Dear All,
We're looking for participants for the panel we're organising for MESA 2019 in New Orleans on Diaspora Business: The economic contribution of refugees to their host socieities. You can find the details below. If you're interested in, please send your contact details to Dr. Emel Akcali at e.akcali@swansea.ac.uk or Dr. Evrim Gormus at gormuse@mef.edu.tr to be able to send you the MESA invitation for the panel until February 15, 2019.
In order to investigate the shifting political economy dynamics that displacement creates through its paradoxical effect, this panel aims to attract papers which will analyze the outcome of the refugee capital flight from conflict ridden countries to the host ones. This is because capital flight constitutes one of the most important dimensions of wars and conflicts and influences considerably the current course of the (post-) conflict processes. Overall, it plays a tremendous role in the emergence and articulation of an interconnected social, economic and political spaces and practices. In this panel, we invite papers that aim to examine the impact of the increasing capital flows in the host country economies. We also aim to inspect the factors that contribute to the capacity of the refugee business communities to organize as interest groups vis-à-vis the host states regarding their commercial interests as well as their political rights. Finally, we would like to explore the engagement of business diasporas in assisting the process of conflict resolution and (post-) conflict reconstruction processes in their conflict-ridden countries of origin.
This panel aims to cover hence the cases of Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon as host countries of the Syrian capital flow, but also other case studies in order to analyze displaced business peoples’ economic activities and their motivations in general for engagement in their places of origin and the host countries.