ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to interrogate and situate the conceptualization of ‘diaspora and home’ within contemporary geopolitics and experience of forced migration. In effect, the aim is to evaluate the conceptualization through the current Syrian refugee crisis. There are currently more than thirteen million Syrians displaced and in search of humanitarian support. 1 Many are refugees in neighbouring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. One million have sought asylum status in the EU. These are Syrian migrants in search of settlement, scattered in response to the erasure of Syrian society, infrastructure, heritage landscapes and homes through systematic bombing. The distinction between diaspora and migration has long been grappled with (see Shuval 2000; Tölölyan 1996), and those attempting to define it agree that ‘no diaspora is a monolith’ (Brighton 2009: 14) and that definitions can risk being unhelpfully ethno-nationalistic (Butler 2001: 213). Diasporic migrations are attempted in a more and more precarious world (Waite 2009), one where structures of ‘home’ and ‘citizenship’ are precarious materialities, post-migration.
