Transnational diaspora diplomacy, emotions and COVID-19: The Romanian Diaspora in the UK.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has legitimized diaspora as a transnational actor in its own right. Diasporas might be agents, instruments, and partners in public diplomacy, but they can also be disruptors. Romanian diaspora’s othering, in-betweenness, and neglected emotions have been stirred and politically instrumentalized in votes for a Romanian far-right party. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed irreversibly for expanding disciplinary boundaries to study diaspora diplomacy (Brinkerhoff, 2019; Ho & McConnell, 2017). Diaspora was placed in unprecedented global spotlight, revealing a wide range of positionings in relation to home and host state. To understand these developments, public diplomacy (PD) needs a shift of focus: a diaspora-centred and transnational analytical approach to unpack the seeming ‘uniformity’ of diaspora and the homeland loyalties conflated in the concept of citizen diplomat that obscure contestation from within. Diasporas might be agents, instruments, and partners in PD, but they are also disruptors. Diasporas generate disruption and become a problem in PD, exposing the tensions, conflicts, protests emerging from domestic (and transnational) publics that PD scholarship has largely avoided. I will use this approach in a case study of the Romanian diaspora in the UK, informed by a research project conducted between 2018 and 2019.