Visualising the foreign and the domestic in diaspora diplomacy: images and the online politics of recognition in #givingtoindia

Abstract

Diaspora diplomacy blurs the traditional conceptual dichotomies that map domestic and foreign policymaking efforts. Addressing how such distinctions are varyingly produced requires greater engagement with the way that diplomatic practice modulates the associations between belonging, nation and territory. This paper applies a semiotic analysis to a case study of the images circulated through the social media campaigns of the India Development Foundation of Overseas Indian (IDF-OI) between 2016 and 2017, a quasi-governmental organisation tasked with channelling diaspora philanthropy into state and national social and development projects. It shows that the connotative potential of images simultaneously positioned Indian diasporas as territorial stakeholders within these domestic agendas, whilst also generating performative representations of the diaspora as an extra-territorial global public. It argues that the images circulated through the IDF-OI’s digital platforms legitimised those particular voices that served both ideas, thereby empowering those with existing structural advantages. This paper suggests that with the increased use of social media in diaspora diplomacy, scholarship should engage with the richness of online platforms and the ambiguity of images as a specific component of those spaces, to better understand how diasporas are mobilised as non-state actors in contemporary international political affairs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To avoid administrative duplication of fundraising efforts, the Union Cabinet approved closure of the IDF-OI in March 2018 (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=177813).

2 I am grateful to the manuscript reviewers for raising this point

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jen Dickinson

Jen Dickinson is a political and development geographer at the University of Winchester. She completed her PhD in 2008 at the University of Leeds, after which she held a number of teaching and research positions at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Leicester. Her research examines the politics of diaspora engagement, and is grounded in feminist and postcolonial approaches that engage with the everyday practices of the state. She has published this work in a number of journals including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Geoforum. Her most current research examines the everyday geopolitical lives of young people from the Rwandan diaspora in the UK. Email: [email protected]