, we should not assume that diaspora members experience “some kind of primordial bond” because “there may be as much difference and division as commonality and solidarity.” This is why this study treats collective action by diaspora members as a dependent variable, as per the calls of Brubaker (2015) and Waldinger (2015). Diasporas need not be organized into a bounded, distinct group to retain loyalties to people and places in the homeland and take up voice on their behalf. Because diaspora members do not constitute naturally occurring groups, scholars have increasingly refuted the notion that their members form pre-configured communities through trauma and displacement (Cohen 1996). Instead, the term “diaspora” is used increasingly to designate persons with a common tie to a foreign place of origin, as in the case of refugees and expatriates, immigrants, and economic migrants (Safran 1991; on the use of the term, see also Anderson 1998, 2006[1983]; Appadurai 1997; Butler 2001; Clifford 1994; Tölölyan 1996). Diaspora members’ transnational ties to the homeland and to one other are often forged through the conscientious mobilization strategies by exiles, emigrants, and states (Abramson 2017; Ragazzi 2014; Sökefeld 2006). Their members may, for instance, form social and political associations in order to foster membership in a community, whether real or “imagined,” and to inculcate a sense of shared history and interests (Anderson 2006[1983]). In these ways, second and later emigrant generations can retain transnational membership and feel deep affection for foreign locales, even if they themselves do not remember their early years in the homeland or have never visited it themselves. These efforts also reinforce loyalties and obligations to the home-country by drawing members’ attention to the realities of home-country conflicts and crises and suggesting what kinds of interventions are needed (Duquette-Rury 2020; Shain 2007: 5). As Shain (2007: 106) argues, transnational connections may be social, psychological, economic, or all of the above; when kin are threatened by home-country crises, these attachments have high stakes and real-life consequences. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press