Introduction

Abstract

Emigration was rediscovered by the global mainstream academic literature as a valid topic of research in the early 2000s. For over 80 years, migration studies have looked at the immigration side of the story, from the point of view of immigrant-receiving countries (Brettell and Hollifield 2000), paying no attention to the large body of mostly non-Anglophone literature produced in the countries that emigrants were leaving (Stola 1992; Okólski 2009). The re-introduction of the country-of-origin perspective in the 2000s was an important step in the further development of the migration studies field: migrants, after all, are people who come from somewhere. The importance of the countries and communities of origin has been especially brought to light by three streams of academic literature: sociologists and anthropologists focusing on transnationalism (Levitt etc.); political scientists debating the consequences of multiple citizenships and transnational political participation (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003; Bauböck 2010); and economists attempting to capture the impact of remittances (Ratha 2005). At the same time, the term “diaspora”, which indicates an outer group that is linked in some way with the homeland, has had an incredible trajectory: it left the narrow field of classic diaspora studies and went out to the wider world, changing the landscape of various fields of investigation: sociology, anthropology, political science and economics (Van Hear 2006; Bauböck and Faist 2010; Bilgili and Siegel 2013; Ragazzi 2014; Kshetri et al. 2015).