Between “Hot Identities” and “Cold Constellations”: On Bauböck and Faist’s “Diaspora and Transnationalism”
Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist’s edited volume Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods (Amsterdam University Press, 2010) represents a methodologically self-conscious intervention in the study of cross-border social life. Rather than celebrating mobility as a sign of global progress or treating diasporas as fixed communities, the contributors approach the two terms as analytical perspectives. The book asks what it means to study human affiliation, identity, and political membership once the boundaries of the nation-state are no longer taken as self-evident. This question structures the volume as a conversation between theories of diaspora, approaches to transnationalism, and a set of methodological proposals for empirical research that can do justice to social relations that span multiple states.
Thomas Faist’s opening chapter frames the volume’s central conceptual move. He treats diaspora and transnationalism not as empirical entities but as heuristics that illuminate different facets of border-crossing life. Diaspora draws attention to collective memory, narratives of dispersal, and the construction of homeland-oriented identities. Transnationalism directs analysis toward flows of people, goods, and ideas and the institutions that sustain them. Faist proposes that research should consider how these two perspectives intersect in practice, since diasporas often operate through transnational networks and transnational relations frequently produce diasporic consciousness. The analytical gain lies in separating the study of identity claims from the study of social processes while keeping them in dialogue. Rainer Bauböck extends this move in his concluding essay on citizenship constellations. He describes the political field of diaspora and transnational belonging as composed of “hot” identities and “cold” institutional arrangements. Hot identities refer to the symbolic and affective dimensions of diasporic politics, where collective memory and moral claim-making shape solidarity. Cold constellations refer to the interlocking citizenship regimes that emerge when multiple states govern the same population. Bauböck shows that the political organization of transnational belonging cannot be understood as an extension of national citizenship but as a system of reciprocal relations among states that define rights and obligations across borders.
The volume locates its conceptual discussion within a wider critique of methodological nationalism. Nina Glick Schiller argues that much migration research continues to assume that the nation-state is the primary frame of social life, even when studying transnational phenomena. She calls for an approach that recognizes the mutual constitution of local, national, and global processes and traces how power operates across these scales. For Schiller, the goal is neither to reject the nation nor to idealize cosmopolitan flows but to analyze the ways in which migrants navigate and reshape regimes of capital and governance. Faist echoes this view by proposing a multi-level research design that links the micro interactions of migrants with macro structures of policy and law. The resulting approach keeps the state visible without reinstating it as the only unit of analysis.
Several chapters extend these principles through specific empirical and methodological arguments. Valentina Mazzucato introduces the concept of simultaneity to capture the fact that migrants act in several locations at once. She proposes research designs that collect data from origin and destination countries simultaneously in order to avoid treating migration as a linear trajectory. This approach invites attention to two-way flows of resources and obligations and to the temporal coordination of social life across space. Her methodology turns the abstract idea of transnational connection into an operational problem for empirical research. Koen Jonkers provides a related example in his study of transnational scientific collaboration. By analyzing patterns of co-authorship and research mobility, he shows that knowledge exchange among scientists often depends less on shared ethnic identity than on the institutional structure of scientific fields. His findings demonstrate that transnational networks can exist without producing diasporic solidarity and that diaspora identification is not a necessary condition for transnational practice.
Paolo Boccagni turns to the distinction between private and public transnationalism. He observes that many migrants maintain intense personal relations across borders while their collective or political engagement remains local. The analytical task is to trace how private obligations and affective ties intersect with institutional and political structures rather than assuming a direct correspondence between them. Such an approach underscores the need to differentiate among the domains of transnational activity and to specify their distinct causal logics. Kathrin Kissau and Uwe Hunger extend this argument to digital spaces. Their analysis of internet-based migrant networks illustrates how online communication creates new forms of connection that do not map neatly onto geographical or ethnic boundaries. The authors treat digital platforms as both objects and instruments of research and demonstrate how network mapping can make visible the infrastructures that enable transnational interaction.
The theoretical implications of these empirical and methodological interventions are gathered in Bauböck’s final discussion of transnational citizenship. He proposes that citizenship be conceived as a set of interdependent regimes rather than a bilateral relation between state and individual. This view captures the reality that migration produces overlapping jurisdictions of rights and duties. The concept of a citizenship constellation provides a framework for examining how states coordinate these arrangements and how migrants and diasporic organizations navigate them. It also introduces a normative dimension to the study of transnationalism by asking how justice and accountability should be distributed across entangled political communities. Diaspora politics, in this view, consist of the mobilization of claims to membership within these constellations and the negotiation of allegiance across them.
Throughout the volume the authors seek to discipline two concepts that have expanded to the point of semantic exhaustion. By treating diaspora as a lens on identity formation and transnationalism as a lens on social practice, the book restores their analytic usefulness. It recommends a three-layered framework for research. The first layer concerns claims and discourses through which migrants and states construct belonging. The second concerns practices and networks through which resources and information circulate. The third concerns institutions and legal structures that govern membership across jurisdictions. Each layer requires distinct methods and can be analyzed on its own terms while remaining linked to the others through causal and symbolic relations. Such a design prevents the reduction of complex social processes to single paradigms and encourages empirical precision.
The broader theoretical contribution of Diaspora and Transnationalism lies in its reconstruction of the relationship between practices and institutions. It redirects attention from celebrations of mobility to the conditions that sustain it, and from abstract globalization to the specific forms of coordination and conflict that emerge when communities and states become interdependent. The book presents a discipline of careful definition, multi-scalar methodology, and normative reflection that renders the study of diaspora and transnationalism an exercise in social scientific craft rather than metaphor. It provides a vocabulary for analyzing how belonging is claimed in contexts where no single state monopolizes membership. By linking affective identities to the institutional order of citizenship, the volume offers a comprehensive framework for understanding how mobility and attachment coexist in the contemporary world. This framework has become an essential reference point for research on migration studies and it continues to shape debates on the ethics and politics of belonging in a globalized age.
