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Kin-State Politics: Causes and Consequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

Myra A. Waterbury Open the ORCID record for Myra A. Waterbury [Opens in a new window]
Myra A. Waterbury*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article situates the development of the kin-state politics literature within the context of post-Cold War scholarship on ethnicity, nationalism, and conflict. It outlines how an increasingly mature literature emerged around the domestic political and foreign policy drivers of kin-state politics as scholars drew from a number of perspectives, from the literature on irredentism to that on diaspora politics and transborder nationalism. The article then evaluates scholarship on the drivers and impacts of kin-state politics, with a focus on the consequences of kin-state politics for the cultural and political landscape of external kin communities and the impact on regional security and stability. While a rich and nuanced literature has helped to contextualize the tensions and complexities of the former, I argue that the latter needs to be developed further. Careful work needs to be done to more precisely establish the conditions under which kin-state politics constitute a security threat. Future scholarship should bring together a more ground level perspective of how kin-state policies are perceived, utilized, and/or instrumentalized by their intended subjects with a critical understanding of how the “game” of kin-state politics is played within the home state and the kin-state.

Keywords

kin-state politicsdiaspora politicsminoritiesnationalismpost-communist
Type
State of the Field
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 48 , Issue 5 , September 2020 , pp. 799 - 808
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Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2020

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